Comment by yamtaddle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yamtaddle | Hacker News Reader

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Everyone else's future?

I see this as another step toward having a smaller and smaller space in which to find our own meaning or "point" to life, which is the only option left after the march of secularization. Recording and mass media / reproduction already curtailed that really badly on the "art" side of things. Work is staring at glowing rectangles and tapping clacky plastic boards—almost nobody finds it satisfying or fulfilling or engaging, which is why so many take pills to be able to tolerate it. Work, art... if this tech fulfills its promise and makes major cuts to the role for people in those areas, what's left?

The space in which to find human meaning seems to shrink by the day, the circle in which we can provide personal value and joy to others without it becoming a question of cold economics shrinks by the day, et c.

I don't think that's great for everyone's future. Though admittedly we've already done so much harm to that, that this may hardly matter in the scheme of things.

I'm not sure the direction we're going looks like success, even if it happens to also mean medicine gets really good or whatever.

Then again I'm a bit of a technological-determinist and almost nobody agrees with this take anyway, so it's not like there's anything to be done about it. If we don't do [bad but economically-advantageous-on-a-state-level thing], someone else will, then we'll also have to, because fucking Moloch. It'll turn out how it turns out, and no meaningful part in determining that direction is whether it'll put us somewhere good, except "good" as blind-ass Moloch judges it.

What role exactly is it going to take? The role we currently have, where the vast majority of people do work not because they particularly enjoy it but because they’re forced to in order to survive?

That’s really what we’re protecting here?

I’d rather live in the future where automation does practically everything not for the benefit of some billionaire born into wealth but because the automation is supposed to. Similar to the economy in Factorio.

Then people can derive meaning from themselves rather that whatever this dystopian nightmare we’re currently living in.

It’s absurdly depressing that some people want to stifle this progress only because it’s going to remove this god awful and completely made up idea that work is freedom or work is what life is about.

I am happy to write code for a hobby. Who is going to pay for that? The oligarchs of our time pay their tax to their own 'charities'. Companies with insane profits buy their own shares.

AI powered surveillance and the ongoing destruction of public institutions will make it hard to stand up for the collective interest.

We are not in hell, but the road to it has not been closed.

The ideal situation is that nobody pays for it. Picture a scenario where the vast majority of resource gathering, manufacturing, and production are all automated. Programmers are out of a job, factory workers are out of a job, miners are out of a job, etc.

Basically the current argument of artists being out of a job but taken to its extreme.

Why would these robots get paid? They wouldn’t. They’d just mine, manufacture, and produce on request.

Imagine a world where chatgpt version 3000 is connected to that swarm of robots and you can type “produce a 7 inch phone with an OLED screen, removable battery, 5 physical buttons, a physical shutter, and removable storage” and X days later arrives that phone, delivered by automation, of course.

Same would work with food, where automation plants the seeds, waters the crops, removes pests, harvests the food, and delivers it to your home.

All of these are simply artists going out of a job, except it’s not artists it’s practically every job humans are forced to do today.

There’d be very little need to work for almost every human on earth. Then I could happily spend all day taking shitty photographs that AI can easily replicate today far better than I could photograph in real life but I don’t have to feel like a waste of life because I enjoy doing it for fun and not because I’m forced to in order to survive.

Look, I like the paradise you created. You only forgot about who we are.

> There’d be very little need to work for almost every human on earth.

When mankind made a pact with the devil, the burden we got was that we had to earn our bread though sweat and hard labor. This story has survived millennia, there is something to it.

Why is the bottom layer in society not automated by robots? No need to if they are cheaper than robots. If you don't care about humans, you can get quite some labor for a little bit of sugar. If you can work one job to pay your rent, you can possibly do two or three even. If you don't have those social hobbies like universal healthcare and public education, people will be competitive for a very long time with robots. If people are less valuable, they will be treated as such.

Hell is nearer than paradise.

Humans have existed for close to 200,000 years. Who we ‘are’ is nothing close to what we have today. What humans actually are is an invasive species capable of subjugating nature to fit its needs. I want to just push that further and subjugate nature with automation that can feed us and manufacture worthless plastic and metal media consumption devices for us.

Your diatribe about not caring about humans is ironic. I don’t know where you got all that from, but it certainly wasn’t my previous comment.

I also don’t know what pact you’re on about. The idea of working for survival is used to exploit people for their labor. I guess people with disabilities that aren’t able to work just aren’t human? Should we let them starve to death since they can’t work a 9-5 and work for their food?

> Who we ‘are’ is nothing close to what we have today.

I am wondering why you define being in terms of having. Is that a slip, or is that related to this:

> I want to just push that further and subjugate nature with automation that can feed us and manufacture worthless plastic and metal media consumption devices for us.

Because I can hear sadness in these words. I think we can feel thankful for having the opportunity to observe beauty and the universe and feel belonging to where we are and with who we are. Those free smartphones are not going to substitute that.

I do not mean we have to work because it is our fate or something like that.

> Your diatribe about not caring about humans is ironic.

A pity you feel that way. Maybe you interpreted "If you don't care about humans" as literally you, whereas I meant is as "If one doesn't care".

What I meant was is the assumption you seem to make that when a few have plenty of production means without needing the other 'human resources' anymore, those few will not spontaneously share their wealth with the world, so the others can have free smart phones and a life of consumption. Instead, those others will have to double down and start to compete with increasingly cheaper robots.

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The pact in that old story I was talking about deals with the idea that we as humans know how to be evil. In the story, the consequence is that those first people had to leave paradise and from then on have to work for their survival.

I just mentioned it because the fact that we exploit not only nature, but other humans too if we are evil enough. People that end up controlling the largest amounts of wealth are usually the most ruthless. That's why we need rules.

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> I guess people with disabilities that aren’t able to work just aren’t human? Should we let them starve to death since they can’t work a 9-5 and work for their food?

On the contrary, I think I have been misunderstood.:)

I hear more sadness in your words that are stuck on the idea of having to compete. The idea is to escape that and make exploiting people not an option. If you feel evil and competition for survival is what defines humans, that’s truly sad.

I like my ideal world a lot better.

> The idea is to escape that and make exploiting people not an option.

I am in, but just wanted to let you know many had this idea before. People thought in the past we would barely work these days anymore. What they got wrong is that productivity gains didn't reach the common man. It was partly lost through mass consumption, fueled by advertising, and wealth concentration. Instead, people at the bottom of the pyramid have to work harder.

> I like my ideal world a lot better.

Me too, without being consumption oriented though. Nonetheless, people that take a blind eye to the weaknesses of humankind often runs into unpleasant surprises. It requires work, lots of work.

IMO it’s impossible with the idea that survival=work. It’s evident here, with people desperately fighting against AI art because it’ll take away people’s jobs. It’s not even just that, though. It’s also the belief that AI art takes away from human art, as if AI chess existing makes Magnus vs. Niemann less exciting.

That same work=survival idea is what incentivizes competitiveness and of course, under that construct, some humans will put on their competitive goggles and exploit others.

There are a lot of human constructs that need to fade away before we can get to a fully automated world. But that’s okay. Humans aren’t the type to get stuck on a problem forever.

I agree with those points, especially competition is an important one. It has been the furnace of our progress too, so this is a double edged sword.

I think people will not stop forming a social hierarchy, and so competition remains a sticky trait I think.

> work=survival idea is what incentivizes competitiveness

True, the idea that you can do better than the Jones through hard work is alluring. Having a job is now a requirement for being worthy, the kind of job defines your social position. Compare with the days of nobility though, where those nobleman had everything but a job ("what is a weekend?").

>When mankind made a pact with the devil, the burden we got was that we had to earn our bread though sweat and hard labor. This story has survived millennia, there is something to it.

This sounds mystical and mysterious; it would be a mistake to project one mode of production as being the brand all humans must live with until we go extinct.

> it would be a mistake to project one mode of production as being the brand all humans must live with until we go extinct.

Indeed, you should not read it as an imperative. The other commentator was also put on the wrong foot by this.

Maybe I should not have assumed people would know Genesis, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Genesis. I should be more explicit: we are not some holy creatures. Don't assume that the few who are gonna reap the rewards will spontaneously share them with others. We are able to let others suffer to gain a personal advantage.

Every other living thing on the planet spends most of it's time just fighting to survive. I think that's evidence it's not a 'made up idea' and likely may be what life is actually about.

What’re you doing on the internet? No other living thing on this planet spends time on the internet. Or maybe we shouldn’t be copying things from nature just because.

Also kinda curious how you deal with people that have disabilities and can’t exactly fight to survive. Me, I’m practically blind without glasses/contacts, so I’ll not be taking life lessons from the local mountain lion, thanks.

Taking a break from my struggle just like a lion takes a nap. I wouldn't agree we are copying nature, rather, we are an inseparable part of it. The fact that we do some things other members don't isn't a convincing argument for me that we're not part of nature.

If you can't support yourself for whatever reason, you rely on others to do that work on your behalf. Social animals, wolves for example, try to provide for their sick and handicapped, but that's only after their own needs are met first.

This is the dictionary definition of appeal to nature fallacy.

That fallacy asserts a judgement that natural=good. I'm not claiming that.

We have physical needs just like other members of the natural world - food for example, if we can't provide food for ourselves, we'll starve to death just like an animal. Why bother judging this situation as good or bad when it's not something that can be changed.

I hope this will happen, but don't you think result just no one can get food, rich watch people dying?

Food will be automated. A lot of it is automated even today. Robots that will till the soil, manage nutrients, plant the seeds, water the plants, and pick the crops. It’ll even be done without pesticides, as robots with vision and plant detection can work 24/7 to remove weeds and pests. Or we’ll switch to hydroponics, still fully automated and done on a mass scale. In this world, there’s no purchasing food. You would just request it and that’s it.

Now imagine that automation in food and expand it to everything. A table factory wouldn’t purchase wood from another company. There’s automation to extract wood from trees and the table factory just requests it and automation produces a table. With robots at every step of the process, there are no labor costs. There’s no shift manager, there’s no CEO with a CEO salary, there’s no table factory worker spending 12+ hours a day drilling a table leg to a table for $3 an hour in China.

That former factory worker in China is instead pursuing their passions in life.

yes, I hope this will happen.

> The space in which to find human meaning seems to shrink by the day

I don’t understand this. It reminds me of the Go player who announced he was giving up the game after AlphaGo’s success. To me that’s exactly the same as saying you’re going to give up running, hiking, or walking because horses or cars are faster. That has nothing to do with human meaning, and thinking it does is making a really obvious category error.

A lot of human meaning comes from providing value to others.

The more computers and machines and institutions take that over, the fewer opportunities there are to do that, and the more doing that kind of thing feels forced, or even like an indulgence of the person providing the "service" and an imposition on those served.

Vonnegut wrote quite a bit about this phenomenon in the arts—how recording, broadcast, and mechanical reproduction vastly diminished the social and even economic value of small-time artistic talent. Uncle Bob's storytelling can't compete with Walt Disney Corporation. Grandma's piano playing stopped mattering much when we began turning on the radio instead of having sing-alongs around the upright. Nobody wants your cousin's quite good (but not excellent) sketches of them, or of any other subject—you're doing him a favor if you sit for him, and when you pretend to give a shit about the results. Aunt Gertrude's quilt-making is still kinda cool and you don't mind receiving a quilt from her, but you always feel kinda bad that she spent dozens of hours making something when you could have had a functional equivalent for perhaps $20. It's a nice gesture, and you may appreciate it, but she needed to give it more than you needed to receive it.

Meanwhile, social shifts shrink the set of people for whom any of this might even apply, for most of us. I dunno, maybe online spaces partially replace that, but most of that, especially the creative spaces, seem full of fake-feeling positivity and obligatory engagement, not the same thing at all as meeting another person you know's actual needs or desires.

That's the kind of thing I mean.

The areas where this isn't true are mostly ones that machines and markets are having trouble automating, so they're still expensive relative to the effort to do it yourself. Cooking's a notable one. The last part of our pre-industrial social animal to go extinct may well be meal-focused major holidays.

> a lot of human meaning comes from providing value to others

This is not intrinsic, though. It is a cultural imperative, so perhaps we need to revisit that?

I've pretty sure that's about as fundamental as it gets. Help tribe = feel good; tribe values your contributions = feel good; your talents and interests genuinely help the tribe = feel very good.

I don't mean this in a "people love work, actually", hooray-capitalism sense (LOL, god no), but the sense that humans tend to be happier and more content when they're helpful to those around them. It used to be a lot easier to provide that kind of value through creative and self-expressive efforts, than it is now. Any true need for artists and creative work (and, for the most part, craftspeople) at the scale of friend & family circles or towns or whatever, is all but completely gone.

Thank you for that response, it did help me understand.

My probably perverse takeaway is that Barbara Streisand might have been wrong: people who need people (to appreciate their work) may not be the luckiest people in the world. One can enjoy one’s accomplishments without needing to have everyone else appreciate them. Or you can find other people with similar interests, and enjoy shared appreciation.

In the extreme, the need for external validation seems to lead to people like Trump and Musk. Perhaps a shift in how we view this would be beneficial for society?

I agree and think the same way. The "just make numbers go up" mentality of happiness is a fallacy. If this was the case, plugging everyone up to heroin hibernation machines would be the most optimal path. But anyone with an iota of human sensitivity will see that as horrific, unhappy and a destruction of the human spirit.

Happiness needs loss, fulfillment, pain, hunger, boredom, fear and they need to be experiences backed up by both chemical feelings and experiences and memory and they have to be true.

But here's the thing, already the damage is done beyond just some art. I don't mean to diminish art, but frankly, look at how hostile, ugly and inhuman the world outside is in any regular city. Literal death worlds in fantasy 40k settings look more homey, comfortable, fulfilling, and human.

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