The Abolition of Work (2002) • Hacker News Board

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#121

Post by jamil7 » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 7:02 AM UTC

Iv wrote: post #102

jackyinger wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m not interested in or know much about self driving cars so I’ll leave it. I think your points about cooking are really off base though. It seems like you’re basically describing mass production which we’ve already had for a long time, a wasteful process that produces inferior food.

As for a turing test, we’re talking about a professional chef here. Someone you can take an enormous variety of ingredients to in various forms of freshness or preservation, who can produce something that tastes really good. Theres often a large amount of creativity, improvisation as well as fine motor skills and expert timing involved in the process. It would be a monumental, hugely expensive task to create a machine that could even produce something edible given the same constraints. This just seems so far fetched to me.

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#122

Post by chordalkeyboard » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 7:11 AM UTC

jakelazaroff wrote: post #18

daenz wrote: post #6

>Such is “work.” Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it’s forced. This is axiomatic. Work and play are both voluntary to different degrees. You can survive without working, although your existence will likely be miserable. You can also survive without playing, but again, your existence will also likely be miserable. Play is something we prefer to do voluntarily…

> Calling work non-voluntary reveals more about the author than it does about the system they describe: that they feel that they have no choice. Assuming I don’t want to starve to death, what are my other options? I could beg, although that’s still work in the sense that I’d be trading my time for money. I could go around to places that offer free meals to homeless people, but that seems unreliable. And I could steal…

> Assuming I don’t want to starve to death, what are my other options?

Well that's the rub, you don't want to work, you want to eat. The food has to come from somewhere. Even if you were a forager, other animals want to eat the same food.

> I suppose that’s technically a “choice”, but only by the most ruthlessly literal definition.

"Technically correct, the best kind of correct." More seriously we are talking about survival and food. Its hard to imagine a more ruthless domain of inquiry.

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#123

Post by konjin » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 7:12 AM UTC

smnrchrds wrote: post #40

jakelazaroff wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I’m aware, all welfare in the US (e.g. SNAP and unumeployment benefits) have some sort of work as an eligibility requirement. I suppose you could add “move to a country with a better social safety net” to the list. But it doesn’t change the overall point, which is that every alternative to work requires you to turn your life upside down.

> very alternative to work requires you to turn your life upside down. Oh, yes, absolutely. But this is moving the goalpost. The question was not whether one could stop working without having to make changes to their lifestyle. The question was whether one could stop working without literally starving to death. In most developed countries, the answer is yes. No one really starves to death due to poverty in developed…

Welfare is a full time job. Anyone who thinks otherwise has never had to get the right forms filled out, wait hours on end every x weeks at some govt building that takes hours to get to without a car and then fight the bill collectors that buy junk debt to be collected from the poor.

The point of welfare is to make not working so unpleasant that a minimum wage job is less work to hold down.

This is true across the whole developed world, the majority of which I have lived in.

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#124

Post by avz » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 7:13 AM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #67

jakelazaroff wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My entire contribution to this thread has been an attempt to move the goalposts :) If the question is “is it possible to stop working without literally starving to death?” the answer is trivially yes, but I don’t think that’s particularly interesting. Getting thrown in jail will get you fed without working. But most people would consider that an absurd tradeoff. So we pretend it’s not an option, moving the goalposts…

Seconded. Move the goalposts, because the question without moving them is absurdly uninteresting. I can live a horrible, miserable, shorter life, but it's not a literal death sentence? So, OK, that's better than them taking me out and shooting me, but... So we concede. smnrchrds wins the point. It's not a point we cared about, though, and we're going to move on to talk about a question we find more interesting: Can a…

> Can a person live a decent life without working?

Here is how I read this:

"Can I live a decent life?" - > Can other people make sure I have what I need when and where I need it?

"...without working?" -> ...without me doing anything for them in return?

Sounds awesome. For me.

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#125

Post by chordalkeyboard » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 7:13 AM UTC

jakelazaroff wrote: post #34

smnrchrds wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Assuming I don’t want to starve to death, what are my other options? Welfare in most developed countries is enough not to starve and not to become fully homeless. But in many countries, it does not go one inch beyond this. Subsisting on welfare is indeed a very uncomfortable life. But it is not literal starvation to death.

As far as I’m aware, all welfare in the US (e.g. SNAP and unumeployment benefits) have some sort of work as an eligibility requirement. I suppose you could add “move to a country with a better social safety net” to the list. But it doesn’t change the overall point, which is that every alternative to work requires you to turn your life upside down.

> I suppose you could add “move to a country with a better social safety net” to the list.

How many countries allow people to move there for the purpose of collecting public assistance?

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#126

Post by lazyasciiart » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 7:28 AM UTC

jamil7 wrote: post #121

Iv wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m not interested in or know much about self driving cars so I’ll leave it. I think your points about cooking are really off base though. It seems like you’re basically describing mass production which we’ve already had for a long time, a wasteful process that produces inferior food. As for a turing test, we’re talking about a professional chef here. Someone you can take an enormous variety of ingredients to in vari…

The fine motor skill and expert timing are a given in automation, so let’s start by assuming the chef is not doing the physical work. And if we are trying to recreate the experience of eating at this chefs restaurant, then we aren’t taking them any food to improvise with, we will just eat one or two of the dishes they have already designed - so you may be picturing something more complicated than what would actually do the job.

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#127

Post by chordalkeyboard » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 7:34 AM UTC

Bakary wrote: post #20

georgewsinger wrote: post #11

I am a capitalist libertarian, with anarcho-capitalist sympathies, and I too support the long-term abolition of "work" as we know it. Ending toil is, in principle, impossible with our current level of societal wealth. We will need major, non-trivial technological innovation in order to truly escape our toil (through capitalism, of course :). Teams of innovators will need to build out AI & robotic infrastructure (amon…

>The leftist desire to redistribute wealth (which I think is strongly misplaced and immoral) While not a leftist per se, I've always found this concept of redistribution immorality to be a little strange. Much wealth is already regularly redistributed from value creator to rent-seeker. Laws can be optimized to serve the needs of corporations. Much of wealth creation also depends on the previous work of others in the…

> That's why injecting the concept of morality feels misplaced: if the there already is redistribution, then workers taking a share through governmental action is just an actor exercising whatever power they had, where they previously did not and other actors did.

My perspective is that people who allocate capital see this effort as workers becoming rent-seekers. So there are capitalists, and a capitalist rent-seekers; and there are workers, and worker rent-seekers.

> if the there already is redistribution,

So if people are opposed to the rent-seeking, they might fell that the correct decision is to avoid increasing the amount of rent-seeking.

> The flipside of that concept is to have privatized profits but collectivized negative externalities.

This exists and is terrible.

> That's not to mention entire industries consisting in intelligent and skilled workers spending their lives redistributing wealth from a wealthy person to another (traders, corporate lawyers, etc.)

So some of this is actual productive work that allocates capital or resolves disputes, and its not always easy to draw the line between parasitic activity and productive activity in these domains. Even if the line can be drawn in theory its not clear how to regulate it. And the regulatory effort is itself vulnerable to parasitism, rent-seeking, and capture by the object of regulation.

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#128

Post by lazyasciiart » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 7:40 AM UTC

konjin wrote: post #123

smnrchrds wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> very alternative to work requires you to turn your life upside down. Oh, yes, absolutely. But this is moving the goalpost. The question was not whether one could stop working without having to make changes to their lifestyle. The question was whether one could stop working without literally starving to death. In most developed countries, the answer is yes. No one really starves to death due to poverty in developed…

Welfare is a full time job. Anyone who thinks otherwise has never had to get the right forms filled out, wait hours on end every x weeks at some govt building that takes hours to get to without a car and then fight the bill collectors that buy junk debt to be collected from the poor. The point of welfare is to make not working so unpleasant that a minimum wage job is less work to hold down. This is true across the wh…

I have been on welfare in the developed world and it wasn’t like that at all - I’m very skeptical that you’ve managed to get significant personal understanding of welfare across even a majority of the developed world. It sounds like you’re not thinking of pensioners, for one, who generally don’t have many recurring forms to fill out.

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#129

Post by abyssin » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 7:43 AM UTC

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…

In rich societies with strong social safety nets, it is possible to live as if work had been abolished. One only needs a fraction of the ressources consumed by a normal Westerner to live a materially comfortable life. But what you realize when you try reaping the benefits of our already largely automated economy, is that work is about ideology. You'll be materially comfortable, but a social outcast. People don't like to work, but they hate non-working people even more.

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#130

Post by ritchiea » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 7:44 AM UTC

sapientiae3 wrote: post #117

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…

It’s strange that people seem to think that work is always a burden - try do nothing for a few weeks and see how that affects your mood. Work, while has its difficult moments, and parts that can be very tedious, is one of the greatest things we can do. No beer ever tasted better than one after a solid day’s work, and being part of the advancement of civilisation, even in some small way is pretty much the pinnacle of…

The comment above yours cites Steven Spielberg and Steve Jobs. Clearly the vast majority of us don’t have the autonomy at work or the compensation that those Steves have/had. There are many types of work that people enjoy and not just in prestigious fields. The problems with work arise out of issues such as:

- Businesses being incentivized to pay as little as possible

- Workers not being treated with dignity, not allowed enough time to recover from being ill or take vacation to mentally recharge

- Workers being pressured to maximize for output rather than their own experience at work

Of course work can be great for some people, but it’s intentional blindness to look around and tell the worlds workers most of us are in a position where work is fulfilling rather than a demanding stressor that asks more of us while corporate entities attempt to cut pay and benefits. You can call it overemphasis on short term thinking or a systematic failure of capitalism. But work is demanding and often even unforgiving to most workers.