We know what a world without work looks like

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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.