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> The cynical me says they weren't smart enough to automate away their own work (so they could be assigned more, different work), so eff 'em, right? That is, until someone else automates away your job.

Sort of besides the point but I wish someone _would_ automate my job so I can find even more interesting things to work on; I’m trying and I haven’t figured out how to yet. Yes, this is obviously only a position someone can feel if they are blessed with either lots of ability or economic security, but could we change that?

I know the problem is the resulting economic hit and not the having of a job or not, and I wish we had more of a safety net and support for people shuffling to better economic activities rather than being stuck in a local maxima with potentially disastrous switching costs. Things like UBI, public option healthcare, free state sponsored college degrees, and government sponsored vocational training have a decent record, and I wonder how we can scale them up past things like the GI bill.

> but I wish someone _would_ automate my job so I can find even more interesting things to work on

What makes you think you would work on "more interesting things" as opposed to "nothing". That is, why would your employer keep you on as opposed to firing you.

They might fire me yes and I would find another job (or try my hand at consulting or making my own business).

But, to me, that would’ve been preferable to doing busy make-work, or worse lobbying to keep the inefficiencies that provide me the busywork I use to justify a salary. Once something becomes automate-able, I think it should be. I have never seen software people at the big co FAANG companies I’ve worked at get let go because their core job was automated, only reassigned out of dead end roles that never would have gotten them promoted. I understand this position is only possible to hold alongside all those privileges.

But why do you not see or feel that if you’re capable of doing more interesting work than your current role that you don’t need wait for automation to make you redundant to switch roles.

Because my work isn’t fully automate-able yet; if I became aware of a method to do so I would do it.

> They might fire me yes and I would find another job (or try my hand at consulting or making my own business).

> But, to me, that would’ve been preferable to doing busy make-work

Good news. You can totally stop doing busy make-work and find another job, start consulting or start a business right now! You don't have to wait to be fired.

Yes, if you work at a large software shop, they may reassign you. Or maybe not. Apparently even FAANG is trimming workforce.

This misses the point that things become busywork because there are better alternatives. There is a difference between weaving a pattern by hand now vs hand weaving before the invention of the loom. My work isn’t busywork _yet_ because I don’t know of a way to automate it.

As an aside about large software shops reassigning, I’ve found at large software shops a big part of the role is making up meaningful work for yourself that helps the firm, and that’s a large part of what is actually rewarded (as opposed to fixing bugs or maintenance). I think a lot of people fall into the career trap of needing their immediate manager to narrowly define what is useful exactly. Usually when you are made redundant nobody reassigns you directly they just kinda ask you to figure it out and give you a couple weeks to a month to talk to teams with headcount and pick one with a problem area you think you can make progress on.

In theory, they could work on nothing, with over all productivity staying the same.

In theory, looking at a complete society's productivity, unemployment is a great thing, because it means little work is needed to sustain a specific level of wealth.

The problem is only one of distribution.

I genuinely believe we can make a world where no one is required to work for survival. We could intentionally automate as much as possible while also ensuring that automation is collectively owned. Then we could all collect dividends on our system with ample time off for "what we will" as the activists fighting for the 8 hour work day used to say.

I believe strongly that the current economic system is effective primarily at concentrating wealth at the top and using the general population as a pool of cheap desperate labor. I believe we can actually generate more wealth if we abandon intellectual property and develop technologies specifically to free people from toil in an open, community-oriented way. Of course this will be a fight because those who hold the reins of power today have no interest in diluting their power.

"But automation is expensive" - well engineering development is expensive. Which is why I think we should spread the costs out as much as possible - make everything open source, so none of the work is repeated, and anyone in the world hungry to get in on the action can contribute, instead of secretive siloed orgs spending a hundred million on some secret sauce for one single application, without sharing the benefit of that work for all the adjacent applications. Instead smaller investments distributed throughout the world will lead to large scale innovation of the crowd, the way we saw 3D printer development explode AFTER the patents expired. Because 1000 people working on an idea get way more done that one well funded organization in many cases. This is exactly the kind of innovation that patents extinguish, and worldwide agreements ensure patents have widespread enforcement.

We all need the same basic necessities, so there is so much overlap, that these systems built by the crowd could rapidly mature.

Eventually we could envision a system that can function with just 10% workforce participation, as people basically volunteer for maintenance and development. Before then we need to educate as many people as possible on engineering, robotics, and computer science.

But the end goal of a world where a highly automated "means of production" is held in community ownership is I think very important. Working in a world of privately held companies with closed source engineering leads to VERY different engineering requirements, and fails to realize benefits of community based engineering development. There are people all over the world that need what you are developing, and some of them have the time and energy to make it their own and contribute their own spin. But only if we make that community.

I have tried to discuss these concepts on my youtube channel in this latest video, though it was unscripted and I'd like to produce a clearer scripted version in the future:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx_2-xwWJUk

EDIT: For additional motivation, I highly recommend this talk by Jenny Odell called "How To Do Nothing". I feel so strongly that we are wasting ourselves away at jobs that could be automated away, and this talk really captures some of what the alternatives could be for the human psyche:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izjlP9qtmBU

Don't forget to automate defence (yah that one, military), and how to prevent any interested party in controlling that automated defence system.

I think Americans over estimate how much investment in defense is needed. Massive defense spending is needed when you’re abusing the rest of the world. Less so if you’re not.

Ukraine seems to be happy with the military aid the US is supplying

I guess I should note that I never said anything about abolishing the existing state. But for us regular people I think there are better models for an economy. And we can form cooperatives and do things however we want. I just happen to believe it would be better for pretty much everyone to abandon things like patents and private wealth accumulation in favor of cooperative economic models.

> I think Americans over estimate how much investment in defense is needed.

I don't think you understand the concept of risk, particularly as it pertains to things like war and armed conflict.

Defense spending always looks excessive and unnecessary until you need it. Saying a country overestimates how much defense spending they need is like saying you don't need car insurance because you've never been in an accident.

Wars are similar to car accidents. We're really bad at predicting when we're going to get into one and it can be a whole lot worse than we ever could have imagined.

Additionally for most western countries, the U.S. military acts as a fail-safe of sorts. If Belgium, for instance, underestimates their defense needs they know at some point the U.S. will jump in to help them if need be, which is largely what's happening in Ukraine right now.

By contrast, if the U.S. underestimates its defense needs and suddenly finds itself under attack, say by the Chinese, who exactly would come and save them?

I understand that the USA has chosen a strategy of global imperialism as a plan for maintaining control of world affairs. Our military occupies or encircles nearly every country on Earth. This is obviously an extremely expensive strategy, and one that no other country has ever chosen.

But all this talk of military spending is orthogonal to my original comment. I am saying we would be better off if washing machines were open source, and the workers at the washing machine factory would be better off if the organization was cooperatively owned and managed. I never suggested abolishing the state. The comment mentioning the military was in error if they thought I was talking about making my own country. You can do what I propose inside the USA, and the government can keep taxing exchanges to fund the largest military the world has ever seen. I have opinions on that, but those opinions don't relate to the idea that non-military technology should be open source. Obviously militaries prefer secrets.

I will say, it is interesting that you say I don't understand risk. The USA does not have the largest army humanity has ever seen in order to manage risk. The USA has this army to maintain power over other countries. Belgium as you mention relies on the USA for some extra defense protection. But this also means that Belgium cannot oppose us. We have covered the globe in US military bases so that we can maintain control. This strategy goes far beyond managing risk. If we merely wanted to manage risk, we could have avoided treating every country south of our border like shit, fostered healthy relationships with them, and after decades of healthy relationships formed a military alliance with them. Then that organization would defend the Americas against foreign invaders, not the USA.

About 3% of the global human population (or 70 to 85 million people) died in WWII. Following WWII, NATO was developed to make every military leader in the world grok that attacking a NATO country meant certain annihilation, and as a consequence, every NATO country has known only peace at home since WWII.

Last year, I would have responded to your position with this quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent in Shelby County v. Holder, "t]hrowing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet." and reminded you why you're dry. But this year, with the umbrella being on full display and not only stopping rain, but also stopping a genocide by the murderous LGBT-hating Siloviki class ruling Russia, I'm just kind of confused about how you could argue that we've got way too much umbrella.

"no one is required to work for survival"

Sadly, this automates away the #1 source of meaning in one's life. "I made it this far, in spite of all the adversity" is what most decent adults lean into to motivate themselves out of their beds in the morning.

Family? Friendship? Education, community, creative pursuit, experimentation, travel?

I really don’t think that compulsory labor is the best way for people to find meaning. We’re not going to sit around on the couch forever feeling so miserable that we can’t go out and do anything. We’d be so free to explore what we want! Sure, people raised in a society that worships labor would feel unsure of their footing for a while, but I don’t think that’s a deep part of the human condition. People absolutely would still work. Imagine creating a theater production. All the work on planning, set design and construction, etc. None of that may pay a living but it’s still meaningful work that most people can’t spend time doing today. In a world without compulsory labor more meaningful work will be found.

All these are important, /because/ life is survival. Remove the /because/, and the secondary characteristics will fade away. One can just do whatevs, it doesn't make a difference anyways.

Is that true? People wealthy enough to ensure their lifetime survival don’t seem miserable.

Ha! If only rich heirs wasting their lives on drugs & hookers weren't such a pervasive stereotype.

It does seem hard to live in a work-centric world when you as an individual don’t have to work. But I wonder a) how true this stereotype is and b) what it would be like it no one had to work. There would be more community oriented resources for finding meaning. Wealthy individuals in a work centric world don’t have that.

How do you know the stereotype is correct? And poor people wasting their lives on drugs is another pervasive stereotype.

What do you mean by “decent”?

In the US at least, we’re going to get a point in the next few generations where it’s going to get harder and harder for many to find meaning in life. Increased automation, increased climate change, decreased financial security for people who expected to be secure.

It’s going to be rough.

This is a great insight. Once "work is no longer required for survival", people are going to soon discover that "work is not longer sufficient for survival" either.

"Decent" as in: we believe that character, including work ethic, can make or break a life.

Collective ownership of automation means everyone sees the benefits from automation. Decent means a life better than that for 90% of Americans today (but available to anyone worldwide). But “better” is subjective and I’m talking about good healthy food, a clean safe home, good clothes, transportation, and a wealth of free time to spend with others.

And people can still work for more if they want. I just don’t think that makes sense as a focus for everyone, because it devolves in to what we have today, which is a mess for most people.

But ultimately what is decent is up to everyone. I just think open community innovation is a better way to manage progress than what we have today, and would benefit everyone more than what we have now.

We aren’t exactly meeting everyone’s needs to the maximum we could today.

EDIT: I just think open community innovation is more likely to produce what more people want and need. I think it will actually produce more innovation than the current system. Remember that the sole function of a patent is to prevent innovation on top of existing ideas by third parties.

If open source has taught us anything open community innovation will create a lot of what we want to work on but much less of what we need.

How do we allocate resources without prices? How do we assign prices without profits and losses?

It’s a good question. I don’t really propose we eliminate markets. But I think we can insulate individuals from prices by letting small cooperatives worry about that where individual cooperative members can just follow co-op rules.

For another example, see this real world practical example in India where a single facility gives out 50,000-100,000 free meals every day. There is a real economics to this, and it’s something I want to study. I presume they have a multitude of funding sources including donations of money and product, probably some government support for the free meals they send to schools, and volunteer labor. But they have an organization which across India gives out over 1.2 million free meals a day. It’s well worth studying how they make that work, but they certainly do make it work.

https://youtu.be/qdoJroKUwu0

But imagine you are part of a co-op that owns an automated farm. How do y’all determine who gets what? Well that’s up to the members to decide. But I think it’s an eminently solvable problem. On a larger scale different co-ops might trade using money, or might have sharing agreements between co-ops. Again, it’s up to the members.

And then for things that are reusable, libraries are a great source of inspiration. The Oakland public library has a tool lending library where you can borrow all kinds of common household tools for free. I think there’s a great number of possibilities for how to share wealth without the exchange of money, and in other cases money can be handled at the organizational level.

I admire your optimistic view, but in every collective project there's an a-hole just and solely looking out for themselves.

And what you mightn't see is the threat this poses to the evidently unfair, but also evidently well entrenched status quo.

Certainly a functioning collective needs ways of dealing with assholes. I’m a member of a local makerspace collective and it seems to handle this just fine. There is a rich history of collectives and cooperatives and I think given what is at stake, it would be better to pursue this end and manage the difficulties than give in to the assholes.

I think it’s important to really understand what is at stake. The current structure of society is such that everyone is under the thumb of assholes today. Better to have an asshole as another member of a collective than an asshole as your boss.

I do certainly understand the threat this poses to the well entrenched status quo. My strategy is to start small so the big players don’t believe you’re worth stopping, and then once you’ve proven your method works you’ve already picked up enough momentum to keep moving despite opposition. But in the end this is a project that will take lifetimes, and may never be achieved. I’d still rather work on this than design some robot designed to make the lives of very comfortable people slightly more comfortable, while simultaneously ensuring the CEO gets a new vacation home in Colorado.

Our species should always prefer more to less interesting work

Look around, your eminence. Most of our species prefer not working at all, and if we must, prefer expending the least mental effort.

Sure, I get it, it’s naive and idealistic. However, as a counterpoint I have seen repeatedly that people actually go a bit nuts without interesting work or hardship. I think that’s why puzzles, video games and dramatic television shows are so popular.

The problem is that we want work that is accessible, and interesting. It should be right near the edge but firmly within our abilities to be satisfying and meaningful, and we have problems when it deviates from that significantly.

It’s possible that for wide swaths of people that edge won’t keep up with the edge of what is not automate-able, but I think a) accepting that someone people will have to be supported out of work and b) others can have their personal ability edge pushed further with vocational training is both good for those individuals and good for society.

The problem is that we want work that is accessible, and interesting

In the words of Chris Farley, "sounds like a personal problem."

The cynic in ME says: establish an LLC, find a front man/woman to sell it back to your current company, and rake.

Ignoring whether it's a good idea, this is not trivial these days - both parties need to really trust each other given the number of ways things can go wrong.

Agreed, but you can say that about 2 cars passing each other at a 4-way stop.

Sometimes you just need to take a calculated risk and see where it goes.

Cynical me says maybe some of them were smart enough to automate away their own work and are slacking off like crazy. Presenting your automation solution to the bosses is marking you as a class enemy because now they will be expected to do a lot more for the same pay.

This is fantastic description of incentives and why technology is neither good nor bad, but provides leverage that can be used in dystopian ways when different forms of power grow unchecked.