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Comment by 972811 | Hacker News Reader

sure - I agree with this, but I think this goes both ways. I will give a parallel situation that I think about quite a bit: cars. Cars have quite a bit of the same benefits as remote work. You can live further from work, you have independence, and quite a bit of the concrete negatives (e.g. no more crowded public transit) generally go away. But we now know that designing society around cars was a mistake. It ends up being bad for everyone and is more isolating by default. I'm similarly concerned about doing something that will make Americans more isolated by default.

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>I'm similarly concerned about doing something that will make Americans more isolated by default.

You're right to be concerned about this, but I think it stems from a combination of "false dichotomy" and "learned helplessness":

The socializing we do at work is ultimately a side effect of the work environment, not part of the primary goal. We can learn from how non-car-oriented societies structure their settlements. Returning to the previous (and terrible) iteration of the American status quo is not the only alternative.

We don't have to settle for terrible choices simply because they have mildly beneficial side effects.

I'd also like to start taking steps toward a society with less work. There will come a time when human work simply isn't needed: when robots can do the physical labor and AIs can do the mental labor--perhaps not in our lifetimes, but it will happen. And even now, we don't need to be working as much as we do.

Economists have been predicting that for one hundred years now. Hopefully AI will work out to do this.

“Economists have been predicting that...”, in a tone of “...and it ain't happened yet, so they're probably wrong”. Actually, they've been right all along, only it's been masked by the twin phenomena of hugely skewed distribution of wealth and creation of ever more bullshit jobs.

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