Comment by kristiandupont | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kristiandupont | Hacker News Reader

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Throughout my career I've encountered a good number of people who were adding very little (to none or in a few cases, negative) value to their workplace.

It used to bother me immensely. On behalf of the employer and for their own sake. I can still find that sentiment if I look for it but today, my perspective is that at least in many cases, it's ok. If the company does well and the employee doesn't hate their life because of unfulfilling work, we're all better off than if they went unemployed.

Yes, ideally everyone should follow their passion and pursue the life of their dreams but some people don't think of work as the source of that. However, that doesn't mean that they would rather not work at all -- and I don't mean just because of the loss of income. I know that UBI is all the rage in here and I think it's an interesting thought experiment but I just don't see a world where only the 1% of performers in any field are required and able to work is a promising thing.

> Yes, ideally everyone should follow their passion and pursue the life of their dreams but some people don't think of work as the source of that.

Not only do some people not think of it that way, I doubt enough necessary jobs are the dream jobs of enough people for it to work out. I bet we need the vast majority of people to be working in jobs that aren't any part of any dream of theirs.

Besides, maybe their dream wouldn't pay, so they fund it with their bullshit day job. Then it are pursuing their dreams. Hell, maybe that dream's just "raise and provide for a family"!

> I know that UBI is all the rage in here and I think it's an interesting thought experiment but I just don't see a world where only the 1% of performers in any field are required and able to work is a promising thing.

I entirely do not follow how this would be the result of UBI.

>Hell, maybe that dream's just "raise and provide for a family"!

I think we're agreeing there.

>I entirely do not follow how this would be the result of UBI.

I didn't mean to imply that it would. I've just seen people argue that UBI is a solution to the problem of people not having work.

> I didn't mean to imply that it would. I've just seen people argue that UBI is a solution to the problem of people not having work.

Ah, I took you as meaning that UBI would cause only the top 1% of talent to work. Sorry, guess I misread that.

I'd say automation would free all those folks up to find meaning in other pursuits, like, say, the arts... but, uh, unless there's a society-wide rejection of AI art, that's looking rather iffy now. Like they could maybe still do it, the same way people enjoy doing Sudoku puzzles even though computers can solve them better, but they'll have to be content with the finished work having the same value to others as a solved Sudoku puzzle, i.e. none whatsoever.

Focusing in on the UBI section of your comment: I feel that there is always something being glossed over with the assumption that large amounts of people would stop working if we introduced UBI. I don't think this is true in the general sense (people would find other ways to work), but probably true that most people would quit their job in the short term.

Just to rant about that a bit, we acknowledge and ignore that a large proportion of people barely scraping by would probably not do what they were doing if not for the threat of homelessness and starvation. It's true that the way that things are built would have to change with UBI because most of what we benefit from in the current system is based on the exploitation of the most desperate. We should note though that a large proportion of the benefit of that exploitation is not going to bettering society, but into the pockets of the most wealthy.

At least with UBI we would remove exploitation of one's living situation as a tool to extract labour, which removes a lot of power from the existing monopolies.

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