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Comment by mhb | Hacker News Reader

If you invest more than 10 seconds of thought in this line of reasoning, its flaws become obvious and it applies to every field in which this argument is made - stories, drugs, software, movies. Compensating creators based on the marginal cost of reproducing their work is not a paradigm for maintaining the flow of creative works.

Maybe you have some junk counterargument that creative people will work for free as well as for material goods. Or who cares about the future, let's distribute what we have now. If you think creative people will work for free just for the joy of creating, then you've never worked on the last 20% of a project which is often not that joyful.

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I don’t think they said anything like what you said they said. They said it’s a Wonder.

Like, I don’t think it’s right to spend thousands of lives and decades of time of slave-labor building the Great Pyramids, but it’s absolutely a Wonder, and nobody denies this.

This library project is absolutely a Wonder, however right or wrong you might ultimately believe it to be, and as the poster said, it has been attempted many times and never come anywhere close to this effort.

Fair enough. I guess I assumed that in the context of a community that surely appreciates the marvel that is the internet, there was a secondary objective in mentioning it.

Sorry for nitpicking, but it's believed now that Great Pyramids were built by well payed, well fed laborers, not by slaves.

It eventually still boiled down to some kind of forced labour. Feeding those laborers for decades consumed ressources, which the rulers couldn't just magically conjure out of thin air... so e.g. farmers had to probably suffer from that.

Let me explicitly state this, then. I do not care at all if a new movie is never made or a new book is never published. We have multiple lifetimes of quality music already, why do we need to incentivize creations relevant to the modern culture?

Because not all entertainment is equally interesting to you.

The next book never written could have been your favorite book. Or game or movie or show or entertainer or content creator. With zero substitutes.

“I don’t care about future things because someone already was paid for making content that I can enjoy today” seems like a basic logical error.

…and if I never see it, I'll never miss it.

I'd like to start from a worldview of abundance and invite you to imagine a future in which we (as a society) will be able to answer a related question: What are the prerequisites for accomplishing the missing, painful 20% of any project out there?

What you're asking is how to get people to work. The world and economics have already provided many alternatives. Pick your poison.

Yes, there _is_ a reality we know. But that does not mean that things _ought_ to be the same in the future.

One day every human will have a unicorn that poops hamburgers and pees beer.

Until then we will have to work, allocate resources and carry on as normal.

> Until then we will have to work, allocate resources and carry on as normal.

The real fun in my life began when I learned that this is a belief and not an immovable law.

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