Building a better world without jobs (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Building a better world without jobs (2022)

workforcefuturist.substack.com

28 pointsjenny606080 comments

If there's toilets in the future, then there will be sewers, and if there's sewers then there will always be a guy required to go down there and dislodge stuff. And he won't want to do that for just the hell of it... Therefore jobs.

Could solve the problem of getting stuff done nobody wants to do through a model where you do a 3-4 year tour of civil service. Could be less of a job and more of the entrance fee to the perks of adulthood.

Service guarantees citizenship, except unironically.

To make the math work, more like 40 years tour of civil service as an entrance fee to the perks of adulthood. Wait, that's called retirement!

Oh, really? Because I'm pretty sure we didn't strictly need that much labor for essential jobs even before any meaningful automation.

Humans' consumption infinitely expands to fill all available productivity growth, that what has always happened, and what will keep happening unless someone starts forcing billions into GULAGs, in my opinion.

No it didn't, not for the basic goods. Nobody is drinking "all available productivity growth" worth of water, eating the equivalent of food, buying house after house, or compulsively commuting.

About luxury goods, don't you think that humans being blasted with aggressive advertising and other manipulation in every single space of our lives has something to do with it?

Don't forget that most of the things we purchase don't even need to be owned by every single person - if they could be meaningfully shared, you definitely don't need a 100 cars per 100 families, most tools are needed but rarely, even entertainment is only consummerism-centric because a lot of money is going into making it so, while very little goes into enabling humans to just hang out together.

I'll start the SHAE movement: serve hard, adulthood early.

Cool. Slavery.

If so, then so is school- it's literally children being forced to hard mental work against their will, justification irregardless.

Fair enough, but so is what we have today unless you were born to rich parents.

That's absurd. Having to work to earn a living is not the same as slavery. If you don't think there are enough good jobs where you live then you should be agitating for onshoring and more investment in local manufacturing and production. Fundamental wealth in a society comes from producing and improving physical things that make our lives better.

Depends entirely on what sort of job you have. Wage slavery is definitely a thing.

Living paycheck to paycheck, barely being able to afford food and rent, with no real options is materially indistinguishable from slavery. Nobody wants to do these jobs. They're doing them because they're given no other option.

That's due to a lack of competition among employers. Corporations have been given too much leeway and should be restricted in their reach and forcibly broken up. International corporations should be banned in both directions. If you fix the economy so that it's not possible for companies to commit arbitrage resulting in money both flowing out of the country as well as concentrating at the top then economic mobility would be achievable by all who were willing to put the effort in.

As long as we live in a system where the rich intrinsically have more power and the incentive to use it to squeeze more wealth out of others, this will be at best playing whack-a-mole and at worst a matter of time as corruption and manipulation inevitably win.

The reason we're seeing the same outcome around the globe is because it's essentially inevitable, it's just a question of pace.

Can this be demonstrated true? Where has this fix been tried to success? Where is this capitalist utopia where nobody dreads going to work.

There will always be discontents but just looking back over the history of most Western nations will give you pretty striking examples of success before various forces of corruption took hold. We currently live in a utopia when compared to our collective past, it could be much better but that doesn't mean we're not far up the slope of progress.

At best, it is communism, at worst, it is slavery.

It doesn't solve the problem that there are tasks that less people want to do than needed. Jobs are an elegant solution to that problem. "I know that you don't want to dig shit, but if you dig shit, then you will be able to afford a better meal than if you didn't", if you like good meals more than you dislike digging shit, you can be happy despite having a literal shit job. Wages are sometimes called "compensation" for a reason.

Like democracy, the paid job system sucks, but in practice, it sucks less than the alternatives.

The reality is that most low-income jobs won't grant you a good meal. It will grant you access to food and maybe housing. The line between this mode of existence and slavery is really fucking blurry. We like to pretend that we're offering these people a way out of poverty by having them work these jobs, but that virtually never happens.

For the people doing these jobs, if you don't work you don't eat. This service system is at least fair in the sense that everyone gets a momentary piece of the same raw deal, rather than having some people draw the short straw and spending their entire lives digging shit and living between paychecks while others know nothing but comfort and luxury.

It also makes sure everyone has skin in the game when deciding how we decide to treat the people doing these jobs, since it's everyone.

This is assuming everyone would happily do their duty and also that the math would actually work out. I think the math is the bigger problem even though human nature is always a wrench in the gears of any such scheme, it's the math that dooms systems like this to implode after a while. The scheduling alone doesn't make any sense, to replace one full-time career of 45 years you'd need to break that up into say 9 five year stints. Then also considering that crappy jobs far outnumber 'good' jobs you'd be looking at rotating through a series of them, changing every 5 years until retirement because if you didn't and everyone 'retired' from having to work a crappy job after one 5 year term then you'd have a massive shortage of workers in no time. So everyone has to work a career that consists almost entirely of shitty jobs but they're forced to change jobs all the time so they can never really get good at any of them and then they retire when they're too old and worn out maybe with a single 5 year stint as a not very good accountant or something?

Fairness is good, but I think it is sometimes overrated.

It is sometimes apparent in countries where conscription is active. Putting aside the obvious gender discrimination, conscription is possibly the fairest thing we get. But it also mean that we take people off jobs where they are good, productive, and enjoy themselves to make them do things they don't like and perform poorly.

A highly visible and concrete example is for famous k-pop artists. You have young men doing an awesome (and hard!) job entertaining millions of people and bringing a lot of value to South Korea, but in the name of fairness, they have to stop doing that and do something where they are a poor fit for 1-2 years. Personally, I think it is a waste.

The k-pop idol thing is an extreme case, but the idea is that if you are particularly good at something, that you enjoy doing it, and that thing brings value to society, why should you do something else? It is unfair because some people will enjoy themselves more than others, but nature is unfair anyways, some people get some genetic disease and their life is nothing but pain, should we torture healthy people in the name of fairness?

There are ways of making society a bit more fair that doesn't involve making everyone more miserable, that's socialism, and it makes a bit more sense. The idea is that you are going to dig shit and someone else will live in luxury, but the state will take a bit of the "luxury" guy and give it to you, so you can afford the good meal without requiring the "luxury" guy to dig shit if the reason he lives in luxury is because his net contribution to society is particularly valuable. Most countries have some of that, even the US, but since it is real life, the idea may be simple, but the execution and details are far from it.

I think a better phrasing is "I know you don't want to dig shit and I don't want to dig shit but there's someone out there willing to do it if I offer them enough money". Offering money in exchange for work is the better, fairer option because no one has to take the job if they don't want it. Offer enough money and someone will value the pay more than their dislike for digging shit. The problem with such a system is when other things get distorted through monopolies or collusion that result in an unfair market or limited choices. It's a classic baby-bathwater situation, keep paid jobs but get rid of market distorting factors.

> no one has to take the job if they don't want it

Is that true though? Won't the vacant jobs tend to be specifically the jobs nobody wants to do, so that those do the jobs are those who do so out of sheer desperation?

This especially given increasing automation and fewer job opportunities (where most human labor isn't doing anything machines can't do cheaper).

I don't think monopolies and collusion is causing this.

This is a naive take. People doing those jobs right now are definitely not paid much, they just have no freedom, for many it's either an abysmal job or homelessness.

And you speak of unfair practices as though they're not the very definition of what capitalism as a system incentives.

I volunteer for a dog shelter and have to pick up and clean dog shit. For free. It brings me joy and belonging, not the picking up dog excrements, but the feeling that I can help someone or groups unconditionally, without expecting anything back.

From the text version not the video: the talk is really about the distinction between "work", which is almost anything that's not leisure, including cleaning the sewers, and capital J "Jobs". His argument is that things like the "gig economy" are not capital-J Jobs. So you're not necessarily going to have people with "sewer cleaner" as a Job, with a pay scale for Sewer Cleaner (Second Grade) and a pension, you might instead find it posted on Taskrabbit or something.

I got the same impression and he oddly seems to be arguing that this will somehow be better which couldn't be further from the truth.

Why do you think robots would not be able to do those tasks?

>Why do you think robots would not be able to do those tasks?

The manufacturing of the robots themselves also requires input from unpleasant jobs. The raw materials like steel, plastics, batteries, etc to make the robot. Example of not-so-fun jobs like mining cobalt being done by children: https://www.google.com/search?q=child+labor+cobalt+mines+ev+...

Why can't we have "master" robots build the the "slave" robots? Still the same issue... How do the master robots get built/maintained/repaired?

You also have Moravec's Paradox when trying to build robots that can replace humans' sensory-motor skills (e.g. cleaning sewers, mining cobalt, etc) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

The Boston Dynamics prototype robots have impressive demos of them dancing and jumping but they're probably several decades away from being cost-effective in replacing humans for mining and other unpleasant jobs.

1. Batteries with enough amp hours capacity in a small enough size are still many decades if not a hundred years out.

2. Motors and actuators have to get a lot more powerful and a lot smaller, also decades out.

3. Pressure sensors need a lot of work and miniaturization.

4. The AI needed to make it all work needs a shitload of data consisting of real world interactions using the above hardware so we will need to spend a long time training these robots but even after we have a working model the hardware required to run it might not fit in the robot itself so we'll have to solve the network problems with transmitting all the sensory data and individual commands for all the micro-actuators.

This is all assuming you want a robot with human level dexterity, speed and abilities. Clumsier ones that can't do all the jobs that humans can will obviously arrive sooner but that doesn't solve the problem of eliminating all manual labour.

Robots need to be programmed.

Why do you think robots (or AI) won't be able to program robots?

And who programs the robots programming the robots?

AI doesn't exist, and at the moment it is unclear IF, not when it ever will. Don't believe the hype, the Emperor is still naked, only conceals it better.

>AI doesn't exist, and at the moment it is unclear IF, not when it ever will.

My guess is never.

It may get very close to the real thing and that thought alone makes me shudder, maybe we’ll become the tool to fill in the gaps.

And this is how we get the terminator ending.

Because AI isn't actually intelligent.

Other replies have pointed out this is the type of task we could automate, but I’ll assume you’ve taken (what I consider to be) a valid retort into consideration: Yes, we could automate it but machines break and the last option in fixing is always to send in humans, even if just to manually operate other machines to unlock what stopped the automation. Thus jobs.

I don’t know if it would be societally possible to have those people without jobs, but I believe it could happen. Think how many of us love to tinker with and improve complex system for the hell of it (open-source), and would welcome doing more of it for free if only we didn’t have an obligation (a job) which takes us away from it. Even when no one needs to work, many will choose to.

> Think how many of us would love to tinker with and improve complex system for the hell of it (open-source), and would welcome doing more of it for free if only we didn’t have an obligation (a job) which takes us away from it.

How often are you fixing Wordpress sites where people have been using WYSIWYG editors and now all the content is full of crazy HTML and someone ran a bunch of search and replace with wrong regexps and it's just a terrible mess and someone needs to sort it out and that someone needs to know HTML and JS and they need to be focused on the task at hand to make sure they don't delete something that was supposed to be kept.

In other words: there's a world of work out there and nobody loves to tinker with that because it's not "improving complex systems", it's robbing through the sewers with a plunger. I doubt that you'll find plenty of volunteers for that.

The "we'll automate everything" approach is pretty boring in my opinion: we're nowhere close, yet people are talking about it as if it was a thing that's happening until 2030 and we need to be prepared for the societal consequences of it and we need to make changes now (surprisingly, it's always those changes they intuitively like that we desperately need to enact, otherwise everything will be automated and we'll all starve). Let's talk about that when we can actually see it on the horizon.

> we're nowhere close

I agree. If we ever see it, I doubt it will be in my lifetime.

> Let's talk about that when we can actually see it on the horizon.

Being far away in the future or impossible shouldn’t stop us from thinking about it. That’s what science fiction is. Imagining what might be can help us understand the present, and talking about it opens the possibility of listening to other opinions and refine our own.

Sure, but that's a discussion similar to "what happens when the sun has finally run out of juice and it gets dark forever": potentially entertaining, probably highly interesting to academics, but hopefully not weighing in too much on our energy policy for this century.

I don't think "what if we automate everything" helps us understand the present any more than "what if energy was unlimited" or "what if gravity was a social construct": they aren't, so if you're looking to base a decision on that being differently, you're going to be in for a wild ride, and if you're looking for answers to questions like "do all people want to work?", "is all work equally liked?" etc, I'm not sure what insight is to be gained, the answers are "No."

> I don't think "what if we automate everything" helps us understand the present any more than "what if energy was unlimited"

When you imagine the future societal transformation of a particular development, you do so under your understanding of the current zeitgeist. Again, that’s what science fiction is. It helps you formulate your thoughts on the current state of affairs and compare them to what others think.

I’m under no illusion that commenting on an admittedly science fictional scenario on a random web forum will enact societal change. Were I a politician making those points in public, you’d do well to call me out. But I’m not. I’m a random poster on a random website musing on an imagined scenario.

> potentially entertaining

In other words, that’s what I’m doing it for and I see nothing wrong with it. As far as I’m aware I’m not causing harm.

> I'm not sure what insight is to be gained

Respectfully, because you cannot see it does not mean it is not there. Even the simple act of enjoying a conversation is a beneficial outcome. Maybe it will be helpful in the future, maybe it will not, but I don’t think we should only converse when we have a goal in mind. That would be a boring existence.

If I didn't need to worry about basic necessities (including medical care) I would absolutely volunteer to do these sorts of things.

Do you need to worry about necessities, is total compensation not enough to live on?

I don't see that happening for significant amounts of people. Nobody in Western Europe has to worry about necessities (for a reasonable definition of necessities, if it includes vacations and cars, then this isn't so), yet we don't see the unemployed get super productive and use their free time and energy. Instead, we usually see them degenerate, watch TV all day and slowly wither away. At the same time, it's people with jobs who make the extra time to volunteer and do things.

There are people who literally simulate the entire air traffic control system for fun, so it's not hard to believe someone would want to work on sewer cleaning robots as a hobby.

There will always be toilets but likely in home processing plants will treat it and return safe water and fertilizer to your garden.

Anything else would be emptied into your garbage can once a month. Your job, replace the fillers in your house or some such thing.

Someone is still collecting the garbage, though, right? I think there are some current jobs people will do as hobbies in aid of others and tech will help in ways, including as you suggest, but I think there'll still be someone in that society doing a 'dirty job'.

Side note: My household generates compost but almost no garbage.

It seems to me like taking out the garbage will also be relatively solved by robots.

It’s exactly the same problem as restaurant food delivery.

I press an app on my phone saying “I have something to deliver” a robot shows up in front of my house. I drop off my garbage with an address labeled “the dump”.

“What if that robot breaks down or becomes a giant mess?”

“Won’t there still be people at the dump?”

I promise you there is no problem I can’t imagine a tech solution for! I do agree we are a bit far away from “all labor is eliminated”. Probably a little more than 100 years, but definitely sooner than 1000 years.

> Your job, replace the fillers in your house or some such thing.

What about your job when the fancy "in home processing plant" lines get clogged or start leaking?

Time to call the guy who deals with that shit for a living.

I mean i really think you’re missing the point of the main story. It’s talking about a future where all construction and plumbing is automated by robots and is trying to explore the time period after that and what happens beyond.

You seem to disagree that it is at all possible and want to explore the time period before that time. Which is fine, I agree there are a lot of details to get right! But if you try a little, it really is easy to imagine todays robots getting to a point that they will diagnose and fix all plumbing issues.

Seems like the kind of thing we could automate…

I doubt we will ever get rid of work, but it’s not completely ridiculous over very long timescales. At some point we might stop say medical R&D because we finished. Todays chat bots suck, but conceivably they might eventually take over creative jobs leaving only hobbyists. etc etc.

Work may still exist in 30,000 years, but jobs as a concept could disappear.

I'm not sure the numbers pencil out with our current state of automation implementation for say, small towns; pigging as pointed out elsewhere in the thread does this, but the equipment is pretty expensive, and you have to have sewer lines designed to take the pressure (especially when they run over aquifers) when some old infrastructures were not designed with that kind of pressure in mind along the joints as a regular occurrence. Current state of the art from what I can see is automation of this sort of work is more of "let's create a tool that does X task or at best tasks in a narrow range", and less of creating a Moravec-class android, or Mote In God's Eye-reminiscent Engineer/Watchmaker Motie-style creatures-but-as-bots.

Developing world humans in their near-innumerable billions will always be economically (though arguably not organizationally nor for innovation-wise) cheaper than narrow automation for much "blue collar" work like this for as long as we leave Moravec's Paradox on the table, and not an evolving/improving science and engineering solution in the market.

Once I get into equipment to automate manual work (especially any commercial grade kit), I quickly discover the cost hurdle to clear is quite high. I either need lots of people I want to free up for another part of my business, or use the automation as close to around the clock as possible, or both before the capex and opex fall below the financial benefits. The ongoing maintenance of the new tool is a part that usually is not accurately accounted for in many people's opex calculations. I suspect this is why well-capitalized large companies are leveraging automation benefits sooner and we're seeing increasingly more emergent oligopolies, and Moravec-class automation when it ever arrives might be very profitable to the suppliers and disruptive to these incumbents.

When it specifically comes to sewer automation that’s teething pains. Infrastructure built in X years is going to be built with this kind of automation in mind and everything before that point will eventually be replaced.

Moravec's Paradox was coined in the 1980’s, today’s systems can do vision from cameras fairly well and are only improving over time. Which is really the point I was going for. Even without AGI, it looks like we are going to start building special purpose hardware with very human like capabilities.

On top of this physics has limits on how much physical devices can be improved. If the hypothetical iPhone 732 is eventually the last iPhone ever, then the R&D costs about automating construction fall to zero. Thus robots that build robots which maintain robots etc. A fully lights out factory across potentially geologic timescales. But, that same automation could be applied to everything from recycling, construction, and farming to healthcare.

> ...today’s systems can do vision from cameras fairly well and are only improving over time.

When we replace Roombas with Moravec-class androids that perform common domestic chores, then I think we'll really be tackling the paradox. Right now I am guessing we're at the approximate equivalent of perhaps say, just before the early Cambrian Period, when vision systems started to show up in the fossil record.

So I'm hoping for an exponential development explosion that delivers androids that do laundry (sort, wash, fold, put up, identify for recycling), clean and prep food ingredients, dust/vacuum/mop/cleaning in general, return items to their places, make beds, take out and return rubbish and recycling bags and bins, etc. Even with a developed world income well above the 90th percentile, I cannot cost justify spending ~$0.5-1.0K USD for small slices of each of these capabilities with specialized equipment to automate them, which seems to be about the threshhold they're introduced at.

That’s fair. It took ~100 years for wireless video phones to go from science fiction to something sitting in most peoples pockets. Hell, Paramotor’s are about the most disappointing way we could get flying jet packs.

So, I don’t expect this transition to happen in my lifetime but the future is a long time.

Sounds like the thing that is already partly automated (search term "pigging"):

https://www.rigzone.com/images/howitworks/HIW_pigging_3.jpg

In my childhood I lived in a small town with old pipes that got clogged from time to time, we didn't call a worker to unblock them, we did it ourselves to save a few hundred euros, it wasn't so bad, you put a T-shirt around your mouth and nose and you did it.

We are losing not only the ability to do but the ability to imagine alternatives.

Reminds me of this joke:

Moshe is an apprentice septic tank cleaner. When his shop gets an emergency call, he and his senior head out to the site.

The place is a mess. The experienced septic cleaner wastes no time, pulls up his shirt and dives right in, head first.

After a while, he pops back out and reaches with his hand: "I need the Channellock pliers". Moshe hands him the pliers, and the expert dives back in. Then, out he pops again: "Jumbo plunger, now!". Moshe hands him the plunger, and the old man disappears once more. Finally, he re-emerges and pulls himself up with a tired-but-content look on his face:

"See, Moshe, if you don't take it seriously and apply yourself to this job, you're going to carry that toolbox all your life."

Kids today can film it and put it on Youtube to rack millions of views.

Like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV9dOHRDb3c

> it wasn't so bad, you put a T-shirt around your mouth and nose and you did it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_sulfide

Seems like the first thing we'll want to automate.

Here is a text version of said talk:

https://workforcefuturist.substack.com/p/building-a-world-wi...

My own opinion:

I think it's a tad bit too futuristic, something they admit. That we won't probably remove all jobs.

However, even then I find the biggest concern to be our economic system, less work means more opportunities for big corps to be part of the de facto institution as a oligarchy.

What a bad future, he pretty much lost me at the DAOs, where there is no one person, one vote, but more coins more votes... Not to mention actual decrease of financial security when you have to struggle to find different income streams all the time to keep afloat... I don want to be an uber driver, bike courier and dog walker during the day and "content creator" during the night, churning fake videos on how successful influencer I am...

The future for me is simply this, as Warren Buffett said: “If you don't find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die”

That's it, so simple - work hard, build investments and retire early if you want to, you are really free when you have the FU money in the bank...

The future we should strive as a society is all those menial jobs to be done by robots and automation, so we can work on hobbies and projects...

Its not about work, its about trade. People will want things and some will trade other things and some will trade time. Call it what you will. Everyone can't have it all, the scale slides over time.

I assume that "20M" is supposed to be 20min, not 20 million.

I'm not going to watch a 20 minute video, I have a job to do. Is there a summary?

Im at work, and a 20 minute video is just the thing I need to pass the time

Someone else posted the text version of the talk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34994810

No purpose in life except to consume automated services and processed end-products of microbial fermentation. What a future.

What I learned the last few years is that the matrix was pretty prescient, except the silly idea of a human as a battery. Instead, a human can view X ads and spend $Y per day, and it's that capacity that companies want to harvest with minimal outside distractions.

I saw somewhere that the original script for the matrix described it as using human’s brains for processing power, rather than the battery thing. Supposedly the studio thought the idea was too much for audiences.

I see the battery as subtle metaphor: when people do not pay attention (sleep) their vitals are used by somebody else (are batteries).

All you need to game that system is to buy the products of your advertisers to make it seem like the campaigns convert.

Sounds pretty good to me. My hobbies are pretty satisfying.

Dostoyevsky had a fine take of what’ll happen in that future in Notes from Underground, and it’s not likely to go the way utopians will expect.

Only a little different than life of 90% humans today.

I'm curious who pushis this anti-working class agenda?

Sorry, but the plutocracy won't allow workers to do anything but be workaholics for peanuts until they fire them for being too old or replace them with cheaper workers or automation. Eventuality, there will be too few jobs to go around and billions of impoverished homeless people. Maybe some will do volunteer work for free or menial gig economic jobs for AI managers, but there will be no spreading of capital around voluntarily. Endless greed will keep billionaires extracting more and more.

lol this is a shitty correlation of random data from a person with zero credibility

We've already had a few decades that had the technical potential to start working less over time. But it did not happen. If anything, we started working more, especially when seen from the unit of a family.

Why? Because the market will continuously invent new "wants", no matter how useless. It's supply driven, not demand driven.

I don't see politicians giving up their jobs too soon. Same for corporate management.

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