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What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

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Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#471

Post by reflexive »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #413
jcoffland wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to work with you if you're a nine-to-fiver either. I'm not saying there's anything inherently wrong with you for feeling this way but I don't want to work with people who don't love what they do. Edit: to clarify, by nine-to-fiver I mean someone who is just punching the clock in order to make a living but does not care much about what they are doing. I don't really care what hours you work if you're real…

I feel like everyone who downvoted you is missing the whole point of the article that was posted. The point is to imagine what your life would be like if you didn't have to work for money. Imagine if you could work on startup ideas and software projects simply because you were passionate about solving a problem or creating something, and not because of the money. And it doesn't even have to be something useful, or so…

Imagine if you could work on startup ideas and software projects simply because you were passionate about solving a problem or creating something, and not because of the money.

I've been in this position, and I've concluded: if you really have no financial constraints, you'd be daft to spend your time working on a startup, or solving the dull, pedestrian problems that are of such utilitarian concern to society.

If you're creative, why wouldn't you just be an artist and make things that are personally and intensely meaningful to you (but only to you)?

If you're an engineer, why wouldn't you just spend your time inventing new esoteric programming languages to implement Conway's game of life, rather than the drudgery of, say, making and debugging a robust automated toll booth, that could save society millions of dollars? That only makes sense if you're anticipating an eventual return to the monetized (wage) economy.

Or - start a family and invest your full time into raising and educating your own children - probably the most rational choice, with the least value to the rest of society.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#472

Post by joantune »

thenomad wrote: post #458
joantune wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a tricky question, and an important one. What I meant with projects is something tangible. What you are talking about is education? should that count? if those people are being educated or want to learn something, shouldn't they be able to still have an UBI while doing it? My answer to that is: 20hours/week of communal work - they would do that work 20 hours/week and still have time to learn whatever they want…

I was talking about self-improvement, which is similar. OK, further question - what if they want to watch The Wire and write a series critique for public consumption as their communal work? That's definitely something tangible. Does that answer change if they're: 1) A complete unknown with a blog 2) Have published work but aren't very well known 3) Are a famous media writer with thousands of fans asking for this crit…

Yes, it's very tricky to classify something as worth subsidizing and something else that doesn't, especially in regard to Art. I would say:

To get an UBI, you would need to do 20hrs work/week. Every other activity would be as is today. i.e. if you have and are able to reach a good crowd, you'll make money with sponsorships and ad revenue.. but you need a big/good enough crowd for that to happen.. and that takes time and effort.. you would have more time for that..

In regards to science, I'm of the opinion that any scientific study, even the ones that only find dead ends, is worthwhile as it advances humanity's knowledge

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#473

Post by MustardTiger »

vacri wrote: post #230
cesarbs wrote: post #212

Another good read on the topic: http://newramblerreview.com/book-reviews/political-science/t... I like this bit: "the knowledge worker is under severe external constraints. Much of their work is assisted or mediated through information technology, which contributes to a de-skilling of their cognitive labor. And on top of this they are expected to fully invest themselves in their jobs in a way that manufacturing labor…

Are you serious? Knowledge workers have it easy . It's hard to get here, but once we're here it's a great gig. We're paid well, we're in demand, and there's a robust freelancing sector to our industries, be it software, legal, medical, engineering, or whatever. That link describes a call center worker as a knowledge worker. That's absolute nonsense. You could, in theory, argue that a call center worker is about manag…

>but in truth they deal with less knowledge than a subsistence farmer, who has to know a hell of a lot about agronomy.

If they had to then they would. Since they do not, obviously they do not have to. Very few farmers of any sort know much of anything about agriculture other than cargo cult knowledge that is largely misguided or inaccurate.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#474

Post by mungoid »

cesarbs wrote: post #240
vacri wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you serious? Knowledge workers have it easy . It's hard to get here, but once we're here it's a great gig. We're paid well, we're in demand, and there's a robust freelancing sector to our industries, be it software, legal, medical, engineering, or whatever. That link describes a call center worker as a knowledge worker. That's absolute nonsense. You could, in theory, argue that a call center worker is about manag…

This is the bit that hits close to home to me: > they must demonstrate commitment above and beyond their contracted work hours, and express constant satisfaction and happiness about their work My wife and I are both software engineers and that is a nearly constant source of stress for us. In our experience, people in our field frown upon people who treat software engineering as just their job. Two things I recall fro…

I actually JUST left my company this week to do freelancing for this exact reason. They tell you to not work over 40 but then they give you more work than you can reasonably get done in a normal work week so what do you do? Either get behind on everything or you work many extra hours.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#475

Post by nhaehnle »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #465
nhaehnle wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does UBI solve any psychological needs at all?

Anxiety over your material needs is a psychological affliction. These aren't such different things.

That's a bit of a cop-out, isn't it, because you're only talking about psychological needs which are inextricably linked with material needs, and there was never any argument about the fact that UBI does solve those.

If that's really the best you can come up with, I think it's safe to say that UBI doesn't offer any solutions for human worth or psychological needs. (I also partially get it; solving material needs is easy compared to psychology.)

And it's funny, I never see UBI supporters propose actual solutions for those. It's always just hand-waving, like they are prepared to give lip-service to the issue, but they're not really interested in solving it. It's self-serving politics by an elite who already has all the frameworks for solving their own psychological needs, as long as the material ones are satisfied. At least you have to give the full employment/Job Guarantee folks credit for actually trying to come up with something.

For what it's worth, it's not like those things are in conflict anyway. UBI and full employment are complementary policies, they don't contradict each other.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#476

Post by joantune »

witty_username wrote: post #467
thenomad wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really interesting proposal, and one of the few I've heard that actually could improve on a UBI in some ways. The obvious leak point - who would determine what was "worthy" work? If someone said "my project right now is to watch all of The Wire", would that be OK? Would it differ if it was "all of CSI Miami"? What about if it was "All of MIT's lectures on machine learning"?

Hmm.. why not let people vote on worthiness with a point system (money)? That's the current world we live in.

That is a way to do it. However, if you look at it, something like scientific knowledge isn't easily 'bought' by people.. so the 'market' for scientific advancements is skewed, the incentives aren't there.

It would have been impossible to have iPhones or the likes without scientific advancement. Yet, the scientific community reaped 0 benefits and got 0% of share from Apple's profit.. and even tax wise, which could be a way to subsidize scientific grants from the government, we both know that they dodge those and lobby with success for them to not pay them.

So, there are problems with the way of our point system.

Another case:

Investigative journalism. The journalists or even the companies that pay the salaries to the journalists that make those hard strives reap almost 0 benefits, and other outlets just pickup the news and get all of the benefits.. yet these are crucial for change/improvement and progress in our institutions and way of life (think the catholic church scandal, the contras and crack scandal, etc)

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#477

Post by Cybiote »

freehunter wrote: post #314
Cybiote wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making a sandwich or cleaning a toilet is certainly not an easy thing to do. Getting a robot that can understand a scene, any scene and plan motions within it has been very difficult to do. Far more difficult than playing Go at a superhuman level for example. This is known by various names, with one common being the Moravec Paradox . The problem of energy storage further multiplies this difficulty.

I think we're getting confused on the definition of how the robot accomplishes its task. To clean a toilet like a human would, yeah that's difficult. To clean a toilet like a robot would, it's not. A toilet cleaning robot would have a spinning brush like a drill and would circle the bowl of the toilet a couple of times. Really, really easy thing to do. If a Roomba can clean my entire house, not fall down the stairs,…

The comment which originated this subthread was about telling a bot to get a sandwich and clean the toilet. This implies a single bot and the verbiage implies an agent with strong autonomy.

The disadvantage of the specialized machines you speak of is their limited to no adaptability, inflexibility to novel situations and obsolescence upon changing environments. There's need for actually smart appliances (which is what the kind of robots you spoke would be) but they'd be best suited to easily circumscribable tasks. Not what many have in mind when they think robots.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#478

Post by reflexive »

j2bax wrote: post #436
reflexive wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you made that proposition to a fast food worker that he could do meaningful work instead of smelling like fried stuff all the time and always be worried about working enough hours for a crappy boss and no future, or to a janitor that he could help someone instead of cleaning pee all day, maybe they would do that instead Are you saying that making food for people is meaningless? That cleaning doesn't help anyone? H…

How meaningful are jobs that could fairly easily be automated out of existence if we didn't feel the need to occupy every human?

The reason those jobs haven't been automated is because automating a job is an expensive and difficult process, not out of charity for the people doing those jobs.

I've often thought about how meaningful my own work is, in the sense that: what if people just didn't buy my company's stupid product? Would anybody be worse off? Not really.

The only meaning I've found is the satisfaction of doing my job well, on its own terms - whether that's sweeping the floors at a burger joint, or making software builds.

Re: What if jobs are not the solution but the problem?

#480

Post by collyw »

cesarbs wrote: post #240
vacri wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you serious? Knowledge workers have it easy . It's hard to get here, but once we're here it's a great gig. We're paid well, we're in demand, and there's a robust freelancing sector to our industries, be it software, legal, medical, engineering, or whatever. That link describes a call center worker as a knowledge worker. That's absolute nonsense. You could, in theory, argue that a call center worker is about manag…

This is the bit that hits close to home to me: > they must demonstrate commitment above and beyond their contracted work hours, and express constant satisfaction and happiness about their work My wife and I are both software engineers and that is a nearly constant source of stress for us. In our experience, people in our field frown upon people who treat software engineering as just their job. Two things I recall fro…

I am on the fence on this one. On the one hand I completely agree that we should be able to treat it as a 9-5 job. On the other hand, I have worked with people like that and I far prefer working with those with some passion in the field.

Our field is constantly changing and it requires that we keep up with the trends (not unlike medicine or other well paid careers). Its a pain in the arse having to explain a better approach to people who have never bothered to learn anything more than what they got taught at university ten years ago.

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