Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

V_Shtrum t1_ja6qty9 wrote

Reply to comment by Spire_Citron in Is style the next revolution? by nitebear

>careers are a modern invention

Learning and practicing a trade is as old as human civilization.

15

Spire_Citron t1_ja6rh52 wrote

Sure, but my point is that humans existed and got on just fine when we were just living in small communities and taking care of our day to day needs. The rest came later.

14

CertainMiddle2382 t1_ja6w65c wrote

That « Noble savage » vision by Rousseau has been debunked.

Northern American native cultures were very often waging constant extermination wars, maintaining their population at quasi steady state despite high natality rates.

If I am not mistaken, one of the most violent culture in the world were native inhabitants of the San Fernando valley.

Not politically correct, Im sorry.

But the old days were not always amazing…

5

Spire_Citron t1_ja6wjzo wrote

What does that have to do with careers? I made no claims that they were perfect and pure people, just that established careers aren't some innate part of human existence.

7

V_Shtrum t1_ja6s0mn wrote

Yes but taking care of the day to day needs of a community meant work: blacksmithing, farming, carpentry, architecture etc etc. Those trades became specialised, not in the last few decades, but literally thousands of years ago.

4

UnionPacifik t1_jaaoojh wrote

You might enjoy “The Dawn of Everything” - it’s a recent work on early human civilizations that debunks a lot of what you’re saying in this post.

Human civilization is much more diverse and many society’s operated as truly egalitarian, with no centralized authority just fine. Also, many of those so called “dark ages” when kingdoms collapsed managed just fine without a structured society.

“Trade” as you’re describing it is also not a common feature. Humans are generalists usually or that social role wasn’t defined by what you did, but by your birth or the season of the year or any other number of factors.

I really would urge you to challenge this notion that “work” or “labor” is a natural part of the human condition. We live in a super hierarchical society at the moment, with power concentrated in a handful of humans, so it might seem “natural” but we’re a lot more than our ability to produce goods, services and capital in exchange for economic security.

I think humans should still explore and contribute and make things, because that is in our nature, but if we can automate the necessity for labor and work out of existence so that our efforts are directed towards our interest and not our needs, I think we would wind up with an infinitely more productive, diverse and happy society. Do what you want!

3

CertainMiddle2382 t1_jabnruo wrote

Well that book is very explicitly written by a anarchist activist with the intend of making the concept relevant in modern politics again.

It is not a scientific book, and I must say I have some sympathies towards anarchy myself.

Problem is, those very primitive and unspecialized cultures weren’t advanced enough to invent writing, so most if not all of their culture is lost in time, forever.

People with a political agenda have time and time again tried to make them say thing we are mostly unsure.

I am more interested in living ethnology, especially the study on native cultures around the world.

Their societies obviously are not very specialized, individuals mostly segregated by sex, age and power.

An interesting point is their demography, if life was so great, a “saturating” fertility level should easily allow their population to double every generation.

And that was never seen.

Life witnesses, for example in very early colonial Brazil seem to point that those native cultures were far from being food limited (they had plenty of free time to increase harvest intensity), but they were waging constant extermination war with “neighboring” tribes.

In fact, land was plentiful, they had to travel extensively to meet those adversaries.

The goal was genocide of all the opposing men (and not land as said by the natives themselves), either directly or after a variable period of slavery followed by ritual torture, execution and often cannibalism. Women were taken as brides by the young winners (not much polygamy in what I read it seems).

This live experience bears much stronger witness about the quality of life in those happy times.

What saved those cultures was in fact that they were not specialized enough to create more advanced weapons…

IMO

2

Spire_Citron t1_ja6txzt wrote

Originally it was just collecting food and basic cooking and crafting, raising families, etc. No huge aspirations and a lot more down time than we get today. Heck, there are still communities of humans today that live that way.

1

V_Shtrum t1_ja70czs wrote

So collecting food (hunter gathering) had an absolutely colossal learning curve, it takes years upon years to learn how to track and kill wild animals. Gathering wild fruit and vegetables requires an intricate knowledge of the landscape, knowledge of which plants are poisonous, which aren't etc. Crafting has a similar learning curve: fashioning baskets from reeds and clothing from animal hides (for example) are highly skilled.

The point I'm making is that "work" - however you define it, has been part of the human experience since prehistory. It has shaped all human cultures and all our psychology, I don't think it's trivial for that to disappear and I wonder what is going to replace it.

8

Spire_Citron t1_ja70sgm wrote

Sure, but we will still be able to work on things, just maybe not have paid careers. You will always be able to learn a skill, raise a family, travel, make a garden, etc.

5

CertainMiddle2382 t1_ja77eez wrote

Exchange means you have something of value to trade.

Who is going to let you have his seat on his plane, have his spot at Machu Pichu, have his quiet spot of land to grow kale or have his bio baby milk formula, if you don’t give him something he wants in return?

AI is not going to make everything plentiful, and those simple thing we have today (automagically because you live in the US), may become what’s gonna be scarce in the future.

Even a WOW player develops a career in game because it is more efficient for him to acquire scare ressources that way…

3

V_Shtrum t1_ja7w2yu wrote

This

Money is just influence, the ability to influence others and make them do what you want. Looked at this way, it's totally unsurprising that we still work long hours in jobs even though almost all our material needs can be met through automation. People will always want money because they want to influence others.

3

CertainMiddle2382 t1_ja82o2r wrote

Indeed, it is the abstraction of value.

It seems that the set of all the different representations of what money could buy, is just influence…

Funny thing is that, you don’t have to spend money to gain influence, just to show it.

I find it quite ironic :-)

3

V_Shtrum t1_ja8ed3m wrote

Have you read Yuval Noah Harari's books? He talks about this:

He makes the point that throughout history, human beings have been exploited: feudalism, communism, capitalism, slavery etc etc. However unpleasant it is to be exploited, no-one could deny that human beings had value, economic and otherwise.

With developments in biotech, infotech and robotics, we're fast approaching a point where humans have no value, there's literally no need to exploit them, and nothing to gain by doing so.

Globalisation and offshoring have already rendered the manual classes in the West essentially obsolete, and the arguement goes: this is behind the recent resurgence in authoritarianism and xenophobia. We're likely going to see another wave of this - only this time of all classes and all countries simultaneously.

I think that a lot of people on this sub have a utopian view of these developments. Why would our governments and corporations be interested in providing us a utopia? What do they gain by providing it? What can we exchange with them when we have no value?

Having a job is having value in the economic system - however small; to hope that all work becomes obsolete is to hope that we all lose our value.

2

RabidHexley t1_jaemcgf wrote

People still act & work in the absence of a need to work as well, in the current world (i.e. people who can afford to retire early). People also take on additional tasks, hobbies, and trades in their lives that have no practical benefit.

Gardening, musical instruments, hiking, fan fiction, all manner of crafts. Most hobbies can take a lot of work and don't have a practical return. An AI (or a supermarket, amazon, midi software, etc.) being able to do something for you doesn't replace the desire to do and experience things yourself.

Many people's actual jobs already don't serve any practical function outside of the narrow scope of something like a corporate structure. Middle manager, bureaucrat, many accounting roles, and all of the people serving in support positions for these roles. Completely divorced from any fruit of labor besides a paycheck.

3

V_Shtrum t1_jaep48h wrote

All of what you say is true, the circle I'm trying to square is that, on the one hand, people often find work dull and unfulfilling etc. On the other, it's been widely observed that unemployment and underemployment correlate with all sorts of negative outcomes such as crime, poor mental and physical health etc. I'm not sold on the idea that more generous unemployment benefits (AKA UBI) alone are going to solve that*

I was convinced by Victor Frankl's book 'Man's Search For Meaning' that (most) people aren't at their core hedonistic, what they really want is meaning in their lives. Many people get this from work, others from having a family (and so on). I think that if AI were to eliminate work, it would eliminate a lot of the meaning that a lot of people get in their lives, and something needs to replace that. If nothing positive fills that vacuum, then something negative will.

EDIT:

I would also add, as you intimate, that the death of meaningful work predates AI, and that the gross dissatisfaction that many people feel at work (and in their lives) is a consequence of this. I don't know what the solution is.

*There will of course be a subsection of people who will be perfectly happy on UBI.

1

RabidHexley t1_jaf0j2e wrote

I feel like a lot of the malaise that comes from unemployment/underemployment are due to employment being the standard structure of society. The constant fear and anxiety of failure and poverty hanging over your head while you ponder how you actually want to live your life. Without employment you're not a functioning member of society, our cities are entirely built around there being places to work.

There would certainly be a transition, we and everyone else currently alive are born into this world. Accepting change is always difficult. But I don't see why society wouldn't be able structure itself around different systems. Clubs, associations, societies, performance, athletics, childcare (we're not gonna have robots overseeing kindergarteners), education (people still want to learn things that are already known), friends, family. Hell, join a farmstead.

Structures and systems that could replace obligatory employment have already been conceived. They're just limited by the need to function within a capitalist system. They're marginal to employment because almost everyone requires employment to function within society.

There'd probably be a meteoric rise in virtuosos and elite athletes in less financially rewarding sports given there'd be no fear of failure and poverty preventing talented people from pursuing their chosen craft to the utmost. Doesn't matter what AI or a computer can do, we'd still want to push human capabilities to the limit. And there'd still be prestige associated with such pursuits. (People still care about Chess and Go in a post Deep Blue and AlphaGo world)

The generation leading into this world would certainly have its members who struggle without the societal structure of employment. A UBI/welfare-based society would encounter challenges since we'd still be talking about a world based around economic (un)employment.

But I can't imagine the people born into and growing up in a truly post-employment world would view ours - riddled with poverty and people performing tedious busywork such as it is - with anything but horror.

Along with all of the intangible benefits that come from children no longer starving, people no longer living in eternal debt and eliminating the crime and instability that comes with systemic, generational poverty.

2