91–100 of 236 posts
Ok, so do it. Get some like-minded people who want to live free of industrial society and go hunter-gather in a national park, or the deep Amazon rainforest or some other out of the way place.
Survival.org
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…
This is hopeless naive. There are more houses than there are homeless people, and yet the prices of houses continues to rise. Dirt and oxygen are not hoarded because they are impossible to hoard, anything that can be hoarded will be hoarded.
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We will never have an abundance of land, at least not without colonizing the galaxy. In a post-work society, people who own all the land will effectively own everyone else. How will people afford rent?
I don't get this. Go out and drive on a highway sometime. I do, and I'm not in a particularly big state (small New England one.) Yet I pass empty miles and miles of forest, often without a single building in site. Even in normal streets I can go fifteen minutes down my road by car, and the houses thin out to nothing. Unless you restrict the world to maybe what, the 100 most dense megacities, there's insane amounts of…
A lot of people find work to be very satisfying. The issue isn’t one of work but one of many of the jobs we currently have.
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I think that's a very strange way of looking at the real estate industry. They don't determine who gets to live where at all. They simply gather and withhold information that they then offer for a fee. In most situations the same information can (or at least could) be gathered in different ways also, leaving out real estate industry from the loop. Also just to clarify what I mean: real estate owners =/= real estate i…
"They simply gather and withhold information that they then offer for a fee." That's not even 100th of what they do. One of the most important services they provide is that they are the ones who make sure the deal comes together, which means coaxing the buyers and sellers in to agreeing, without which the deals would just fall apart. They show houses for people, which means sitting and wasting time some stranger's ho…
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) will become irrelevant once we achieve a certain level of abundance that is unlike anything we are accustomed to today. It will be like wanting to redistribute oxygen or dirt -- two resources so abundant they are essentially free. This is hopeless naive. There are more houses than there are homeless people, and yet the price…
The problem is these people don’t need a house, they need a full time caregiver to manage their addictions and mental illnesses. The government and people are somewhat happy to give welfare payments but not cover the expense of giving the level of care these people need.
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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…
Now consider this, can joy not be had in cooking? I can certainly tell you that I find cooking good food to be a very fulfilling task. Unlike engineering projects I can go from start to finish in under an hour. And it fulfills an immediate and visceral need.
I think that the argument for play is a good one. In engineering I encounter many people who engineer, not for the joy of it (which is spread very thin in many jobs anyway), but for the money. Now imagine if there was no quantitative social status (money) associated with engineering. You would see engineers self select purely on a basis of authentic interest rather than financial status seeking. Would that not bring more promising talent to the table?
Let me now attack the idea of automation from another angle; to claim that we should be able to automate all product is as outrageous as claiming that Atlas holds the earth up. How could we automate everything? Who makes the machine, and perhaps more importantly, who fixes them when they break. You cannot possibly convince me that you could make a machine to fix machines. Again, such a device would be in the realm of science fiction. In reality, even in the relatively controlled environments of factories things inevitably break in unpredictable ways, and there you are, back to needing humans to clean up the mess.
Now, automation does have a place; doing repetitive tasks. But I’d rather order a meal from an expert chef than a robot.
>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…
I read it as him saying yes we have no choice but he wants one. Therefore change the system to anarchism. Ultimately and quickly it comes down to philosophy and your view of the truth of the world.
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If you count the whole field of agriculture, which would include most supplies producers and processing, you reach ~2% of the population (in France, I took my country as a reference, as I know it is a net exporter of food). 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.
> 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%.
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.
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…
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 produce more, which is good, but the loss of leverage is an important factor to consider.
There's also a wasting and dependency effect that occurs when too much of a system is automated. If people aren't needing to work on or maintain a system, they don't need to know how it works to use it, pretty much by definition. It's doing the work for them. That creates a dangerous situation where essential systems aren't really understood, and fewer and fewer people end up knowing how to fix things because there isn't the same need to distribute the knowledge of upkeep/understand the work it's doing personally by doing it yourself.
Automation is extremely beneficial, and I'm often frustrated by what seem to be clear cases of not taking advantage of it, but I think what you're saying here over simplifies things.
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.