The solution is to use technology to replace high skilled professions with average Joes. These high skilled professionals can just go do research, and there is always more research to be done. The average Joes will be aided by a combination of technology and human supervision to do a job that is effectively as good as a professional would have done it.

For example, a nurse might be retrained to do diagnosis. Instead of learning the corpus of medical literature they will have Internet access to a database and supervision from an MD. So that way we might be able to replace many MDs who will instead go into research.

I think that is the sane way forward. And it won't be a solution for everyone, of course. But I think it should be doable.

That sounds like a recipe for “idoacracy”.

What happens when there is an emergency and the system is unavailable?

You are literally training people to be button pushers that’s a horrible horrible idea especially when so many innovations come out from the work place when people are faced with challenges.

Would you make the same claim about how we require groups of people for everything we do ? What if we run out of architects ? What if we run out of neurosurgeons (given that we're always saving, saving saving on training such people resulting in their numbers not increasing despite the obvious incentive, combined with idiotic ideas about outsourcing it's becoming a real possibility, certainly for particular geographies)

In the days of old, they would scrub the decks of ships while under sail for no reason than to keep the crew busy to prevent boredom which was considered a cause of mutiny. Perhaps, not having a system where people are working all the time is dangerous for no other reason.

I'm a workaholic as it is the only way to maintain my sanity.

You can't have a revolution if everyone is living paycheck to paycheck and missing even one day could jeopardize their housing.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/most-americans-live-paycheck...

You definitely can have armed revolution. Some form of "imbalanced economic conditions" is the most common STATED reason for violent revolution, which the starving poor inevitably participate in.

You are mentioning retraining people who have already been through the education system. Weinstein is advocating restructuring the education system from one that creates docile workers who perform repetitive tasks for a wage to one that encourages creativity and initiative. I also think you underestimate how many people have given up their passion to the reality that they need to plug themselves into capitalism to survive. If given an opportunity to pursue that passion instead of living paycheck to paycheck I think we might see a intellectual and cultural golden age.

No, I think you overestimate it. There's this belief that circulates that people's occupations or pursuits are determined by their circumstances; they're bricklayers or plumbers or whatever due to a combination of factors beyond their control, and given the right magical combination of UBI/education/retraining/pixie dust, they'll move to some other job.

Meanwhile, my father-in-law was a tradie since he was a kid and even in retirement, supposedly freed of any occupational needs or financial necessity, he still does it because he likes to. I don't see him writing a screenplay or orchestrating a symphony. It's not his bag.

I agree that re-education and first education are certainly two different things, and I even agree that we would get more people interested in the creative pursuits if they were inculcated in them at an early age, but I disagree that this is the entire solution or even a substantial part of it because not everyone has that inclination.

I think you're conflating trades, which often provide solid incomes, and lots of room for creativity, learning, and skill-development, with mind-numbing service jobs like being a cashier, delivery drivers, or call-center employees.

There is also some conflation between 'creativity', and 'artistic inclinations'. Lots of things require creativity, artistic practices only being one of them.

My brother-in-law prefers a mind-numbing job. He was a cashier for many years, until they promoted him to management and he had to have his mind "in the job" even outside of work hours, then switched to being a delivery driver, which is working out as his dream job - he can listen to sports broadcasts while driving, and when the deliveries are done, so is the job. No part of it comes home.

He has a degree in sports journalism, so he can be creative, and learn, and develop skills, it's that he doesn't want to do that for a job.

I suspect the reason he doesn't want that job is that he doesn't want the stress and responsibilities associated with that job, not that he doesn't like being creative.

I second this. I wasn’t saying everyone should be painters or musicians or novel writers.

Working all your life in physical labour, to provide ungrateful offspring with the chances you never had will do that to you.

I couldn't agree more!

I'm really disheartened at the pessimism that some HN members show towards people working low paying/status jobs.

> Well, I think here you point out to one, really, of the basic defects of our system: that the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act -but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.

-- The Mike Wallace Interview: Erich Fromm (1958-05-25) [ http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/from... / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTu0qJG0NfU ]

If you bind two fingers together, nerves and muscles that can make no difference anymore (because of external constraints) become numb or even die off. This is trivially true, it's not surprising in the least. Few people deny it because they lack the inherent capacity to understand it, but because they themselves are bound in some way, too.

Compare the fact that your comment is greyed out, even though it's perfectly polite and coherent, with the discussion in the video above. It's gotten much worse, much more uptight and cowardly.

Thank you for linking to the Erich Fromm interview! I have never heard of him before, but I find myself agreeing with most of his statements in this interview. What strikes me, and are relevant to this discussion, are his thoughts on alienation in the workplace and how production and consumption have become ends upon themselves, not means to increase the dignity of humankind.

Until the advent of Hard AI it is possible that many people could be put to work constructing the digital realities and experiences for video games. (even playing actor roles in video games) However I think even for this to be a reality one would still require a UBI.

> Not everyone can paint or write a screenplay, and not everyone wants to.

Not everyone can, but I'll bet a lot more people could than are currently doing it.