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Comment by alenox | Hacker News Reader

Something about this article reminds me of a post-scarcity future star trek paradise where everyone works on whatever gives them joy. At Valve, your basic needs are taken care of (a paycheck, healthcare, etc), and you produce the things you love to produce. If this works on the level of a firm, would it work on the level of a whole society?

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> If this works on the level of a firm, would it work on the level of a whole society?

Well, while Valve employees work the the things they want and like, they have been carefully selected to want and like the same thing as Valve. "Society" doesn't have a very hard hiring process designed to only allow high-quality individuals in, at the expense of a high rate of false negatives, and if a society had the same access to "fire" it's members, even Iran would think it was a bit over the top.

As it stands right now, society doesn't value certain kinds of output from people. In a scenario where scarcity is no longer a problem for basic human needs, the idea of having valuable kinds of output isn't so important any more. Valve still exists in a world where it needs to accumulate money in order to keep operating and producing software, so it does have a need to filter its hires based on certain metrics.

How about the Star Trek: TNG episode with the game that directly accessed the pleasure centers of the brain, and everyone quickly became addicted to throwing little virtual chips into little virtual holes...except for Wil Wheaton!

I bet that episode is ripe with animated gif fodder. They always got that weird self-satisfied look on their face when they were playing.

I hope someone creates a version of that game for Google Glass. Or a Glass parody video acting out similar poses.

Don't forget his love interest, played by Ashley Judd, who also resisted the game: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/The_Game_%28episode%29

This is essentially the liberal wet dream. The main philosophical difference between classical liberals (libertarians) and today's liberals is largely a question of practicality. This is also why libertarians tend to see themselves as lone heroic dreamers while liberals tend to see themselves as working in the dirt to make the garden grow.

If this works on the level of a firm, would it work on the level of a whole society?

If you can find enough people that take joy in working in your post-scarcity sewers, yes.

Alternatively find some people who take joy in building robots to deal with the sewers and other joyless tasks. (Or some people who take joy in building robots that build robots that deal with such things.)

You missed another interesting option. Have robots (or pharmacology) which can reversibly alter a person's joy module(s) so as to take joy in dealing with sewers (or making/managing robots to do the same), and people who are fine with having the robots teak their joy-production neurons for a suitable duration of time.

I am sure this is everyone's ideal job, but I do think that there are many people that simply just _don't want to work_. In the case of Valve (and software development), I think creative juices tend to flow more easier and creates a harmonious vibe that you don't always find with other professions.

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