Generously assuming you're not being obtuse, the person you're replying to clearly meant "work" as "stuff people have to do", rather than "stuff that needs to be done".
Getting people food to eat is very important. Getting people slightly better software, not so much.
The further we push up and up the less importance the jobs become. Knowledge work is great, but it's necessarily less valuable from a humanity perspective than laborious work.
Of course this flaw isn't solved in a capitalist system, so we just ignore it. We just lie and pay knowledge workers more, because their work takes more human effort/investment, even if the product is less valuable. So we have a mismatch, where money value does not match real world value, and it's only getting worse. It's a bubble - eventually it will have to pop.
Where is the proof of this? How can you say that this is true?
> The further we push up and up the less importance the jobs become. Knowledge work is great, but it's necessarily less valuable from a humanity perspective than laborious work.
I reject this conclusion wholeheartedly. After food production and other such ventures, there really is only knowledge work. That you dismiss it so easily does not mean that it is not important. Indeed, the "slightly better software" of today can impact billions, billions who were not alive during the agricultural age. Even by that metric, yes, what we create today impacts many multitudes greater than us. We pay knowledge workers more because of this fact, which is matched in a capitalist system, which, need I remind you, is the single greatest contributor to the increasing of living standards in the world, something that is unmatched by any other system. You may have issues with it, but the facts are as they are.
> capitalist system, which, need I remind you, is the single greatest contributor to the increasing of living standards in the world
I reject this conclusion. The single greatest contributor is technology, which advances with or without capitalism. We can tell because the USSR had increasing standards of living too, because they too had technological advancements. In some areas, more advanced than the west.
It's merely a coincidence that capitalism was the vessel. Any somewhat reasonable economic system will do. Certainly, the areas today with the highest quality of life are qusai-socialist - and the capitalist nations, like the US, are left to the bottom of the barrel of the developed world. In spite of her massive wealth.
The simple reality is that inventions become less and less valuable as time goes on. The problems become smaller and smaller, less and less important, because we necessarily solved the biggest ones first.
A new medicine is remarkable yes, but nothing in the face of aseptic technique. A new phone is neat sure, but nothing in the face of the original global network, the telephony network.
Jumping from A to B is much greater than D to F and so on, because innovations build on the previous. It's a pyramid of humanity. If you take out the lowest levels though, it crumbles.
Without sanitation, food service, agriculture, you cannot have innovation. Ultimately everyone like you or I could die and that would be a blip. If every agriculturalist dies, then humanity is no more. To me, that is indicative of value - value in terms of service to humanity.
This problem will grow with time because not everyone can be knowledge workers. Not everyone can get a college degree just to be paid 20 bucks an hour. Our jobs are going to higher and higher levels of abstraction, but they're leaving people behind.
We've solved it as much as we can. We educate everyone now; we provide college assistance too. Suddenly most people can read and write, and we took it 1,000 steps further than that. But people as a whole are limited.
When the average person can no longer work the average job, the economy will collapse in on itself. Sure, we can automate and then provide new jobs. We don't know what to do if people cannot work those new jobs. Everything is based on people, like you and me, buying. If we cannot buy, if the average laborer cannot buy, nothing else matters. And it comes down like a house of cards.
Sorry, no. I know of many people who have suffered due to not having enough to eat under the communist regimes of the USSR and Maoist China, while places like West Germany, Japan, South Korea, and the US were thriving as usual. If you do not have personal experiences with these areas or the people in them, please do not act as if you do, because the statistics and personal experiences tell a different story. It is not simply technology but the distribution of technology, something that should've been done in a communist society, ironically.
> The simple reality is that inventions become less and less valuable as time goes on.
Again, I am simply unsure of where you came to this conclusion. Solving something like cancer is simply much more monumental than anything that came before. Knowledge work is obviously instrumental to understanding how such a disease works and spreads.
> When the average person can no longer work the average job, the economy will collapse in on itself
What a strange comment. It's as if you assume that the average person has some set of knowledge (and a corresponding upper threshold of knowledge that cannot be surpassed) whereas the opposite is true; we teach 8th graders advanced calculus concepts where it took Newton decades to understand. If anything, the limit (if it indeed exists within our normal belief of the future) is quite high.
I do, and of course there was suffering. I think you're taking me for a commie, that's not the case.
> Solving something like cancer is simply much more monumental than anything that came before
Um... no. No it's not.
It just seems that way now because we solved so much. If you go back 500 years and ask them what they need solved, they wouldn't say cancer.
This is actually evidence of my point. As time goes on, our problems become smaller, so thing appear bigger. Cancer appears now as HUGE deal, but historically people dealt with things like infant mortality - where HALF of all infants died. Could you even imagine that in the context of modern life?
We fixed that with aseptic technique and vit K. Now, because we did that, we have the opportunity to focus on problems like cancer, which wasn't even something we cared enough to look at in the past.
It's to the point where we're so far removed from fundamental flaws of humanity, they are literally unthinkable, unimaginable. You cannot even conceptualize them. Our own understanding of death has changed since we've eliminated so much death.
> What a strange comment. It's as if you assume that the average person has some set of knowledge
Incorrect, and if you noticed my paragraph above this, I don't know how you concluded that.
It's not a matter of knowledge, knowledge is infinite. It's a matter of aptitude or potential, and that is not infinite. We can teach everyone everything, but it won't stick, because not everyone can learn everything.
> If anything, the limit ... is quite high.
I disgaree, we're already reaching the limit with our current knowledge and technology.
In the past two decades, kids were forced essentially to go to college. However, some could not do it, and now they are subject to a life of menial jobs with poverty pay. This is in contrast to the prior generation, where high school grads could get decent jobs.
It's to a point where college grads, with bachelor's degrees, are now making 20 dollars an hour out of college (depends on the degree). Better than high school grads making 12, but not by much.
Masters will be the next bachelors in the next 10 years, probably sooner. The end result is large chunks of people being assigned to poverty. The newer advice for them is to simply turn to trades - I'm sure you've heard this. The idea being trading off your physical health for being able to perform a job that both pays okay and fits their level of aptitude.
This should be obvious to you. Truthfully, I don't know how you don't see it. Maybe it's just because I'm Gen Z so I got slapped in the face with this since birth. But every single day it was pounded into our heads we NEED to go to college or we will fail at life.
This WAS NOT the case of the prior generations. I am extremely lucky to have the ability to perform okay in college. If I was born, say, 20 years later it's likely I would not have the ability. If someone like my mother, bless her heart, was born today she would not make even a quarter what she makes now.
But, I know many people who did not or could not go to college. Some went anyway and got 'easy' degrees. Despite being educated, they are now making close to nothing. Some are now getting masters, because that's the only way to make money. And some didn't go and are now flipping burgers because that's all that's out there.
Sure, that's all well and good, but the amount of suffering caused by that versus cancer is not comparable.
> kids were forced essentially to go to college. However, some could not do it, and now they are subject to a life of menial jobs with poverty pay. This is in contrast to the prior generation, where high school grads could get decent jobs.
You should read Capital in the 21st Century. The conclusion is that the postwar period was a unique point of time where the US was not affected by destruction but could use the proceeds of the Marshall Plan to have cheap education and wealthy citizenry, something that has not been replicated prior or since. In reality, this was short lived and now we are living in an era where we must toil to survive, as we used to. That our close ancestors did not have to do so is not a conclusion about them, but about a conclusion about the wider socioeconomic climate. So many people take the post war period of their parents and grandparents are gospel. Those times were never to persist in reality.
> I disgaree, we're already reaching the limit with our current knowledge and technology.
In you current jobs? Sure, perhaps, but not in actuality of knowledge about the world and universe.
> Maybe it's just because I'm Gen Z so I got slapped in the face with this since birth. But every single day it was pounded into our heads we NEED to go to college or we will fail at life.
Ah, there is the rub. I take heart in your toil but again, you are not special. No human has been in the history of mankind. There have always been trials and tribulations to consider. If you disagree with me, so be it, but the truth does not change, just as it has not changed with me.
> Some went anyway and got 'easy' degrees. Despite being educated, they are now making close to nothing. Some are now getting masters, because that's the only way to make money. And some didn't go and are now flipping burgers because that's all that's out there.
I mean, yes, this has been repeated ad nauseum. The joke about underwater basketweaving has apparently been active since the '50s [0]. You are blaming the wrong people for this, and to be honest, I am not sure who you should blame, because as Piketty says, it is an emergent problem in the field.
You're correct - the amount of death we deal with now is so much less it's not even comparable. I'm not comparing an abstract here like "suffering" - although, if I wanted to, it would be easy to argue that has also gone down.
It's truly undebatable that less people die now.
> it is an emergent problem in the field
Correct, it's a simple consequence of our economic systems that we haven't solved. It's a fundamental flaw. In order to survive, you must work. What happens to those who cannot work? We have put bandaid after bandaid, but the fundamental problem remains.
I get the feeling you don't see this as a real problem because nobody is causing it directly. But it is real. It's real right now, and it's been getting progressively worse and nobody knows what to do.
If 10% of people cannot earn a college degree, what happens to them? This isn't a hypothetical. As time goes on, those people are reserved to a life of poverty. 50 years ago, they would be just fine, there was plenty of labor jobs that paid well.
Now peer 50 years into the future. 30% cannot get a master's degree or some hypothetical equivalent benchmark. And so 30% live in poverty? And now 100 years into the future. 70% cannot earn a phd or some hypothetical equivalent benchmark. And...? Our economy? They cannot buy. What happens then?
> There have always been trials and tribulations to consider
You're not thinking logically here. Humans have a limit, we all fall somewhere on a bell curve. If we push the jobs up and up and up the bell curve, as we have, we reach a tipping point!
If we automate any more than we currently have, I fear we won't have jobs left that people can do. Even you, too, have a limit. You are not the smartest human alive I take it. Prepose you must be in order to work. What will you do?
Sure, we can look at something like automatic phone directories replacing secretaries and say "well they can skill up and get a different job". What happens when AI replaces the entire bottom half of knowledge jobs? Can those people "skill up"? They barely passed school to be an accountant and now that job is automated, they're already at their limit. Or, at least, some of them are.
What if YOUR own job is automated? What will YOU do? What if the only way to progress is to be a top 10% engineer? Well, are you? If not, will you ever be? It's possible the answer is no, and you're just fucked. There's no other way to put it, a large amount of people are just fucked. Until the majority is fucked, and then the system implodes on itself because the bold assumptions it made can no longer be fulfilled.
No work, no capitalism, no economy, no humanity. We've gotten very lucky that initial assumption has held true. I don't believe it will hold true forever.
I am comparing suffering, not death. Death is not necessarily suffering.
> You're not thinking logically here. Humans have a limit, we all fall somewhere on a bell curve. If we push the jobs up and up and up the bell curve, as we have, we reach a tipping point!
> If we automate any more than we currently have, I fear we won't have jobs left that people can do. Even you, too, have a limit. You are not the smartest human alive I take it. Prepose you must be in order to work. What will you do?
You are still thinking that the amount of "knowledge" or "skill" that a human can hold is fixed, which is simply wrong. If you still believe that, then there really is nothing I can say that would disabuse you of this notion, in spite of the evidence to the contrary that the millennia of progress by, yes, humans, have led to more humans educated than ever. Why must there be a limit to the "jobs left that humans can do?" Please seriously ponder this question as to why, as it has not happened before in human history when other advances came.
I can tell by this conversation that you're very young, that you seem to see things in terms of black and white, yes and no, and I promise you, I have seen the same way years ago, but it is simply not reality. There are more shades of gray in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
I don't think it is, or maybe we're thinking of this differently.
The quantity of knowledge is not fixed, it's infinite. The kind of knowledge IS fixed - this is your potential. I can learn to read, and to write, and to engineer. But I can't learn how to make a quantum computer, I simply don't have that potential.
But that's me. It varies from person to person, along a bell curve in my mind.
> Please seriously ponder this question as to why, as it has not happened before in human history when other advances came
Because the average potential is relatively high, and we already got the low hanging fruit out of the way.
For the vast, vast majority of human history, the average person could not read or write - they didn't need to. Eventually they did, but IMO the average human definitely has the potential to read and write, and I was proven right by that.
Some humans did not. We may consider them disabled. And yes, they were fucked and are fucked. I mentioned bandaids earlier, we provide help to these people. But the underlying problem exists, those that cannot read or write pretty much can't work any job, so they're fucked. 100 years ago they could be fine.
When other advancements came, we pushed human jobs up the bell curve of potential, and it was fine because there was SO much potential left.
But do you, honestly, think the average person can be an astrophysicist? If you answer no, as I would, then clearly there is a tipping point. We're not there yet, the average person does not need to be an astrophysicist. But they do need to graduate college, and some percentage of people can't, and they're simply fucked in our current society.
Of course. The difference is the level of education. Otherwise, do you really believe that those, all across the world, become astrophysicists? Everyone has the capacity to change, grow, and become more than they once were.
I know this applies to other people too because I've personally met people who can't read and never will. I've met people who couldn't graduate high school, and not from a lack of trying, and everyone in between. Based on that, and my own limits, I'm concluding there are limits to how "smart" someone can get and it varies. For me personally, I felt as though if I continued my education higher I would really be pushing it.
Perhaps you should speak for yourself then. It is not useful to extrapolate your experiences onto everyone else as it's comparable to someone with an IQ of 50 thinking everyone else is the same, not realizing that others might be much more intelligent than them. I simply do not agree that we have reached anywhere near the limit of human potential yet, as evidences by thousands of years of adaptation of work in the face of new technology that hunter gatherers could not have dreamed of, yet we are anatomically identical to them. To think that only today are we reaching the limits is a prime example of recency bias; it was famously said that in the early 1900s that everything that could've been invented had already been.
I feel I don't need to speak for myself when I say something so obvious as "not everyone can be an astrophysicist"
Rather, perhaps you should think more reasonably of yourself? I admire the confidence to believe you can truly do anything, but I'm definitely more confident in saying, no, you can't.
For the vast, vast, VAST majority of human history you could live simply by performing labor. This is no longer the case in modern societies.
Only KNOWLEDGE jobs now provide, IMO, an adequate income.
We have ALREADY left a lot of people behind. People who cannot read, or write, are completely fucked.
We are LUCKY that most people are able to read and write. As time goes on and this trend continues and we continue to cut off the bottom X% of jobs, what happens to those people?
Imagine a hypothetical secretary. This is all she is capable of doing, and she barely passed high school, and not from a lack of trying. Her job is then automated.
What does she do? This isn't a hypothetical question - spell it out for me. There are no jobs below her. What does she do?
To expand further, assuming some automate X removes the bottom Y percent of jobs, the lowest hanging of fruit, that means the jobs left MUST BE > Y. If someone can only do up to Y, then they cannot work a job. As Y approaches infinity, nobody on planet Earth will be able to work.
You're able to work right now because you happen to be smart enough to perform the average jobs available. When some automation, AI or not, doesn't matter, eliminates the bottom 90% of knowledge jobs, only the top 10% will be left. You will not be able to work one of those jobs, because you aren't working one right now and I'm assuming you've already pushed your brain to its limits. If you haven't, you're leaving money on the table, and you should be a rocket scientist.
It has nothing to do with automation here, it's actually everyone's fault here in starting a race to the bottom. Personally I'd rather do a lottery after basic competence but that's more of a regulation issue.
If SWE were to fully automated, I'd be busy running my own startup to implement all the ideas in my head. I think many also would. As a result, there would a boom of startups and an increase of job demand for lawyers, IBs or accountants. That's the thing with automation, as it improves the cost of running a business should decrease proportionally that everyone could eventually transition to the capitalist class themselves. Those who aren't would be working lucrative jobs.
This doesn't work, we go right back to "economy imploding"
The capital class only exists because it can harvest the resources of the non-capital class. If everyone is in the capital class, that means there's no extraction, nobody is buying. House of cards falls down.
We can make it work, don't get me wrong. But not in our current economic system, we would need something novel. And that's really my entire point here.