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Comment by jdimov | Hacker News Reader

Your history is just as flawed as your understanding of work, value and progress (in other words, you've been brainwashed). "Hard work" has always been a domain reserved exclusively for the slaves. The "virtue" of hard work is just a shallow manipulation tactic devised by those in power. None of this has changed today. What IS changing, however, is that as knowledge becomes more readily available, fewer and fewer people are willing to buy into this crap. And that's good. Now, you may begin to worry about who is going to do all the work that slaves are doing today so you may continue to live comfortably. The correct answer, of course, is: machines.

(And btw., no, we're not where we are because of your grandparents' hard work. If your grandparents had anything to do with humanity's progress, it was ONLY through insight, not through hard work.)

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The "virtue" of hard work is just a shallow manipulation tactic devised by those in power.

How is this an argument against what ekianjo wrote? Yes, there has (almost?) always been a privileged upper class that had much more leisure than the masses. Still, the fact remains that living standards would have been lower had a majority of the population not worked their asses off.

Should the distribution of work be adjusted? Absolutely! In our current world, inequality is so high, and to a large extent unjustly high, that it's sickening. But there is still a whole lot of work that needs to be done to maintain our living standards.

- Should the distribution of work be adjusted? Absolutely!

In the modern world, I unequivocally agree with this statement.

But, I find this to be a fascinating question when applied to less recent periods throughout history. Would we be where we were today if the ancient Greeks didn't have a ruling class and a slave class? If the Europeans didn't have the same 1500 years later? It's largely been the working (I use this term quite loosely: consent is not implied) class that has enabled (a small number of) the leisure class to make the majority of societal and technological progress. How true is this today? I'm willing to bet those making technological and societal progress are now largely in the working class.

Sorry my comment is inconclusive; it's something I've been long meaning to investigate further.

I have asked similar questions myself in the past; I agree that it's a fascinating (and fascinatingly uncomfortable) topic. Like you, I don't have a conclusive answer.

What you consider in your comment echoes Bertrand Russell's famous essay In Praise of Idleness. Russell, however, goes farther and outright states that

>Leisure is essential to civilization [...]

http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

> Your history is just as flawed as your understanding of work, value and progress (in other words, you've been brainwashed). "Hard work" has always been a domain reserved exclusively for the slaves.

Haha, to wake up and see that is really entertaining. You're a guy who has made money in IT and you think everyone can live the same way as you. You don't realize you are living in a small bubble that does not apply to 99.9% of all other workers out there. You don't realize there is a whole working class below you who's working to make sure stuff gets cleaned, garbage gets collected, meals get cooked, tables are waited and so on ?

> The correct answer, of course, is: machines.

Amusing, again. There's just so much machines can do, and there are still many jobs where it's completely irrealistic to replace people by machines (mostly because the investment is not worth it). If you think otherwise, I'd recommend you go out and visit actual industries making stuff, not just IT related ones, and try to understand why most of them still employ people no matter how many machines they have.

Take a look at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SuGRgdJA_c.

We will see an increase in automation for jobs that we didn't expect to be so. The speed of this transformation depends on our creative and technical ability.

If you think that work defines you, read up about the Puritans in America. They had an extreme motto that 100% of your waking life must be allocated to work. You could say they are the only religious that had a fear that someone around them was having a good time.

> If you think that work defines you [...]

I don't, and I've never implied that.

> We will see an increase in automation for jobs that we didn't expect to be so.

We've seen increases in automation for hundreds of years, yet there was never a depletion of jobs for people. There's more jobs now that there has ever been before (not talking about short time scale here). Industry automation has led to the creation of the expansion of the Services industry. And there will still be tons of professions where you can't automate stuff - at best you can improve people's work using computing aids, make them work more efficiently, but at some point of the supply chain you still need human action. For the services industry, there's also the bias that most people want to deal with other people and not with computers, so automation will face cultural limits as well in some areas. I'm not worried.

Surely you can see the endgame here. Amazon employs 1/3 as many people per dollar of revenue as Walmart does. Imagine a world where Walmart automates itself to a level comparable to Amazon. Lo! Watch as 1,452,000 jobs melt away!

And that's just one company. Sure, it's the biggest one. Sure, they're probably jobs nobody would do given better alternatives. All the same, those are now 1,452,000 fewer people employed in a world replacing human capital with physical capital.

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