What happens when no one needs to work? | Hacker News Reader

What happens when no one needs to work?

marshalljonesjr.com

9 pointsmarvin10 comments

Not sure whether to consider this a mental exercise or if this author is serious in his assumptions.

If he is serious, the author seems to have forgotten about all of the jobs that cannot be automated. Book writing, art, entertainment, inspirational speaking, posting funny cat pictures and original memes to the internet, innovation and clever software development, music and musicians, and more. Prostitution, legal services, etc.

Even if all of these were to somehow be automated people would still need each other. Service industries are also important.

Could you imagine living in a reality where every job is done by a machine but because there is only one person running the show there is no one around to support or improve on the code? None of society would move forward. We'd be running on legacy architecture and legacy ideas. And then what would the point of living be? Likely we'd see a whole lot of anomie and disassociation. What would be the point of learning if there were no purpose in applying it?

The "logic" fails when the author assumes that society in the future will be an "either/or" instead of the spectrum of human experience and automation that it always has been and always will be. We are nothing without machines, and they are nothing without us. They need us to reproduce them and improve them, and we need them to help us to maintain homeostasis with our environment. It is a symbiotic situation, not one of bleak and utopian/dsytopian absolutism.

Machines will eventually be able to do everything you mentioned including improving its own code.

I would like to fill in some gaps that's not addressed by the OP: 1. The object of a humane society is friction-less living whereby everybody's basic needs (food, shelter, safety) are met without having to "work" because robots have automated everything. 2. In this future, the energy required for automation is fully sustainable and automated meaning creation of energy is self-sustaining from origination (solar, nuclear) to distribution to maintenance without requiring human input. 3. The final assumption is that mankind has lost interest in war and conflict - religions and ideologies co-exist without being "personal" to the degree that advocates turn to violence as a persuasive measure.

We'll create a virtual reality to live in. Probably will simulate the 21st century. The machines will feed us intravenously and will be powered by the energy we put off. Now the question you have to ask yourself is, how do you know this hasn't already happened?

On a more serious note, we're already paying people to live who aren't working. Its called welfare. As time goes along, I suspect we'll have growing numbers of people on welfare while your average job becomes increasingly technical. If people on welfare were to become more motivated as a whole to learn these technical jobs, it would probably speed up the process to get to the point the author describes.

Your second paragraph mirrors my thoughts. As I've said before, Norway de facto has a system like this already. People who are for some reason unable to work (usually due to low skills or illness) get an allowance from the government which is just enough to live a comfortable life. We are able to pay out this kind of welfare since the petroleum industry is very lucrative at the moment.

People who are jobless due to low skills are paid to receive more training, and payment is only made if the person enrolls in some kind of education program. People who are jobless due to long-term illness get a more or less permanent monthly payment.

A system like this is probably what we'll end up with, where the richest are taxed hard enough to make it work. There are doubtless lots of challenges associated with this, but it is the only workable system I can see to make sure that people don't starve even as we have the richest society in human history.

I think we're already there to some extent. We need less people to keep everyone alive than there are people alive.

So far this has lead to oodles of unemployed and unemployable people rotting in social housing.

I think the whole thing needs looking at.

Automation of everything will enslave us as much as not automating it. We need a healthy balance, even if it does invoke smashing a few looms.

Insert comment about how Marx and Lenin got the right idea...

What happens when a minority of people still need to do unautomatable jobs in order everyone else to prosper?

Current situation seems to be this: hand a white collar to everyone but a few (and they don't get to do anything meaningful), pay them allowance. Force everyone else (a minority) to take a job where they are overworked for a considerably smaller pay.

I'm sceptical on whether we can make workless society work.

See: "Jobless recoveries and the disappearance of routine occupations "[1] It's going to be tough getting there.

[1] http://www.voxeu.org/article/jobless-recoveries-and-disappea...

Credit to manaskarekar for tracking down this link. I've posted it since I would love to see HN's opinions and thoughts about the long-term implications of rapid technological progress.

And how the market exists if nobody have the money to buy food and drink?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com