Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Spire_Citron t1_ja6txzt wrote

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

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