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Comment by JanSt | Hacker News Reader

Reducing work for humanity is a net positive under two conditions:

1) the profit is distributed to as many people as possible (say UBI)

2) we find things to fill our time with apart from work.

Problem one is likely solvable over the long term. Problem two may become a challenge for many. Work often adds meaning to peoples life. Feeling like you can't contribute anything meaningful to society may effect mental health. On the other hand, we may find time to take care of younger and elder people; spend more time with friends etc.

I think a big question will be, how fast the changes happen. A quick destruction of jobs without 1) or 2) will lead to negative consequences in the mid-term.

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I think one of the biggest problems with work these days is that so much of it doesn't help people feel like they're contributing anything meaningful to society. I think if large swathes of people had much more free time and no less capital I like to think we would find lots of projects that would feel like they benefit society. A community housing development project for example, where people use Monday and Tuesday to help build new houses in their community. Or maybe getting together and spending half a day cooking a huge meal for the neighbourhood each week. Thats the kind of world I want to live in.

Yeah. Routinely I encounter premeeting for the upcoming premeeting for the agenda preparation of actual meeting. It is like Leo's Inception for meeting. Sometime even reaching 6-7 layers deep of "pre". Doubt anyone find it meaningful.

Assuming point 1 is achieved and we don't decend into mass unemployment and civil unrest.

Speaking to point 2, I think it's likely that with a large number of people no longer feeling work stressors, we will gravitate towards meatspace small communities not substantially different from tribal communities or villages.

Those models of living were both very successful during periods of human existence when there were fewer hours devoted to labor.

The outputs from those communities will mostly just be self existence and social cohesion.

There will probably be a renewed interest in philosophy, theology, math, chess or other stimulating intellectual pursuits that have no direct economic stimulation. I think it will actually be a fantastic time to be an academic.

Many humans are very good at avoiding boredom through intellectual or artistic pursuit and for the rest there is neighborhood gossip and/or skydiving.

That's an optimistic view and I'd be happy if it came to fruition.

I'm not sure modern cities work for that though.

It is pure guessing at this point.

I have personally lived like that in a modern city, on 5th street in downtown Austin, TX. Here are my conclusions from the experience:

Self organized social community isn't that hard, given the right factors it's an inevitable emergent behavior. All we needed was a shared space to inhabit and time spent in proximity. Order and non-commercial community relationships spontaneously resulted, you wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of random fish from the same species dumped together in a tank started schooling, human sociality hasn't evolved out of us yet either.

I'm not saying everyone will do it, I'm not saying that people who grew used to social isolation over the last few years will ever participate, but we aren't so removed from the tribal/village time period that those evolutionary tendencies have been weeded out. Dunbars numbers and all the extrapolated implications still hold in my experience.

So it seems reasonable to be pessimistic about a potential beneficial outcome, given these conditions.

The quest for meaning is perhaps the lifeline for Meta's VR ambitions. If there's nothing left to do in the real world, people will get lost in endless generative content.

Humanity ends with people playing VR farming simulator.

I think video games already are this for a lot of people. I realized this while attempting to clear all the question marks in Skellige in Witcher 3, and I watch the games my nephews play and there is just so much grinding for loot. It really has in a lot of ways replaced having a part time job for them.

Why does it matter that it’s a headset? People already do this on their phones.

Well that is an interesting take. I would not say it is implausible.

If you could live in a Matrix-style creche it kinda makes sense to do it: you're physically safe, you're already in an intensive care unit if you ever get sick, and you can explore an unbounded world of experience...

I could see a future when the bulk of humanity lives in "the Matrix" voluntarily, eh?

I love the idea of never having to work another day in my life, but, lets be honest here, UBI is never going to happen. At most it will be "if you are having no kids, here is some money until you die." Even that will be a stretch because money just does not grow on trees.

First of all, money does in fact grow on trees.

Second: UBI is a response to economic conditions, not a driver.

Once the machines can economically/productively outperform most of us, UBI is an alternative to just letting us starve in the street, or riot, or whatever.

The robots provide an economic cornucopia exactly by putting people out of work. Supply becomes effectively infinite but demand/purchasing power falls to zero (because everybody is out of work) so rescue the economy (and civilization) you just give people money.

Yeah, trees are custom designed biorobots that make apples, cherries, etc that are way bigger than their wild counterparts. Yes, there is a lot of human work involved in nourishing the trees, keeping pests at bay, harvesting, distribution, etc. But in the past 200 years, the farming industry has seen one of the biggest transformations in how many workers are required, as in 200 years ago high percentages of the working population were employed in the farming sector and now only very small percentages are.

The remaining farmers still need things like fertilizer, people who service machines, etc, and they still have to put in work themselves. In fact farmers are some of the hardest working people I know. But the trend is still true, there are less and less farmers who generate more and more output.

You definitely need some way to distribute those resources to farmers (and other industries) in a good fashion, and in history the market economy approach with pricing autonomy has proven to be the best way. So money will likely not go away in itself, but economy will be more about resources in the future than about work.

That being said, the economies of even the rich nations are still highly dependent on human output so it's still way too early to discuss about UBI, but if we should find ourselves in a situation where we have literally no use for the work output of large percentages of populations, then we really need to think about some way to distribute resources to them so that they don't starve/riot.

If you say that only millionaires should be able to live without working, then you should look at what makes that millionaire a millionaire: their 20 rental properties? worthless if nobody can afford them. Their 5 square kilometer fully automated farm? worthless if nobody can afford the food. Their 100 million investment into a big company? likely that company is also out of business if nobody buys from that company. Sure maybe yacht builders will continue to have a great time, but that's a fraction of the economy. A lot of current millionaires would be rendered quite poor in a non-UBI future, as a lot of wealth is generated from serving existing customers.

> I love the idea of never having to work another day in my life, but, lets be honest here, UBI is never going to happen.

The system will collapse on itself if most are jobless. You can't sell products if no one can afford them.

My biggest grip with UBI is it just redefines zero. The better solution would be to do away with capital entirely, have people democratically vote on what services they want, and then conscript if there aren't enough volunteers/robots/AI to provide those services. There seems to be this tendency to forget that labor is what matters, not capital. Capital is a means of exploiting labor, but if labor can be automated or democratically voted for than no one is exploited.

Money is accrued labor. May it be in the form of money, machines or software. Money is the way to efficiently distribute it. Every purchase you make is a vote for a service or product. It's the most efficient form of democracy. It just sucks because it's scarce and not distributed fairly.

The value of labor is subjective. Some of the most important service people, like educators, are some of the lowest paid and their accrued labor is worth less once inflation hits. Capital, in general, creates perverse incentives, e.g. mainstream news is divisive and negative because that style of reporting maximizes profits. With money as the goal, it's no wonder many young people would rather become social media influencers than educators. That said, UBI is a more realistic outcome despite not fixing any of these problems.

1) Those in power tend to not give up said power. There are exceptions of course. Take for example the contracting of the British empire. However, as the outcomes of significant societal changes become less clear, those in power and comfort are less likely to forfeit those advantages.

2) In my own little bubble, no one I know is particularly fulfilled by creating crud API's and gluing together microservices. I'd bet that with guaranteed financial stability finding meaning in life would become easier, not harder.

How many presidents have held onto power in the US history?

Monarchies have a history of getting taken down (in terms of power). They held an absolute power and a tight grip.

You could see money as a proxy for power, but that's only true as long as it's scarce and you can buy real power with it.

I've been a follower of your thinking patterns regarding 2) for a long time.

Life will be easier, no questions. But that's different question from the mental health one. Feeling useless is a pretty shitty feeling and a primer for depression.

> How many presidents have held onto power in the US history?

I see the point you're driving at but the democratic institution of the US has explicit guard rails against this. We force presidents to step down because we _know_ that voluntary relinquishing of power is unlikely.

I do see money as a proxy for power. If you make enough of it you can influence public opinion, enrich or destroy education, buy twitter, etc.

this intro is like "blue sky" social thinking.. good on you to have broad ideas in the abstract BUT.. evolution is based on things that really exist now.. the same applies 100 years ago or 1000 years ago.. The winning modern human populations have mostly killed opponents, enforced order in hierarchical ranks, shape the public media to reinforce order, and accumulate weapons, wealth and build security technology. Other civil people and wildlife have had to cope or die off, as there are few wild places on Earth now.

For owners, managers, others in authority, control is the daily game, not optimizing for some ideal commons. Violence is common and so are crooked lawyers and corrupt decision makers.

Unpleasant and low-paid work will continue and perhaps increase, as pleasant and stable breeding grounds deteriorate and are further embroiled in conflict and vice. Many capable people, for pressure reasons, will double-down on authority, control, security and law-enforcement. Trapping and tricking other humans for profit will increase. Indentured servitude via debt and other means, will increase. AI will be used for this.

I think you are disregarding hundreds of years of progress in pretty much any area.

It was usual to kill natives to take their land.

It was usual to own slaves.

Worker rights have not existed in any form until somewhat recently.

Schools are available.

Violence has declined constantly.

We take the environmental protection much more serious now than 50 years ago (you could argue it's not enough, I'm talking about progress)

(2) is part of the reason philosophy and all the sciences were born… out of boredom. So I wouldn’t worry too much about (2).

And all of art before they became commercialized. It will be a boon for artisnal production, entertainment, and culture. Which will help fill a gap for those less motivated without guidance/work either helping work on it or engaging with the art.

Sure but how many people will fill their time with these? 5%? 10%? What about the other?

Does it matter?

If billions of people chose to do nothing but barbecue and watch TV for their entire lives because we automated the entire economy, I would be 100% okay with that.

I'd be okay with that too, but homo sapiens sapiens will be very unhappy quickly. We are not made to sit around and BBQ all day.

And once the people who are BBQing all day have done enough of it, and realize that it's no longer fulfilling to them, they'll find something else to do. (And some of them won't! For some, they'll feel joy in BBQing all day for the rest of their lives, and that's fine!)

For some, that other thing will be another leisure activity.

For others, it will be something like what we now see as work in one form or another, whether that be helping people in ways that robots and AIs can't, doing research, or even just doing some work that robots can do, because some people like to do it, and some people like to have a human doing it for or with them.

For others still it will be art: painting, writing, creating video games, becoming an actor or comedian, whatever.

Humans are not well-adapted to having nothing productive to do. If a given human wants to continue to do purely leisure activities, it is often because they have been so exhausted and abused by our current system that their body and brain needs the time to heal.

We were "made" to sit in a tree and eat fruit and pluck bugs out of each other's hair all day

UBI isn't needed. Instead of distributing profits, wealth can also be distributed by making expensive things cheap. Value is relative after all.

Problem is that food won’t get cheaper.

Why?

Quick google search shows that it is getting cheaper in the long term [1]

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...

> Problem one is likely solvable over the long term.

It's not in the interests of capital to solve it.[0] Having high unemployment means cheaper labour. People have argued that capitalism should be replaced for more than a century, yet nobody's successfully displaced it.

[0] Obviously mass unemployment is bad for the economy in general, which would also ultimately impact capital, but for some reason that always seems to be a lesser concern.

> Having high unemployment means cheaper labour

But fewer consumers of your products who are also earning less which means you can’t make up for it via higher prices. Taken to the hyped extreme AI means total economic destruction for labor and capital. In fact, unless it achieves self generation and maintenance of all supporting infrastructure and industrial inputs before this occurs then it’s the end of AI.

> fewer consumers of your products who are also earning less

This is a consequence of potentially collective, uncoordinated action. It's possible that every individual company says "it makes no sense to be paying this much for labor, i'm getting cheap AI/robots" and fires a ton of people everyone else be damned, and then runs into lower demand later because everyone else is doing it. So everyone acts in their immediate interest to be collectively worse off, not unlike... a bank run!

Once there is AI-powered automated law enforcement to put down any resulting unrest, it's over. There will be no going back from the class divide at that point.

The rich will be living in their towers with the lucky few allowed to serve them and get paid a pittance, while the rest of us are starving in the streets.

It doesn't matter whether it is in the interest of capital. It matters whether it is in the interest of Democracy. Hundreds of millions will vote for the party, that promises to distribute these profits.

There is no single capitalism but many different flavors (US vs European welfare states).

The US and many other places have shown that you can quite reliably get people to vote against their interests if you can convince them that it would also benefit some group they don't like.

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