Comment by pardoned_turkey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pardoned_turkey | Hacker News Reader

pardoned_turkey

I frankly find the idea that we must shield adolescents from any form of work... just pretty bizarre.

There are some dangerous jobs out there, and I can perhaps accept the argument that most 15 year olds don't have the agency to sign up for that - although as a matter of practicality, having grown up poor, I know a lot of people who ended up better off working the kinds of jobs that journalists and the regulators now frown upon.

You can make abstract arguments about how in a post-scarcity utopia, no person should ever have to work. But we're not there now and you don't get there by preventing people from working before that vision of a 3D-printed, AI-based future can be realized.

For now, work is inevitable for most; so what's wrong about being paid a living wage for classifying content in front of your computer on your own schedule? As a teenager, I'd have loved that. And I was exposed to content far more vile than anything this gig could've thrown at me.

> You can make abstract arguments about how in a post-scarcity utopia, no person should ever have to work. But we're not there now and

I would argue that either A) developed nations _are_ post-scarcity or B) it's impossible for a society to ever reach post-scarcity.

If we strip away all the "necessities" we've added over the past 100, 50, 20 years, and instead focus on what we've long considered basic necessities (food, shelter, clothing), then developed nations are post-scarcity because everyone has access to those necessities -- even someone "homeless" in the US has access to shelter in a real building, though it's only the minimum.

If we say that the "necessities" we've added are genuine necessities, then how can we ever reach post-scarcity if we're able to continually redefine what are necessities?

In either case, we should focus less on scarcity of "necessities" and more on absolute poverty, which leads to:

> you don't get there by preventing people from working before that vision of a 3D-printed, AI-based future can be realized.

Abject poverty is the norm, and nations became "developed" through brutal labor, including child labor. We shouldn't be telling people to stay poor because we don't like their working conditions.

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