the article argues that work will no longer be economically necessary, and that we are capable of organizing ourselves into a community without the need to work for income.
but i disagree. even in the past those rich people had to maintain their wealth, so a lot of what they did was economically necessary.
so i don't think that the economics of work will go away. it will change, but not vanish.
there is a lot of work that should never be replaced by machines. raising children for example, but also caring for the sick, elderly and disabled. yes, some of it will be machine assisted. those will be machines that increase the independence of people. also art and entertainment, while it may use machines for assistance should remain firm in human hands. also government, laws, jurisprudence. science, research, tourism, etc...
much of it can be done machine assisted, but the human touch is not optional, and a good part of that work is still something that people may not want to do without some sort of reward.
today economic benefits are the reward for humans making an effort. in the past it may have been social status, but i don't think it is a good idea to go back to that. social status is what gives rise to prejudice and racism.
work will not go away. the economic necessity for everyone to work just to put food on the table, that may go away, but the need to motivate people to do work that machines can't do on their own will remain.
therefore what changes is the motivation. today people are motivated to study and work because they need an income. in a world where income is not strictly necessary society needs to make an effort to motivate the future generation to study and work on things we still need despite that.
money is the most egalitarian way to motivate people to do work that is hard but needs to be done. everything else brings us back to status and class, which is not what we want.
Interesting question. What is work? Is playing with your children work? Is talking to elderly people work? I think a lot of things we have outsourced to "professionals" is considered work now and was considered "just normal life" before.
to me work is anything that i am obligated to do, that i can't say no to even if i'd rather do something else. (and yes, doing housework and raising kids is work, and as a society we should treat it as such. that is, we should recognize that stay at home parents are actually working and should be rewarded for doing so. same goes for caring for other people)
Great stuff. I am really interested in reading some of the books mentioned.
Self involved political gossip that leads to a culture of policing deviant behavior is my worry. It is just hard for me to not see how this all doesn't create a huge bull market in law enforcement. More "crimes" from people having more leisure time, more "crimes" from more surveillance. Most of all though more "crimes" because a culture of policing deviant behavior will start to find more and more behavior as "deviant".
At least the salon had the pretense of high art and philosophy. Our salons would have the pretense of political gossip and the philosophy would be about classifications of deviant behavior.
This was posted a week ago and I'll just reiterate what I said there..
As an American why should I believe a word of this, when our country's Overton window ranges from "lip service" to "open contempt" for the unemployed? How can I feel confidence for my economic future when, in less than a decade, the frontier AI labs have abandoned any semblance of caution and are embracing a lobby for fewer guardrails? When "move fast, break things" is applied to the "mass cognition replacement machine"?
Filing this entire article under "I'll believe it when I fucking see it". The pollyannic nonsense is willfully ignorant and only serves to excuse more concentration of wealth and the mass theft of leverage from the average worker.
The point of the article isn't that we will have no need to work; that remains an open question. The body of the article is exploring previous societies or segments of society in which no one needed to have a job, and how they lived their lives, as a way of pondering what a post-work world would look like. It's not particular pollyannic in tone once you get past the opening paragraphs.
Well, the article seems mostly theoretical. One of the premises of the article is that the capital owners (who thus own the economy, and the political system, and the legal system and the law enforcement) will give the rest of the people enough to assuage economic anxieties.
It's not even clear that the AI data centers required to run all this will be economically viable in the long term. But again, the interesting part of the article comes after the discussion of any new kind of economy.
If the author wanted to write a purely historical essay she is more than welcome to. Instead she chose a framing device of a post-work society thanks to AI that I think undermines the whole article.
"Aristocrats are (typically) rich, which we certainly will be if we have robots capable of all normal nonrelational labor." ...okay
> When the machines can do everything else, our relationships will be what’s left.
I think I saw this posted already and I still didn't read all of it, but this was not really what I thought of when there's no external work needed
There's still a lot of things that can't be outsourced to machines, like exercise, or building one's mental capabilities
I'd also think this would enable more people to spend a lot more of their day in prayer like literal Christian monks as prayer is another thing than the machines cannot do
"The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe." - Douglas Adams
I like the article, but I'd say it has left out descriptions of those people who weren't in the social Matrices it described (either because they didn't want to be, like "one family who had moved out of the West End into an aging lower-middle-class town" or because they couldn't like those lower orders in "volunteer work is part of what separates them from the lower orders".
In fact I'd say that angst from this type of person (I consider myself one) is a good chunk vocalizing concerns about "a world without work". "Going your own way" is a large part of the American psyche, so what happens in a world where there is not work that needs to be done, which had been laying out straightforward paths for "your own way" ?
I'm personally not feeling too much of this angst, being both happy working on the kinds of physical things that aren't going to be automated away any time soon, and also having the engineering knowledge/skills to effectively use LLMs and benefit from the automation. But I'm also not looking so far into the future as to worry about those endeavors becoming trite.
The article does not really have any arguments. It ends on this:
> I’m not certain that that’s what we’re facing now. I said that I don’t like making sweeping statements about the relationship between technology and cultural change, and I meant it. If a more relational world is the most serious problem AI causes, I’ll certainly be relieved. Still, that doesn’t mean I’m looking forward to it. I like my job, and I like liberal individualism. If the former will one day be a casualty of progress, I hope the latter will survive it.
After it spends too many paragraphs making the author feel important by reciting a bunch of historical just-so's. Interesting trivia, but otherwise nothing to hold any points together. There are no points however, because it just moves from one scene to another.
This is not a depiction of "a world without work" and you can substitute the timelines of the years covered, with today, and nothing would change.
Thanks for the great article surprisetalk. Did you even bother reading it or do you just cross-post the drivel that asterisk publishes?
Reminds me of the mouse utopia studies i read about where the mice didn't have to work and there was plenty of food and water, no diseases etc and eventually everything got all messed up and the mice lost the ability to reproduce
The mouse utopia experiment is nothing like having a pet mouse. Its more like exploring the way mice react to being institutuionalized. Its been a while since i read about it so i dont recall how much excersize or enrichment the mice had access to.
But from what i recall id call it more like a prison where all their needs are met and they have absolutely zero responsibilities, thus their current choices have zero impact on their future quality of life.
In people id expect that to lead to depression and mental illness which is basically what we saw in the mice. Im not convinced this experiment could be considered a utopia any more than a coed prison which also provides, food water and shelter but not entertainment or enrichment/stimulus.
Without entertainment/enrichment/stimulus even humans develop all sorts of problems like dementia, just look at nursing homes/classical assylums for the human equivalent/example.
The nuance is it wasn't a utopia because eventually the population of mice were extremely overcrowded: that's when things circled the drain. If you trapped a bunch of humans where they had no personal space ever they would all also go insane.
Some cultures would mind, China for instance: the anthropology of the CCP holds that the ability to labour is what makes us human and separates us from lower primates. Therefore, as AI grows more powerful and takes over jobs, it is important people be given other jobs to occupy their lives even if they are just makework.
It's quite literally a impossible for there to be a world without work.
You can't have fully realistic VR
You can't have AI/Robots that replace all work. A bulldozer makes a bad livestreamer. You'd need synths, indistinguishable from humans that both supply and can't receive(!) emotional labor, clearly an impossible task. Maybe most people will get all their needs from semi-realistic VR and AI-tiktok, but some won't.
Even now some people are hospitalized due to talking to AI too much. The thing currently needs a lot of labor from humans
>Work: Using physical or mental effort to do a task
This used to be
>Work means using physical effort to do a task
In the future it will be (not saying LLMs will bring us there)
>Work means using physical, mental or emotional effort to do a task
Women are well ahead on this since men effectively automate the physical and mental labor for them. There was a big advantage for men, then it sorta equalized but still in men's favor, but during the AI age it will truly be a woman's world. However you route it it's going to be a very long walk from "no more coding" to "we are all babbling toddler with synth mommies".
> We were not defined by our jobs but by our participation in a densely interconnected social world.
Serious comment: 20+ years ago, Burning Man taught me this. Back then it was closer to its founding anarchic ethos and in a pre-social media, pre-starlink, pre-cell phone world, provided an large-scale social experiment in constructing an artificial and temporary bubble of post-scarcity society, within which commerce and status relocated from the obviously economic, into other modes of competition and hierarchy-finding.
In specific, social status recentered on a spectrum of predictable values including durable ones such as charisma and appeal, but also more altruistic ones, such as the nature of the gifts one provided (experiential and environmental, more than tangible). Status through the "gift economy" is how this was described.
It was, frankly, glorious to inhabit: at least, for a week...
I have wondered idly where in the space of possible social structures humanity would find itself, in a post-scarcity world, as it became further decoupled from "contemporary capitalism" as we know it.
That is: was the "natural" social ordering that emerged at Burning Man, an accurate view of what a prototypical post-scarcity humanity would tend toward?
Or was it "merely" the one that emerged when all the participants were entirely inculcated in and hence prone to recapitulating the hierarchical arrangements of the quotidian world on which the fantasia of Burning Man was built?
My assumption is that human nature (in all layers of its stack) makes social hierarchy inevitable, and if we don't need literal currency, we'll find a coin to trade in, hoard, envy, and pursue.
But I would assume that, being a product of contemporary capitalism, with little ability to distinguish natural law from cultural constructs in my own intuitions, wouldn't I?
the article argues that work will no longer be economically necessary, and that we are capable of organizing ourselves into a community without the need to work for income.
but i disagree. even in the past those rich people had to maintain their wealth, so a lot of what they did was economically necessary.
so i don't think that the economics of work will go away. it will change, but not vanish.
there is a lot of work that should never be replaced by machines. raising children for example, but also caring for the sick, elderly and disabled. yes, some of it will be machine assisted. those will be machines that increase the independence of people. also art and entertainment, while it may use machines for assistance should remain firm in human hands. also government, laws, jurisprudence. science, research, tourism, etc...
much of it can be done machine assisted, but the human touch is not optional, and a good part of that work is still something that people may not want to do without some sort of reward.
today economic benefits are the reward for humans making an effort. in the past it may have been social status, but i don't think it is a good idea to go back to that. social status is what gives rise to prejudice and racism.
work will not go away. the economic necessity for everyone to work just to put food on the table, that may go away, but the need to motivate people to do work that machines can't do on their own will remain.
therefore what changes is the motivation. today people are motivated to study and work because they need an income. in a world where income is not strictly necessary society needs to make an effort to motivate the future generation to study and work on things we still need despite that.
money is the most egalitarian way to motivate people to do work that is hard but needs to be done. everything else brings us back to status and class, which is not what we want.
Interesting question. What is work? Is playing with your children work? Is talking to elderly people work? I think a lot of things we have outsourced to "professionals" is considered work now and was considered "just normal life" before.
to me work is anything that i am obligated to do, that i can't say no to even if i'd rather do something else. (and yes, doing housework and raising kids is work, and as a society we should treat it as such. that is, we should recognize that stay at home parents are actually working and should be rewarded for doing so. same goes for caring for other people)
Great stuff. I am really interested in reading some of the books mentioned.
Self involved political gossip that leads to a culture of policing deviant behavior is my worry. It is just hard for me to not see how this all doesn't create a huge bull market in law enforcement. More "crimes" from people having more leisure time, more "crimes" from more surveillance. Most of all though more "crimes" because a culture of policing deviant behavior will start to find more and more behavior as "deviant".
At least the salon had the pretense of high art and philosophy. Our salons would have the pretense of political gossip and the philosophy would be about classifications of deviant behavior.
This was posted a week ago and I'll just reiterate what I said there..
As an American why should I believe a word of this, when our country's Overton window ranges from "lip service" to "open contempt" for the unemployed? How can I feel confidence for my economic future when, in less than a decade, the frontier AI labs have abandoned any semblance of caution and are embracing a lobby for fewer guardrails? When "move fast, break things" is applied to the "mass cognition replacement machine"?
Filing this entire article under "I'll believe it when I fucking see it". The pollyannic nonsense is willfully ignorant and only serves to excuse more concentration of wealth and the mass theft of leverage from the average worker.
The point of the article isn't that we will have no need to work; that remains an open question. The body of the article is exploring previous societies or segments of society in which no one needed to have a job, and how they lived their lives, as a way of pondering what a post-work world would look like. It's not particular pollyannic in tone once you get past the opening paragraphs.
Well, the article seems mostly theoretical. One of the premises of the article is that the capital owners (who thus own the economy, and the political system, and the legal system and the law enforcement) will give the rest of the people enough to assuage economic anxieties.
We know this premise is pure fantasy. For example Michigan which produces so much food it cannot even eat all of would not provide free school lunches for students: https://www.michigan.gov/mde/news-and-information/press-rele...
It's not even clear that the AI data centers required to run all this will be economically viable in the long term. But again, the interesting part of the article comes after the discussion of any new kind of economy.
If the author wanted to write a purely historical essay she is more than welcome to. Instead she chose a framing device of a post-work society thanks to AI that I think undermines the whole article.
"Aristocrats are (typically) rich, which we certainly will be if we have robots capable of all normal nonrelational labor." ...okay
> When the machines can do everything else, our relationships will be what’s left.
I think I saw this posted already and I still didn't read all of it, but this was not really what I thought of when there's no external work needed
There's still a lot of things that can't be outsourced to machines, like exercise, or building one's mental capabilities
I'd also think this would enable more people to spend a lot more of their day in prayer like literal Christian monks as prayer is another thing than the machines cannot do
"The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe." - Douglas Adams
I like the article, but I'd say it has left out descriptions of those people who weren't in the social Matrices it described (either because they didn't want to be, like "one family who had moved out of the West End into an aging lower-middle-class town" or because they couldn't like those lower orders in "volunteer work is part of what separates them from the lower orders".
In fact I'd say that angst from this type of person (I consider myself one) is a good chunk vocalizing concerns about "a world without work". "Going your own way" is a large part of the American psyche, so what happens in a world where there is not work that needs to be done, which had been laying out straightforward paths for "your own way" ?
I'm personally not feeling too much of this angst, being both happy working on the kinds of physical things that aren't going to be automated away any time soon, and also having the engineering knowledge/skills to effectively use LLMs and benefit from the automation. But I'm also not looking so far into the future as to worry about those endeavors becoming trite.
The article does not really have any arguments. It ends on this:
> I’m not certain that that’s what we’re facing now. I said that I don’t like making sweeping statements about the relationship between technology and cultural change, and I meant it. If a more relational world is the most serious problem AI causes, I’ll certainly be relieved. Still, that doesn’t mean I’m looking forward to it. I like my job, and I like liberal individualism. If the former will one day be a casualty of progress, I hope the latter will survive it.
After it spends too many paragraphs making the author feel important by reciting a bunch of historical just-so's. Interesting trivia, but otherwise nothing to hold any points together. There are no points however, because it just moves from one scene to another.
This is not a depiction of "a world without work" and you can substitute the timelines of the years covered, with today, and nothing would change.
Thanks for the great article surprisetalk. Did you even bother reading it or do you just cross-post the drivel that asterisk publishes?
Fun fact: Leonard Nimoy grew up in Boston's West End.
I don't think anyone would mind a society without work so much if there wasn't the threat of starvation and destitution there currently is.
Reminds me of the mouse utopia studies i read about where the mice didn't have to work and there was plenty of food and water, no diseases etc and eventually everything got all messed up and the mice lost the ability to reproduce
Pet mouses have plenty of everything and reproduce a lot if you allow them.
The mouse utopia experiment is nothing like having a pet mouse. Its more like exploring the way mice react to being institutuionalized. Its been a while since i read about it so i dont recall how much excersize or enrichment the mice had access to.
But from what i recall id call it more like a prison where all their needs are met and they have absolutely zero responsibilities, thus their current choices have zero impact on their future quality of life.
In people id expect that to lead to depression and mental illness which is basically what we saw in the mice. Im not convinced this experiment could be considered a utopia any more than a coed prison which also provides, food water and shelter but not entertainment or enrichment/stimulus.
Without entertainment/enrichment/stimulus even humans develop all sorts of problems like dementia, just look at nursing homes/classical assylums for the human equivalent/example.
The nuance is it wasn't a utopia because eventually the population of mice were extremely overcrowded: that's when things circled the drain. If you trapped a bunch of humans where they had no personal space ever they would all also go insane.
Source: it came to me in a dream
Im confused, are you saying the famous mouse utopia experiment never occured and was simply imagined?
Some cultures would mind, China for instance: the anthropology of the CCP holds that the ability to labour is what makes us human and separates us from lower primates. Therefore, as AI grows more powerful and takes over jobs, it is important people be given other jobs to occupy their lives even if they are just makework.
see also discussion from a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49616238
It's quite literally a impossible for there to be a world without work.
You can't have fully realistic VR You can't have AI/Robots that replace all work. A bulldozer makes a bad livestreamer. You'd need synths, indistinguishable from humans that both supply and can't receive(!) emotional labor, clearly an impossible task. Maybe most people will get all their needs from semi-realistic VR and AI-tiktok, but some won't.
Even now some people are hospitalized due to talking to AI too much. The thing currently needs a lot of labor from humans
>Work: Using physical or mental effort to do a task
This used to be
>Work means using physical effort to do a task
In the future it will be (not saying LLMs will bring us there)
>Work means using physical, mental or emotional effort to do a task
Women are well ahead on this since men effectively automate the physical and mental labor for them. There was a big advantage for men, then it sorta equalized but still in men's favor, but during the AI age it will truly be a woman's world. However you route it it's going to be a very long walk from "no more coding" to "we are all babbling toddler with synth mommies".
> We were not defined by our jobs but by our participation in a densely interconnected social world.
Serious comment: 20+ years ago, Burning Man taught me this. Back then it was closer to its founding anarchic ethos and in a pre-social media, pre-starlink, pre-cell phone world, provided an large-scale social experiment in constructing an artificial and temporary bubble of post-scarcity society, within which commerce and status relocated from the obviously economic, into other modes of competition and hierarchy-finding.
In specific, social status recentered on a spectrum of predictable values including durable ones such as charisma and appeal, but also more altruistic ones, such as the nature of the gifts one provided (experiential and environmental, more than tangible). Status through the "gift economy" is how this was described.
It was, frankly, glorious to inhabit: at least, for a week...
I have wondered idly where in the space of possible social structures humanity would find itself, in a post-scarcity world, as it became further decoupled from "contemporary capitalism" as we know it.
That is: was the "natural" social ordering that emerged at Burning Man, an accurate view of what a prototypical post-scarcity humanity would tend toward?
Or was it "merely" the one that emerged when all the participants were entirely inculcated in and hence prone to recapitulating the hierarchical arrangements of the quotidian world on which the fantasia of Burning Man was built?
My assumption is that human nature (in all layers of its stack) makes social hierarchy inevitable, and if we don't need literal currency, we'll find a coin to trade in, hoard, envy, and pursue.
But I would assume that, being a product of contemporary capitalism, with little ability to distinguish natural law from cultural constructs in my own intuitions, wouldn't I?
Regardless, I hope I get to find out.