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The Abolition of Work (2002)

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Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#101

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

gfxgirl wrote: post #76

> Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world This is utter nonsense. Many people enjoy their work immensely. To take a HN hero I'll bet Steve Jobs enjoyed changing the world via his work and through that loved his work. I'll be Steven Spielberg loves (loved?) his work. Further, short of AGI, there will always be work. Let's imagine no one had to work anymore. What would we all do? We certainly wouldn't…

> To take a HN hero I'll bet Steve Jobs enjoyed changing the world via his work and through that loved his work

“Hero”?

No.

A notable and inspirational figure with many positive and admirable attributes? Yes.

But a hero? No. Where is the heroism in being the CEO of Apple?

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#102

Post by Iv »

jackyinger wrote: post #97
Iv wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For more than 20 years I have advocated and pursued the idea that society should abolish work. I am astonished that in 2020 most of our production is not automated. We have had the ability to automate most work for two decades. Food, clothes, furniture, electronic devices, all of these could be produced with close to zero human labor. Why don't we? After exploring a market (agriculture) in order to launch my own auto…

The fact of the matter is that automation is far from perfect. There are many tasks that are simple for a human, but fiendishly hard for a machine due to their unpredictable nature. Take driving a car or cooking in a restaurant. How is a machine supposed to know if the meat is a bit too old to be palatable? Would it really be worth it to implement an elaborate apparatus to determine meat freshness, and deploy it in e…

First, the disagreements: no, driving and cooking are not hard tasks to automate. They are stupidly easy if you decide to create the infrastructure for that. You have industrially cooked food, mostly through automated process, in supermarkets, sold as "prepared food". and actually, many cheap restaurants will have several microwaved prepared food in their menu items.

Automatic driving is a very easy task in roads and cities that are designed for it. Instrument all bus lines with ground wires, put a radio beacon on each crossing and sign, a front radar/lidar to detect obstacles and 90s tech is enough to automate a whole city. If it was desired, we would already be there.

Now, like you point out, there are many tasks that bring joy and people would do voluntarily. Said otherwise, there is a non-null amount of volunteer productive work.

Ergo, the goal of automating a society is not to automate 100% of the work, but to automate (100-V)% where V is the amount of voluntary work available.

"But I’d rather order a meal from an expert chef than a robot."

It would be interesting to make a Turing test for cooking. I am sure that there are many robot-made meals that are undistinguishable from chef's preparation.

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#103

Post by remolacha »

Iv wrote: post #72
avl999 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can survive without working, although your existence will likely be miserable. For a large number of people not working is likely to directly lead to literally death. For most people it is not a choice at all.

In rich countries, less than 1% of the population work on agriculture. We could have a society without starvation even if 99% of the population did not work. The fact that starvation is possible in a rich country is by design. It is not a necessary fact of the economy.

The reason why less than 1% of the population can work on agriculture is because the 1% that work on agriculture are supported by highly specialized individuals that provide advanced farming equipment, weather modeling, genetically engineered seeds, financial products that help forecast demand and supply capital, etc. In a world where only 1% work, the supply chains for those things fall apart, and it then takes more than 1% of the population to feed the rest.

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#104

Post by Iv »

didericis wrote: post #100
Iv wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For more than 20 years I have advocated and pursued the idea that society should abolish work. I am astonished that in 2020 most of our production is not automated. We have had the ability to automate most work for two decades. Food, clothes, furniture, electronic devices, all of these could be produced with close to zero human labor. Why don't we? After exploring a market (agriculture) in order to launch my own auto…

Many things we consider "automatic" require complex maintenance and upkeep, and inappropriate automation can actually increase the net amount of work needed to be done. It often coincides with a loss of ownership. If you can't make your own value, and you're letting something else make it for you, you might save yourself labor, but you're giving up your ability to create that value. Yes, the system as a whole will pr…

I am trying to not delve into a 20 pages presentation, but I have gone though and through these themes for most of my professional life. The question whether we can really go to 100% of automation is moot if we can go to 99%. Either way it means that full employment is unnecessary and leads to the creation of bullshit jobs.

> I think the solution is for more people to learn how to set up their own automation and to automate things without making them too centralized.

That's my sad conclusion as well. We could get to an automated society with far less pain and much faster if it was decided collectively though.

Look at car automation: if a city wanted to make automated cars a reality in their streets, there are tons of accommodations they could do: from radio beacons to official maps, standards on how to signal construction work, purposefully designed roads...

Instead, we are trying to design automated cars with the assumption that zero efforts will be made to promote them. Worse: we assume they are going to be so criticized that they have to perform better by a magnitude on day 1. That's making us waste 40 years.

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#105

Post by pdonis »

Iv wrote: post #85
pdonis wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We could have a society without starvation even if 99% of the population did not work. Only if nobody wanted anything else but food. Which is nonsense. People want lots of things besides food. And clothing, and shelter. And sanitation, and medical care, and... What you are calling "rich" countries are countries in which people have way, way more options--where their lives are a lot more than just bare subsistence.…

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 s…

> the notion that unemployed people should starve because otherwise no one would work to produce food

I don't see where anyone is making an argument based on any such notion.

I think the reason most people are suspicious of those who don't work for a living is fairness: we all benefit from the many goods and services that our society produces, so we all should contribute our fair share to producing them.

I agree that the market for jobs in our society is very inefficient, which means that many people are unemployed not because they are unable or unwilling to do productive work but because of our inefficient process for matching people to jobs that will actually be meaningful for them. However, no one has any more efficient process for doing that; there are processes that lead to less unemployment in the sense of fewer people not having a "job" on paper, but those processes (as shown by the Soviet Union and China) don't care about the actual job satisfaction of individual people, so they don't solve the problem we are discussing here.

I also agree that industrialization created many "jobs" that actually aren't meaningful at all; the only reason people were used to do them is that nobody (yet) knew how to build machines that would do them. I agree that those jobs should be automated. What should happen as a result of such automation is that the necessities of life--food, clothing, shelter, basic transportation--should get cheaper over time. The main reason this hasn't actually happened in developed countries (or hasn't happened as much as it should--there are areas in which it has) is governments artificially keeping prices high to serve special interests (for example, the US government paying farmers not to grow crops). That is a political problem, not a technical problem.

Even if all the drudge work is automated, however, people will still need to design the machines, make sure they are doing what they're supposed to do, take care of any malfunctions, and update the designs as conditions change. Plus, there are many services that only humans can provide. So I don't think we are anywhere close to having a shortage of work that people will pay other people to do.

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#106

Post by rayiner »

Iv wrote: post #70
roenxi wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And calling for the abolition of work is like calling for the abolition of death. Great idea, difficult to argue against. Difficult to implement too. Given the current state of technology, it seems quite likely that all the actual plans for abolishing work will devolve into a small group of low status, probably socially voiceless, people being picked out and made to do all the work.

For more than 20 years I have advocated and pursued the idea that society should abolish work. I am astonished that in 2020 most of our production is not automated. We have had the ability to automate most work for two decades. Food, clothes, furniture, electronic devices, all of these could be produced with close to zero human labor. Why don't we? After exploring a market (agriculture) in order to launch my own auto…

> We have had the ability to automate most work for two decades. Food, clothes, furniture, electronic devices, all of these could be produced with close to zero human labor. Why don't we?

Because we actually can’t do those things?

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#107

Post by nradov »

Iv wrote: post #70
roenxi wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And calling for the abolition of work is like calling for the abolition of death. Great idea, difficult to argue against. Difficult to implement too. Given the current state of technology, it seems quite likely that all the actual plans for abolishing work will devolve into a small group of low status, probably socially voiceless, people being picked out and made to do all the work.

For more than 20 years I have advocated and pursued the idea that society should abolish work. I am astonished that in 2020 most of our production is not automated. We have had the ability to automate most work for two decades. Food, clothes, furniture, electronic devices, all of these could be produced with close to zero human labor. Why don't we? After exploring a market (agriculture) in order to launch my own auto…

The agriculture market already spends billions on automation. For example row crop tractors are mostly self driving. Machines milk cattle with no humans involved. Etc. If you failed in that market then it's not due to a lack of will by customers. It's because you're not a competent businessperson or engineer and failed to achieve product/market fit.

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#108

Post by coffeecat »

pdonis wrote: post #105
Iv wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> the notion that unemployed people should starve because otherwise no one would work to produce food I don't see where anyone is making an argument based on any such notion. I think the reason most people are suspicious of those who don't work for a living is fairness: we all benefit from the many goods and services that our society produces, so we all should contribute our fair share to producing them. I agree that…

> I think the reason most people are suspicious of those who don't work for a living is fairness: we all benefit from the many goods and services that our society produces, so we all should contribute our fair share to producing them.

This implies that an employee of a firm like Renaissance Technologies should have the same social status as an unemployed welfare recipient; I do not believe this is the case in our society.

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#109

Post by underslung »

paconbork wrote: post #73
postingpals wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can one be 'over-educated'? Is that a bad thing?

It is if you see any available work as beneath you as a consequence

I think you've missed the point of the article. He is illustrating a society of post-capitalism where the emphasis on work is not to maintain ones' standard of life, but rather to "play" as he puts — a method of unlocking the 'true joy' life has to offer. This concept is not rooted in the need of capital.

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#110

Post by chordalkeyboard »

Iv wrote: post #99
chordalkeyboard wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't consider preparation to be necessary because if the food is free, I can wash the potatoes myself or even make my own bread. Who provides the water? who provides the rest of the inputs for bread? There are a lot of things that need to be done to provide a basic standard of living, even if 1% of the society are slaves who labor in the fields for the benefit of the other 99%.

Oh yes, to be comfortable you need far more than just food, I agree. My point is that we are far past the point where mere survival requires the whole population to work fulltime. Collective choices are made with the assumption that everyone should work but we have the means to create an entirely different society.

> Oh yes, to be comfortable you need far more than just food, I agree.

Its more than comfort, agricultural productivity relies on modern technology. Storage and transport of food relies on modern technology. Modern technology is a society-wide endeavor where many people contribute in tiny ways that all add up to something that can't be replaced by any of them.

> My point is that we are far past the point where mere survival requires the whole population to work fulltime.

Indeed, labor employment to population ratios range between ~40% and ~80% nowadays.

> Collective choices are made with the assumption that everyone should work but we have the means to create an entirely different society.

I think the issue is different than you are characterizing it. Why would a few people work to support everyone else without getting anything in return?

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