The comment I was replying to was premised on most of our work being essentially meaningless in the grander scheme of things. That’s false. You can’t eat if you don’t have UBI or a job.
Definition of work and productivity is arbitrary. You can think of these people taking the monthly UBI, shopping for groceries and eating it as meaningful work in quest for continuation of human race. I wouldn't see that as completely zero value add.
As long as others work more than basic subsistence we'll be fine.
Labor used to be directly related to our ability to feed ourselves (when everyone was a farmer / hunter gatherer). No work = no eat.
Nowadays, we have more productivity as a species if we do specific labor instead in order to feed ourselves, but the premise is the same. No work = no eat (at least until you have enough savings/investments to afford not to work). At least until theoretically automation takes all of the jobs.
Any job that matters is meaningful. But that still leaves many working a bullshit job. That's no fun. As for people who aren't capable of becoming artists or scientists, which I think would be a small % of people, well I hope they have UBI and can live happily.
It is the false premise that employment in a capitalist system exists to provide meaning or value through work, that work is noble or carries some implicit moral weight or dignity of purpose.
Work exists to allow you to enrich the capital ownership class, of which you are likely not a part (if you were, you wouldn't need to work to eat.) That's it.
Work has a lot of satisfying features above and beyond simply keeping people busy. Creating value for yourself and others is what’s fulfilling.
A lot of people take pride in the fact that they pull their own weight: that their ability to provide for themselves and their families comes from their own work. You can still do work with UBI, but if you don’t need to, you don’t necessarily derive the same sense of accomplishment.
This is a problem even for people on disability, many of whom could do at least some work, but can’t work as much or as reliably as they’d need to replace their disability benefits.
Upper-middle-class folks seem to think that work is rewarding to everyone for the same reasons that upper-middle-class work is rewarding to them: some combination of status and enjoying the work itself. And upper-middle-class people can easily imagine sources of those rewards that don’t entail employment. The problem is that you can’t fulfill everyone with status and enjoyment because status is a zero-sum game and not all work is enjoyable.
There's something deeply fulfilling and honorable and worthy of pride in doing work, like farming, that is completely diminished if the work turns out to be completely unnecessary. Unnecessary farming is basically just gardening. Someone whose sense of worth and meaning and purpose in life comes from feeding their communities won't be satisfied with a world where their communities are just as well fed with or without them and they're just gardening.
I am bothered as-well by the "Eat, sleep, code, repeat" phrase. We must not make things complicated just to create work. Work should lead to freedom. I understand it is scary when a work is no longer relevant. But this is not a technological problem, it is a political problem.
BTW, I think Universal Base Salary is a great answer to the speed at which work gets irrelevant. UBI gives exactly the confidence to evaluate work without pressure and bias, which I believe leads to even greater freedom and productivity.
Except most people don't do higher-valued labor, we mainly do completely pointless busy work either because someone somewhere thinks there is a chance they can extract a large amount of wealth from having that pointless busy work be done (every tech company on the planet) or because a government has taken money from everyone else and given it to people to do pointless busy work so we can say "unemployment is only X%". Nobody would pay the millions of useless bureaucrats if they had a choice, they only get paid because the government takes money from everyone else at gunpoint to give to those bureaucrats.
More to the point, I think you are incorrect about the standard of living impact. 150 years ago almost everyone could eat safe, healthy food. Now access to safe, healthy food is incredibly limited, in many cases impossible to obtain without growing/raising it yourself. We've traded our health and happiness for pointless gadgets, that's not an unambiguous improvement in standard of living. With the knowledge and technology we have now, families could easily provide 80+% of their own food with almost no work (and I mean what we have now, no need for robots of the future). Instead of having a tiny number of farm jobs providing massive amounts of garbage "food", we should have a huge number of tiny "farm jobs" producing good food in people's backyards.
Why does the thing from which we derive meaning have to be a job? Why can't UBI recipients create art, have hobbies, meaningfully interact with their community during their day? Our ancestors didn't sit around - they did all those things, too, and those things also gave them structure and meaning.
I am obviously making an extreme reasoning there. It is just to illustrate the absurdity of the notion that unemployed people should starve because otherwise no one would work to produce food.
Society is designed in a way where non-working people are shamed and considered parasites and anomalies. If we want to transition to a non-working society, this has to change, or the fear of losing one job's to a machine will stall automation.
We have subway drivers despite the tech to automate this job has existed since the 1960s.
we're so sophisticated now that we abstract the idea of work away from the idea of making a living (as in being able to be alive, as opposed to dead) and come up with concepts like UBI where we can simply not work, without realizing that not working correlates with not living.
work is not some thing apart from ourselves. work is not something apart from play or recreation or relaxation or any such things. we move and create and change and destroy all the same. we value these things as part of our social fabric of keeping a community of us humans alive. money lets us abstract away the need to trade immediate goods for that purpose, but it also lets us abstract out the fairness of it all. those who seem to contribute more to the general welfare might deserve a little more in return, whether it be in goods or esteem or respect. but we're all expected to put in along with taking out.
UBI would tear up that implicit social contract and unmoor us from our democratic underpinnings. while well-intended, UBI suffers from the same idealism as libertarianism by failing to grasp even a basic modicum of the human condition.
despite automation, people will create ways to make a living. lives are literally depending on it. that's not to advocate long-term suffering, but our social responsibility should be focused on using our natural craftiness to help others help themselves (and leveling the playing field), not providing handouts.
I'm not sure that this widespread assumption on HN that most people would continue their education or pursue interesting hobbies if they had sufficient income to not work is correct. Most people would sit around the house, get high and watch the tube.
Work provides much more than the goods produced and services rendered. For many or most, it also provides a sense of identity and purpose and well-being. When there's no work available, a lot of that is replaced with negative behaviors, not some noble pursuit of improving humanity.
The unhappiness seen in low income neighborhoods isn't solely due to lack of resources. Hell, a lot of times in the U.S. people on welfare are materially better off than farmers who eked out a living during the Depression. What's at least as destructive is the sense that there's no purpose in life.
The bright future of AI, robotics, and automation providing a robust supply of material wealth, combined with UBI, will be millions of people sitting stoned or drunk in front of the tv while their children entertain themselves by hacking robot-driven trucks to make them crash into each other.
So how about we force people to dig holes and then fill them up again, in order to get their UBI?
Giving people pointless bullshit jobs for its own sake sounds like insanity to me. Yes being able to live without working will pose a challenge to humanity, but it's a challenge we should face. The alternative is mandating that people do something even if it is really useless or impedes a more efficient system because we don't trust their ability to figure out how to live well on their own.
It was a pretty weak comment that didn't address the point. The first humans certainly spent a lot of time working to get food and shelter, and stayed awake worrying about not getting enough to eat.
"Society" didn't enslave us with jobs, we already had them.
We can not remove the need to work, because there will always be a need to eat, and to be able to eat, you need to work because nobody will feed you voluntarily.
If somebody else has to work so you can eat without working, thats theft and your victims will try to kill you to stop you taking the products of their labor.
If the only reason for your job is to make money to feed yourself and your family - then isn't that important in and of itself? Because if you and many like you are all doing this, then you are benefiting society in a very direct way - one family at a time. I think it would be hard to eliminated these jobs, without any alternative (e.g. UBI or a completely different system altogether. Note: not directly arguing for another system myself here).
It's a bit more complicated, and the facile 'luddite' retort doesn't help.
Humans need something to do. In times immemorial, something to do entails running around the savanna looking for edible scraps, collecting them, bringing them home and raising the next generation to repeat the process. A perfect machine that produces and delivers edible scraps with zero human effort required leaves actual humans with nothing to do. Having nothing to do is spiritually unsustainable. There is so much leisure or travel. There is so much make-believe work. After a while though, people will need something meaningful to do, something that undeniably pushes the inexorable wall of unbeing a bit further.
This is exacerbated by social effects. We confer value to other people by their ability to provide meaningful work. Assuming a perfect machine that does all the meaningful work, there is zero reason to confer value to any other human being. This is a recipe for disaster, and will hit us much sooner than the angst of nothing to do.
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