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Comment by svantana | Hacker News Reader

I think about this a lot. I think it has most to do with that people don't only care about absolute wealth, but also relative wealth - keeping up with the joneses, if you will. As long as social status is connected to wealth, this will be a problem.

Personally I advocate a gradual decrease in allowed work hours - 10 minutes shorter work day every year, or so. Although France has tried this and it doesn't really seem to work.

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You can live cheaply, by opting out of the rat race. Though you do need to be pretty resourceful. e.g. http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programmi... It's just that most people don't want to, we are social animals and mostly define ourselves relative to the herd.

A very different application of automation to the relative-wealth issue: http://partiallyclips.com/2003/09/25/dome-house/

And sometimes, the herd tells the individual what to do.

I think you could compare this to sports or other game-like activities where success is by nature relative. There's no 'need' per se for athletes to practice 40 hours a week, but they do it in order to win. And the amount of time needed to win will almost always be right around the theoretical limit of how much a human can physically practice. There's an equilibrium in competitive practice that is very tough to regulate.

I think 10 min/day/year is too quick of a timeline. Perhaps 20 minutes a week per year would do. In 12 years we're down 4 hours. In 60, we're down to half what we are now, which is about where we should be, IMO, and is a long enough time to get excessive automation in place.

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