Nicola tesla advanced civilisation yet died poor and alone. Meanwhile someone else made a fortune

And then what? What makes you think the leaders/rulers of our society will then somehow “pay us back”?

You’ll just end up broke and without a job.

2/3 of all jobs are widely accepted to add no value to society[1]

2/3 of all consumption is accepted to add no incremental happiness[2]

2/3 of all CO2 emissions can be eliminated through careful lifestyle management and community design.[3]

These quantities do not seem coincidental and they point to a better way of doing things.

You're not wrong, there's no incentive currently to 'pay us back'. But collectively we are working three times as much as necessary so we can afford things that don't make us happy, and there is no way to sustain that state of affairs beyond the next hundred years or so. Scamming or strong-arming the ruling class into paying most of us for work that doesn't add value may be in our best interest in the short term, but for the long term we need to start acknowledging that it's not in anyone's interest that this state of affairs continue.

[1]Bullshit Jobs, the book [2]the Financial-independence-retire-early (FIRE) community [3]studies I came across in my degree on sustainable energy engineering

Leave it to HN to argue that getting rid of jobs will reduce the carbon footprint of corporations.

I mean you’re not wrong, once we purge a large chunk of the population, since ya know, they’ll have no way to provide for themselves, we will have a much greener planet.

That is a pretty bad faith interpretation of the original argument. You are assuming (incorrectly IMO) that the only purpose of people is to do work. While work is important, I think humans are inherently valuable, even if they don't produce anything else of value besides themselves. Instead of creating fake work for these people to do, I'd rather they just be provided for without doing fake work that accelerates us towards apocalypse.

Are you for paying people to do work that doesn't add value and consuming crap that doesn't make us happy? Because I said nothing about 'purging' or any solutions at all for that matter. I just pointed out that these three problems are in an important way just one problem.

I'd actually seriously like to know, do you want people to have to do work that doesn't add value?

I think what he's saying is that we will probably never build safety nets strong enough to provide for those who had their jobs automated away. They will be condemned to a miserable life of poverty, provided with just enough to keep them from rioting on the streets.

Source: I used to be on SSI disability. This is income for those that are so disabled they are never expected to be capable of working. The average SSI payment is something like $585 / mo. Well below the poverty line and any dignified existence. If this is how we treat our most vulnerable, how will we treat those who have simply been automated out of a job?

That may or may not be true, depending on any number of factors. But that the current state of affairs is neither desirable nor possible as a long-term steady state seems to me self-evident. And yet to my great surprise, this has turned out to be one of the most controversial things I've ever said on HN.

I don't want to do bullshit work just to be entertained.

I want a society were no one needs to work and we only reach it when the amount of people we need is getting so much less that our society needs to rethink this "work".

Without a job? My work ethic is to work in a way that I'm not needed.

And still I'm needed but instead of doing the same old shit everyday I can innovate because I don't need to fix old shitty written stuff.

You're actually right. The goal is to automate all work to the point there is no need for an economy. In a post-scarcity society there is no need to economize.

However, it's a mistake to believe the rich and powerful will allow such a society to exist since they'd be powerless in it. They will impose artificial scarcity on it in order to maintain the existence of capitalism and their fortunes. Just look at how copyright is ruining free computing and the free internet.

>it's a mistake to believe the rich and powerful will allow such a society to exist since they'd be powerless in it.

I'm having trouble imagining how such a transition would even look. I mean, do we still have some sort of recognition of property rights for existing property? If not, then how are the currently owned resources "freed"?

If so, then the wealthy would still be wealthy and there'd still be "classes". So, I'm not sure they'd mind so much, but for consideration of their offspring (which I don't discount).

In either case, how do we go about allocating future resources?

Apparently the working class is doing there part as well to keep the status quo when I see the reaction of others to my statement.

I don't think this is accidental. There seems to be a deliberate effort to de-politicize the economy and to de-economize politics. The left used to be all about labor rights. Now it's about gender politics.

Lol, it's the fault of the working class that they're oppressed? Strange world view.

Fault is a rather morally strongly conoted term, but from a cybernetic analysis, the working class is contributing to the positive feedback loop of is own oppression.

That's not to say individuals that compose the class are all willingly and stupidily acting against their own collective best interest while being convince there's a better practical way they can afford to realize with only marginal chances to end up ostracized or severely punished for the sake of the example.

Lol. BRB lemme make my job and the job of others obsolete and hopefully society will also happen to reevaluate “work” just in time so I don’t starve to death.

Do you understand how dumb your logic is? Or are you going to continue to hand wave literally everything