The second part is the ease of getting pleasure on demand. At any part of the day, most are free to look at the internet of anything ranging from funny pictures to pornographic pictures. They can turn on netflix, play video games, and do just about anything from the convenience of their smart phones. You can see this on just about any subway; a room full of people each engulfed in their own personal world driving their pleasure centers.
When you bring these two together (feelings of inferiority / detachment to those around you AND pleasure on demand), you get a person whose general approach to life is like that of a drug addict. They crave simple pleasures and justify it because they feel like shit. They also feel as if they're alone in this world, and so who cares? Of course this is all subconscious and part of a habitual perspective, but this is the kind of world we're growing up in America. Pharmaceuticals have significant power here and want to convince you they can fix you with a pill. Maybe they can. But what I'm trying to highlight is that we now have a mentality of always looking around for a "fix". I find very few people who can last a whole subway train just looking at the window pondering or who can strike up a conversation with a stranger for the hell of it. We're becoming way too engulfed in a pseudo personal world, and smart-phones are driving it.
No, I'm not trying to start a crusade against smart phones or even taking any stance at all. This is just how I see the problem currently. I want to believe technology can help fight it by bringing more people together for social events, but where's the advertising money in that? And who cares if you're not profiting? This pursuit of profits above all else has created a very shallow society and I would argue the drug epidemic is a reflection of it.
The surplus increases every year.
Every year, fewer and fewer people need to work full-time in mind-numbingly boring jobs to produce what the population needs.
So why do we keep up the fiction that everyone needs to waste their lives doing unnecessary work?
It's time to imagine how we could achieve a post-work society where more people could realize their potential, instead of being tied down to meaningless, mindless and unnecessary drudgery.
But does it produce enough for every man, woman and child in a sustainable manner, and will it be able to keep up with the Malthusian population growth that would continue unabated if every person on earth was perpetually guaranteed to get "enough"?
The answer to both of those is no. While there is certainly a lot of inefficient busy work amongst the workforce of developed nations, to say that most people on earth waste their lives doing unnecessary work is an extraordinarily myopic claim that's been bandied about since that one guy wrote an article about BS jobs. Everyone latches onto that meme and assumes the majority of work being done is absolutely worthless, but they really have nothing to back that up except their own personal experience as a middle class corporate drone.
tl;dr Give everyone and their offspring guaranteed sustenance and the Catholics and Nigerians will take over in a couple generation. Nothing about the OPs post said give everyone enough wealth and force birth control so that they only reproduce at a replacement rate.
I worry that the increasing focus on a meritocracy (especially in tech) ignores the fact that it devalues anyone who for whatever reason -- lack of education, lack of natural ability, or just lack of motivation -- doesn't contribute enough to be considered important. It's probably an improvement on the system we had before, where you were valued for being part of the right community or the right family, but I hope this isn't the end goal, and that we can eventually get to a state where we consider everyone inherently valuable.
Hopefully in the post-scarcity society coming we can come up with a better approach not focused on people’s productivity.
Capitalism has succeeded in its primary goal - amassing resources for capital-intensive projects. We’re done, we have so much capital companies sits on hundreds of billions of dollars. Something new will be needed for the next step.
But actually, I think the Trump loose cannon wasn't sent because of anger against capitalism, but rather misplaced anger against things like immigration, diversity, and a move away from traditional religious views. Capitalism is seen as A-OK, it's just that The Liberals have rigged the system against Good Honest People.
That is a rather optimistic projection of the rollout of Level 5 autonomy. The total number of heavy trucks sold worldwide was less than 400k in 2014, and no one has full Level 5 yet (if it can even be done large scale at a profit), so I would adjust those expectations. Most 'displaced' truckers should be able to find work unloading automated long-hauls into smaller short-hauls and driving them during a lengthy transition period.
> your only options are to find a system where people have value independent of their productivity, make being valueless palatable, or just go die quietly
Points 1 & 2 are somewhat interconnected. If I add up the retail value of all my non-paid work, it comes to far more than I make at my day job, and I suspect this is true for many others. Much of what our culture calls "valueless" - because no money is involved - does actually have value, and this will become more clear as time continues to reveal how difficult automating everything really is.
We have already seen this, for example, with people posting what used to be called home videos (no revenue) to YouTube and stumbling into large amounts of ad income, and I believe we'll see it in more areas. It may increasingly be a 'gig economy', but it's happening slowly, and some of those gigs are turning out to be pretty good.
If a million truckers lose their long-haul trucking jobs, how do a million short-haul trucking jobs simultaneously come into existence? Many long-haul truck already go to distribution centers on the outskirts of metro areas so the long->short-haul transfer systems already exist.
There's no denying that full Level 5 across the board would lead to very large disruption, but it's a little too early to call how it will play out yet.
It's clear that if automation continues apace something will have to give. UBI might be the answer, but I suspect it's actually not radical enough: that trying to bring money with us into a post scarcity economy is not going to go the way we want, no matter how good our intentions.
What changes is our expectations, beyond basic survival. Most people living below the federal poverty line have one or more televisions with active cable, a smartphone, and air conditioning; nearly all of them, in the high 99.x percents, have refrigerators, which implies that nearly all of them are housed as well, and effectively none go without food and sufficient warmth to sleep by circumstance.
In the sense of survival, the United States is effectively post-scarcity. What you're talking about is more "post-ambition".
Scarce is the opposite of proximate, not the opposite of plentiful.
It's fair (and I think correct) to not expect the world to go so far in that direction any time soon enough to be relevant, but many do. Scratch a UBI supporter and you'll often find a big believer in AI.
If you can get a large enough group to say: "Enough, the AI doesn't represent our values, let's change it!", it will already have happened because the same people will have already changed their buying habits.
I've heard a lot about a singularity doomsday scenario where a paperclip-maximising AI realises people are much less useful as paperclip constructors than they are as paperclip ingredients. Surely it can't be so hard to see that the productivity-maximising AI that we've cobbled together out of economic rather than electromechanical components is slowly realising it doesn't need us anymore either?
The truth is the economy soon won't have any use for poor whites other than consuming the output of rich whites. The last bastions of unskilled and semi-skilled labour are being automated or sent overseas (to be automated there). I'm really curious to see what America's 3.5 million truck drivers do when they lose their jobs over the next ten years. I guess we'll teach them to code?
But don't feel too sorry for them; the rising tide of productivity caught poor blacks before that, and all the hamster-wheeling busywork of the middle class is up next. Managers and decision-makers will stay above it right up until they realise abstraction cuts both ways. It'll just be the quants at the end, tweaking the last few parameters and getting the lights on the way out.
I think most of the world at least tries to keep the economic AI from being in charge of everything. It's hard because it keeps buying our politicians, but even so there's a sense that it should be serving our values, not the other way around. We might work with it, respect it even, but we don't trust it.
The USA is pretty strange in this sense, because somewhere along the line a huge chunk of the population got convinced that if they just leave everything to the paperclip AI it'll take care of them. And, for a time, it will, and the people who work hard to make paperclips get rewarded, and the people who start paperclip factories get rewarded more still. But, inevitably, you're not a paperclip, and your value is incidental in this system.
Faced with that, then, your only options are to find a system where people have value independent of their productivity, make being valueless palatable, or just go die quietly somewhere. It's probably not so surprising that, in the absence of the former option, the latter two are becoming increasingly popular.
And, I guess, not so surprising that the paperclip worshippers are particularly unconcerned with mental health and sensible drug policy. Still pretty gross though.