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Comment by nick_urban | Hacker News Reader

“At the moment, mobility is crushing the soul: Don’t speed, don’t drink, don’t text. [...] What inspires me... is giving back people their lifestyles, so they can do what they want to do: texting, vegging out, drinking.”

Texting, vegging out, and drinking: truly the heights to which the soul would soar if not crushed by the villain of driving.

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> Texting, vegging out, and drinking: truly the heights to which the soul would soar if not crushed by the villain of driving.

How about, "Providing efficiencies that would allow us to reduce the work week from 5 days to 4, thereby providing more time for people to actually live their lives"?

Whenever another self driving car or truck article hits hacker news, I cringe at the inevitable post from someone who says "Ahh! Now they can code why the vehicle drives itself! They can be even more productive!"

That is not what life is about. To you, it might be, but the purpose of life is not work. Work is simply a means of supporting yourself while you experience life.

I can't speak for everybody, but I enjoy my work and would do something very similar even if I didn't need the money.

I don't view the opportunity cost of my morning commute in terms of the time I lose at home before work. I view it as lost time I would rather spend at work doing what I love.

I don't fault you for enjoying what you do, but most people don't; therefore, we shouldn't create economic policy around the idea that people do enjoy work. People enjoy fulfillment; whether that is tied to a "job" or whatever we're going to call it in 10-50 years as labor gets automated away, that's an entirely other matter.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2013/10...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/10/10/unhappy-em...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/opinion/sunday/why-you-hat...

http://www.gallup.com/poll/165269/worldwide-employees-engage...

>Work is simply a means of supporting yourself while you experience life.

you can have reasonable experience of life only until you're not that far down from the middle (like whether salary is bad or good is defined not by absolute number, instead it is defined by the relation to other salaries in that region, etc...) Everybody running up toward and beyond the middle move the middle up. So, if people can additionally work while cars are driving themselves - they would as anybody who wouldn't would thus be sliding down farther from the middle and thus slipping into less than "average" life experience.

We are getting off topic but I agree advances today are a massive opportunity to introduce a standard 4 day week. I feel this is much more short term achievable social advance than the often mentioned basic income. I've had this discussion a few times and the majority of people say a 4 day week is impossible/unrealistic. I enjoy pointing out ~80 years ago we had a 6 day work week and people were saying all the same excuses why we couldn't do a 5 day week. And given for most of us corporate types, the work day is typically going far beyond the 9-5 hours of a traditional day. Now our 40 hour week is easily covered in the 4 days.

On a more personal note I'm wondering if your European. I find most Americans are very work obsessed. The idea life is for living and a job is a means to fund that is very foreign. I've found generally withing the first 10 minutes of conversation with someone from the states Ive not met before, they will say this phrase: "I love my job". I'm Australian and while we are heading toward the US view we have a history of life is for living and I'd hate to see that go.

> On a more personal note I'm wondering if your European. I find most Americans are very work obsessed. The idea life is for living and a job is a means to fund that is very foreign. I've found generally withing the first 10 minutes of conversation with someone from the states Ive not met before, they will say this phrase: "I love my job". I'm Australian and while we are heading toward the US view we have a history of life is for living and I'd hate to see that go.

I'm American. I see my job as a means to an end; its not my purpose for being. My view has definitely shifted my view on this from my 20s into my 30s (My job previously made up a significant part of my identity; those days are long past now). I'm only 32, but I feel lucky to have shifted so early in life, so as to not waste the rest of it.

This isn't to say I enjoy my job. I do. But its only a part of my life.

There was and still is a very big push in the States to find your life's fulfillment in your work first. Its very ingrained into our culture these days. I think it stems from the old cliche "if you love your job, you'll never work a day in your life".

Doing work that you hate is maybe not frowned upon, but if you have that sentiment people will strongly advise you to switch career paths to something that you would find more fulfillment in.

From the "I love my job" I get the feeling it's almost a career obligation to have this view. The view good employees think like this and you're no good at your job if you aren't passionate.

There's some additional challenges society would face today with one less standard work day, namely the unavailability of a lot of services for one extra day.

I agree we're making society massively more efficient but there are still issues that haven't been fixed. For example, the need for some services which aren't available 24/7 online and become swamped on the Monday.

You often see this with embassies, actually. I've lived in several countries and going to the embassy, even for routine things, is often something I have to plan up to months in advance because of their 3 day work week.

This would be a huge problem for any regular business and they'd be bankrupt in less time than it takes to run a pitch drop experiment, but the needs of the people who seek embassies don't actually go away, keeping the queue reliably more full than can ever be handled. The Central Bureaucracy building from Futurama [1] sums up the situation very nicely.

I absolutely think a 4-day work week is possible; long term, even a lot less. But the model of "everybody works full time, services become unavailable outside of office hours" needs to be phased out first.

[1] http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/en.futurama/images/e/e4/...

Your issue with the Embassy is not that they work only 3 days a week (they likely keep themselves busy 5 days like everybody else).

Even in 'socialist' europe with its harsh enforcement of 5 day weeks you can typically go shopping on at least 6 days a week. You can also shop for more than 8 hours every day despite 8 hour shifts. That's just a simple scheduling puzzle, and (the much harder issue) of sharing the gains in profit that come from increased productivity.

By the way, the Jetsons TV show envisioned a 3 times 3 hours work week (with enough income to feed a family of 4 and even have a robotic maid). In the 60s. I happily forfeit my right to flying cars or jetpacks in favor of that.

Start a company and only have your employees work 4 days a week. Some companies do 4 ten hour days.

https://thoughtbot.com/jobs

TeamTreeHouse is even better - a 30 hour workweek. http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/work-less

To be fair, driving is a huge pain in the ass. I love commuting by train, because I can read a book or take a nap instead of having to watch the road.

So true. Driving can also be aggravating and frustrating, and at least in the Bay, you have to be at least a little aggressive to get into traffic / turn out / not have other people hate you and honk. If a car could do that for me but still give me control when I wanted it (on the rare occasion I'm driving for pleasure), I'd say "shut up and take my money" in a hurry. It'd also be nice to be able to take a train or bus to work, but the bus doesn't go where I need and it's slower than riding a bicycle for my commute.

People in the Bay Area have such an adverse reaction to honking. They tend to freak out or drive erratically if honked at even if they deserve it. (Don't hit me!)

Okay, how about reading a book? Writing something? Talking (gasp, how old fashioned) to people?

Or, even better, just not getting on the road right now because the self-driving cars are trying to reduce congestion.

>the self-driving cars are trying to reduce congestion.

congestion reduction is such a goal only because people are wasting time in traffic :). If cars are empty or people inside are engaged in a dopaminergic activity (working, texting, having sex, etc...) it will become less of an issue. Especially with electric cars as idling of the engine becomes non-issue. Add to that that currently amount of time my car on the road is limited by my time (and thus i plan/optimize when/where to go, like getting into store on the way from work, etc...), the self-driving car can go to store for pickup or deliver some papers, etc... while i'm doing something else. I.e. the total sum of time of me getting quickly home from work and the car going to store on its own will be larger than one optimized trip - i.e. my time in the car would be lesser while car's time on the road would be higher if everything else was equal. Though it willn't be and thus- i'm looking forward for many productive hours stuck in "smart & autonomous" traffic trying to get home as quickly as possible and sending the car on whatever errands before and after - hope it will enjoy being stuck in traffic among the sames.

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