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Comment by fabbari | Hacker News Reader

> But humans are built to work and we’re only just beginning to feel the effects of giving up that privilege.

I don't know how I feel about this. I believe humans may enjoy work - I often say that if I won the lottery I would still sit in front of a computer coding and experimenting, creating software because I enjoy it - but that's not where the value of being human comes from.

I think having to work and enjoying doing a specific job are two different things, and I am just lucky that that diagram is a single circle. Many, if not most, people would not be doing the job they are doing given an alternative.

When the needed work is fully automated and done by machines/AI people will find a better use of their time. I believe our current economy model and social architecture is not equipped for that shift, but that's another long story.

[Edited: fixed typo]

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People who enjoy the resulting concentration of wealth will find better things to do with their time. The much larger group of people who see their wealth diminish will not.

My cynical take is that the rest of us will be funneled into endless war and plague scenarios until the population is small enough to be less of a threat to those who enjoy that concentrated wealth.

There are probably easier and less chaotic ways. If you get like a nice AI enhanced VR world and some AI generated new drugs and such you can just have everyone live out their existence in a parallel reality in some kind of an oblivion. I’d much rather have that as a rich person than billions of dead and everything destroyed

To me, work is inherently noble. It's the forces that corrupt it that are the problem, not work itself. Getting to enjoy work is an unfortunately rare blessing but I also think enjoyment of work is more dependent on the individual's mindset about their work than we often are willing to admit. It's a very complicated puzzle.

I don't understand what's inherently noble about being paid X dollars to sit at a desk and do something useless to society at large so my employer can make X*5 dollars.

All the things you mentioned are what I mean by the forces that corrupt work. Yes we should be paid for our work, within reason. And we should get to do things that are inherently useful to others. But if you're doing something that's useless to society and your employer is exploiting that work then you're experiencing corrupted work. Not that it is easy to find in the world, but I am of the opinion that the core essence of work is making order out of disorder. You can do that by building pacemakers or tilling fields. There will always be things that corrupt work, unfortunately. But work, unadulterated, is a good thing. I'd be willing to bet that you have something you like do do that can be characterized as making order out of disorder, even if it's not at your job. That is work and it is good.

Thank you for the explanation, which gives me a better idea of what you were talking about. It's definitely food for thought for those like me in pointless jobs.

No sweat. I definitely don't want to downplay the reality of your frustrations with your job. It's just that the many facets of the topic of work are very meaningful to me and I have a lot of strong convictions about it. How to enjoy work or find meaning in it is a whole other conversation but I'm truly sorry your job sucks.

This sounds a lot like Star Trek TNG. At least Picard has said something similar.

In a post-scarcity society, people work to elevate themselves.

For different definitions of 'elevate'. For example, some will seek power, which will still be scarcer for others.

People without purpose is a very, very dangerous thing. And don't fool yourself thinking that most of the people would find proper ways to spend their time. Maybe this is why Metaverse is pushed ever harder, to create some fake thing for people to spend their time in. That's why it is rushed.

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