Now we're supposed to have millions of people face the question and at the same time tell them "no, there's nothing useful for you to do, robots can already do it faster, cheaper, and more efficiently than you will ever manage." So, what? Do we tell everyone "just go smoke weed and play video games"? Or "go kayaking and hiking and rockclimbing and find yourself in nature"? The latter will not scale. Many natural places are already overcrowded and we don't even have a post-work economic system in place.

I love videogames, but the few times of my life where I genuinely did just play games all day for weeks or months, I felt awful. I just couldn't bring myself to do anything else.

Maybe there is a future where video games optimize around giving life meaning once there is little work to be done.

Designing a game where the goal was to create strong friendships between players would be a pretty interesting task.

Definitely! I’ve spent a good amount of time volunteering with kids, teaching them to read and helping them with homework.

But demographics are against us on this one. Children and elderly people are very much in the minority on any population distribution plot. I have personally been in situations where the number of adult volunteers greatly outnumbered the kids they were there to work with. It’s funny and a bit awkward but you get through it, usually by shifting over to board games and other large group activities.

It would be a totally different story if everyone was looking to do this stuff. A hundred volunteers with half a dozen kids or elderly folks is just not going to work. Most will be sent home.

I think it’s the same story with any group who might benefit from this. It could work if we doubled or tripled the number of people available to help out, but 10x or 20x (or more) would be unworkable.

You might say that a large number of people already volunteer for this work, but a handful of hours per week. There’s no way we could absorb millions of new volunteers for 40 hours per week each, that would be excessive.

The last thing I would add is that there are tons of people who are simply unsuitable for this kind of care work. They’re naturally disagreeable people. They may also be restless and easily bored. They would much rather be outside working or messing around.

I think a large portion would choose video games over this...

For myself I both enjoy video games, and enjoyed/felt fulfilled by my time volunteering with an elementary school program to assist children who were having trouble learning to read at the same pace as their peers.

Instead if I don't punch in for the day I won't outlive the next paycheck.

The public park gets swept by a robot.

The robot gets repaired by a bigger robot.

The robots are designed by AI.

Then you get into the world of white collar work, where the "let's optimize society to minimize toil" solution, by and large, is to just eliminate the job wholesale. Accounting exists because the tax codes are too complicated, so streamline them and their jobs could be done by some API calls and Excel formulas. The entire finance sector is superfluous if money isn't the driving motivator in society. Entire militaries can be replaced by a "If we are attacked, we glass everyone we have even minor beef with" MAD systems. Trash pickups can be automated by tube systems. Food production is already largely automated outside of the produce aisle, so maybe we just cut back on foods that we can't harvest mechanically.

Frankly, the biggest sector that couldn't be fundamentally altered by a such a societal shift using just yesterday's tech is construction.

I think you underestimate how difficult something like this would be.

I mean, I agree that as long as you have someone/something supplying the food gloop packets to the store, taking out the waste, and fixing the machines, pretty much everything in a McDonalds could be automated as a closed system.

But we're talking about billions to trillions of dollars of investment.

Just maintaining the frosty machines is outrageously expensive.

We haven’t done it yet only because we require people to do menial labor for shit wages so they don’t starve.

Heck, several local restraints have done away with most wait staff. You sit down and order via a web site.

That's one problem but not the most crucial one. There will be a bunch of people complaining that they do all the work while the freeloaders have it easy.

We can see that today as people don't want universal health care or social safety nets because these people feel the freeloaders are taking advantage of them.

Well, it certainly won't be possible as long as we tie people's housing, food, and health care to their ability to convince others they are useful.

Society currently sends the message: "If you aren't useful, you don't deserve housing, food, and health care". I think the existential angst is something we have to address as we transition into that post-work economic system, but I don't think it's actually possible to address until we make that transition.

There really needs to be some return to commons where ownership of certain things is just discarded so that everyone has the opportunity for self-reliance and self-actualization without needing to provide something of value for others. Community gardens, city parks, and city pools are like the fuzzy, myopic, "My memory's not as good as it used to be" view of that commons fitting into the modern world. The problem is that kind of participation doesn't provide a verifiable exploitable value the way that working under someone towards a set goal does, and our modern economic systems BSOD at even the thought.

In short, it's okay to not be useful just so long as you have something you want to do. Intellectual stimulation will always be a core need, but working for sustenance doesn't have to be.

My other conviction is that people find their own meaning with absurd ease when they're children. Then that becomes non-viable. If it ever were to become viable again -- if they didn't have to work at the gas station to cling to existence that keeps them from sleeping under a bridge -- then their ability to find meaning will come back.

Also, the COVID lockdowns gave us a glimpse at "nothing to do". Finding meaning is pretty hard for many people, especially if you can drown any form of boredom in endless consumption of shows, video games and social media.

Finding meaning is simply less important than having food on the table and a social circle, even if it’s just the watercooler talk with colleagues.

Not saying it’s impossible to find meaning outside of employment, but my observation and experience is that it’s not as easy as "stop working bullshit jobs and you will find meaning easily".

This completely discards the premise. We're talking about a hypothetical world where we don't need work from people, and where it would make very little sense to require meaningless work in exchange for having your needs met.

(We're also talking about the actual present world, where we don't need nearly as much work as we're forcing people to do, so the above should still be partially true, but it really isn't.)

The FIRE community have won the ruined game -- they're what you get when you remove the financial need, but keep the same psychological objective function, keep the same screwed-up sociality. They might be lounging by the pool but they're still stuck in the old mode of being. The ones who transcend the old workday-grind-mode are doing great. But that's non-trivial.

There was a really good article on this that I found recently ... Ah yes, here it is [1]. This is a thought-provoking take on a similar topic.

[1] https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/notes-on-privilege

looks like someone under influence :)

Presumably the weed smoker might occasionally leave home. Someone must pave the road he drives on. Someone must build the weed-smoker’s car.

For all those people doing things for the weed-smoker, someone must manage them. They will work in multiple enterprises. Someone must work to sell things between those different enterprises. This might seem inefficient, but humans have not figured out a better way to do it.

And all that explains exactly why, despite what people prattle on and on about with there being useless jobs, people do in fact remain employed and even as wasteful as that employment sometimes is, there is no better alternative on a social scale. Because when it all comes down to it, people want the benefits that modern society provides. That requires that people work. The alternative is living as a solitary mountain man. Not many people try that—and that, lo and behold, takes even more work.

Everybody today lives more like the aristocrats of old, we just don't notice it because it's common. If you got a special dress for your wedding, you're imitating what used to be a preposterous display of wealth for the elites. Your great-grandmother probably just got married in her nicest dress.

Meaning-making is harder when you've conquered the problem of mere survival, but not impossible.

Some aristocrats just played cards all day, or engaged in elaborate parties, or invested enormous effort into climbing the social hierarchy, or dicked around incompetently ordering the common people into stupid wars.

And some did philosophy, art, science, engineering, and exploration.

We have an absolutely enormous task ahead of us: the climate crisis. I think we could occupy ourselves with that for the next few centuries at minimum.

Nonsense. As this very article shows, many people find no meaning in their job. They feel dejected by working bullshit jobs every day and receiving shit pay in return. They do find meaning in things like raising a family, which ironically is something that is less and less attainable for the working man/woman, as the working class gets a lower share of wealth and things like housing skyrocket.

Your implied solution is to have the person sweep the floor by hand before the sweeping robot makes a second pass in half the time. How will that help the person feel any better? If the machines supass us, forcing people to do busy work will not make them feel better.

For example, the pine bark beetle is ravaging the forests of the Sierra Nevadas. Millions of dead trees just waiting for the next PGE power line to drop or lightning bolt to strike so why not strike out with a few thousand young bodies and start felling that timber and getting it to mills?

What about some sea walls? Forget waiting for giant cranes and pontoons, how about people start dropping cement rubble in the ocean around coastal communities, one dinghy at a time? The coral is on its way out, time to reinvent some of that Roman cement and mitigate the hurricanes' impact.

How many roads could use some form of a retaining wall in the event of a deluge? There's got to be thousands of spots in the US alone. Wire covered rubble? Gabions? Deadman walls? Whatever works!

The list goes on and on.

Graeber was an anthropologist. He recognizes that having a purpose is good for humans.

Among the examples he gives are people joining the military. Versus say becoming a corporate wage slave. For many, it's one of the few tracks available which offers "helping people", "serving my country", and other purposeful motivations. And the positive of having a purpose can outweigh all the negatives of serving (low pay, relocation, risks).

Another facet Graeber covers is the "service economy", including "knowledge workers". He challenges the idea that people need results oriented work to feel job satisfaction.

Alternately, Graeber suggests using the category "care work". All the things people and society needs to function well. Nurses, cops, soldiers, councilors, running a soup kitchen, volunteer work, etc.

Sadly, our current economic model devalues "service work". The focus on profits and productivity and efficiency is anathema to the work of people caring for other people.

Just to note the issue, I believe (but cannot prove) "productive work", where labor is part of making something, is orthogonal to "care work", and should be considered separately. Or at least be included thesis which is larger than a drive-by HN comment.

--

Highest recommendation for

"The Utopia of Rules" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules

Developing his Bullship Jobs thesis, Graeber tries to take on bureaucracy. Many critics get stuck on his prior criticisms of neoliberal economics. They're missing the point. Bureaucracy is (apparently?) a trait of modernism and (apparently?) central to all systems of government and economics.

I would LOVE continued exploration of the territory scouted by Graeber, Scott's Seeing Like a State, the Ehrenreich's professional middle class (PMC), and I'm sure many others. (Sorry, I still haven't read much about Marxism and its critics.)

It's so sad that Graeber passed.

There's a huge chasm where a leftist criticism of bureaucracy should be. Like the failed promise of the administrative state. Like how "the system" is dehumanizing when it should empower. Like if we understood it better, maybe we can minimize capitalism's dark pull on the state (panopticon, taylorism of all things, cost disease, accelerating credentialism). Etc, ad nauseum.

The closest (adjacent) work that I'm aware of is now being driven by the Inflation Reduction Act. Stuff like permitting reform, better governance, scaling up the administrative state (necessary to roll out renewables at the scale required). All the PvP stuff where opposing concerns and incentives are in tension.

Administrative capacity is one of David Roberts' obsessions. His Volts podcast has terrific episodes tackling this and related concerns. https://volts.wtf

Please share anything you might think is relevant. TIA.

I understand what he’s saying the problem is, I think it’s just part of how complex processes such as companies and governments expand.

However, part of me leans in the efficient market side of, yes there are inefficiencies but once capital is justly expensive, then the wheat is separated from the chaff. If a company could do something more cheaply with equal quality, they will probably try that.

Though the larger a company gets, the easier it is to “hide” these busy-work jobs.

Further, we don’t know the outcome of UBI. We saw a glimpse of it during covid.

A very rough trial, but many people were getting more money via unemployment than by a minimum wage job.

Most these individuals sat around hedonically watching TV, smoking weed, or drinking. Surely part of the pandemic in general, but I think there’s a human-nature aspect of path-of-least-resistance.

I’m not convinced our society has the proper values to take UBI healthily, I think it will exacerbate the existing meaning crisis we’ve been in since religion has started to decline. We have young kids going to nihilism and mainstream outlets justifying this as a good thing. I think the last thing we need is to give people more time to ruminate on these ideas with a slosh fund.

In a perfect world we could have UBI, have a subset of the population be the productive earners that can make more money over the UBI, and those on UBI would use the time and money for creative enhancement of themselves and society.

But I think that’s too optimistic an outlook. We have foundational problems with many aspects of western civilization that need to be addressed before we add fuel to the fire.

I know people who, if they didn't have to work, would just sit around binging TV all day.

I also know people who, if they didn't have to work, would probably somehow discover faster-than-light travel or solve world hunger or something.

It might not be culture. It might be personality that determines what we do in "idleness." More likely, it's a mix of both.

Lots of people project this “you just want to be lazy”, but honestly, that’s not it at all. Hordes of people cannot just sit around and watch tv, as is demonstrated by the wealth of people who retire and then become extremely bored.

Contributing where you want to contribute is a very much different thing than just wanting to be lazy.

https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-...

Is there evidence for that statement?

I remember I was very motivated at the start of lockdowns but 3 months in I had basically resorted to binging video games for the rest of the 7 months.

==Most these individuals sat around hedonically watching TV, smoking weed, or drinking.==

Is this from your personal experience or is there a study that shows this outcome?

>Most these individuals sat around hedonically watching TV, smoking weed, or drinking. Surely part of the pandemic in general, but I think there’s a human-nature aspect of path-of-least-resistance.

Reminds me of an Onion article that's stuck in my mind: "Man Not Sure Why He Thought Most Psychologically Taxing Situation Of His Life Would Be The Thing To Make Him Productive"

https://www.theonion.com/man-not-sure-why-he-thought-most-ps...

It's very hard if not impossible to extract lessons from the pandemic that aren't about pandemics or basic proofs of possibility. E.g., we learned that the economy doesn't collapse during "shut downs" of certain activities, but we can't get any good numbers of monetary damage for a future shutdown choice. We might estimate the COVID shut-downs caused $X of damage, but good luck removing the influence of COVID's medical specifics and surrounding culture war.

For your example, COVID-related unemployment assistance tells us nothing because (1) a pandemic restricts activity; (2) a pandemic is stressful and people look to mindless activities to cope; and (3) everyone knew the checks would end one day, but some didn't know if they'd find a job by then. It wasn't a good analogue to UBI.

This will never, ever not be the case. Working age people today don’t even expect social security to exist when they need it. How could you possibly guarantee a UBI to the level you’re asking?

Being able to survive without 'working' sounds like a dream, but I get hung up on the technicalities of it all.

One technicality that blocks me is something I encountered not that long ago...

How do you compensate those that will come dig in human manure, sometimes for hours, to fix a house's clogged pipe? I had to do that: toilets wouldn't flush anymore, shits floating and all. I didn't know where the pipes were exactly and one them, the last one before the sewers, was clogged. So basically 40 meters of shit blocked inside the pipe, which then started overflowing on the property, for weeks (or months), unnoticed.

The plumber couldn't come immediately (it was a sunday late in the afternoon) but would be there next morning.

So for five hours I dig into human manure to find the damn pipe (which I more or less knew where it was located). It saved the plumber five hours of digging into, literally, shit and piss (saved me five hours of billing and five hours of waiting for things to be fixed too).

In that "without working" society, who digs into human manure? Who comes to pick up the trash? Who comes to fix a broken AC? Who wants to spend 12 years studying medicine to save the lives of those who aren't working?

That's what I don't get.

I think the argument is that there is inherent value in helping fellow man/woman, self actualization, etc - and that is the reward in itself.

I do not agree with this.

If I have to do work or starve, maybe I'm willing to dig shit for $15/hr.

If nobody has to do work to survive, suddenly you have to shell out $300/hr to motivate someone to do it.

And tbh, the kind of person that would study medicine for 10 years is probably not gonna be the kind of person to settle for the survivability-level income of UBI.

In the situation you describe, I would have a pretty strong motivation to fix the problem if it was my property (deeply unpleasant living conditions). If it was my neighbor's property, I would also have a strong motivation to fix it (sense of community). Neither of those things is tied to money.

Not everyone is motivated by the same things. Avarice is not the root of all industry.

Society then probably gets restructured so that everyone is expected to get at least a PhD rather than a bachelors. Mathematic literacy matches that of linguistic literacy - it will no longer be socially acceptable to claim you are bad at math the same way it's no longer acceptable to be unable to read or write. Almost everyone will have the engineering knowledge necessary so they know how to fix and program the robots. Everyone learns multiple languages and does part of their studies abroad so there is less destructive nationalism. Society starts to value knowledge and the dissemination of knowledge more than the accumulation of capital and wealth which only leads to the destructive forces of extreme inequality and wealth. We start moving towards a more utopian Star Trek vision of the world, hopefully culminating in the creation of a machine like the replicator and the ability to perform interstellar travel which would truly be the end of the scarcity dynamic and a new era of humanity based on abundance and scientific exploration.

Number of People with Bachelors degrees continues to grow:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2021/02/22/new-...

Number of People with Masters and PhD degrees doubled since 2000:

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/02/number-of-peo...

If you do 30 hours of plumbing a week for 80$ an hour, you make that UBI + 2400$ a week (or wherever the market seems your work worth).

There is always an incentive to do more, and especially as long as the market incenctivises/rewards more or less useful things (e.g. externalities get properly accounted for), then people which aren't content with bare survivability will at least for part of their time do something deemed "useful" or undesirable.

Same as today, with money.

Unlike today, someone receiving poverty support who does this won’t lose nearly as much in poverty support as they make digging in shit, so the marginal return on digging in shit will be greater.

UBI (under some different names) was initially proposed as a conservative alternative to means-tested poverty support, specifically because it relieves perverse incentives and reduces duplication (with the tax system) of function in means-tested benefit programs.

> In that “without working” society, who digs into human manure? Who comes to pick up the trash? Who comes to fix a broken AC? Who wants to spend 12 years studying medicine to save the lives of those who aren’t working?

Being able to minimally survive without working and not being punished by having the support rapidly, at a high ratio, reduced when you have outside income separate from the basic support does not mean not working is the norm in society.

By learning things? By knowing and liking many things? By knowing and liking many people? By being very good at a unique permutation of skills, and using them to improve your life and that of your friends, having great adventures and whatnot?

> The robot owners aren't going to just hand out money, so would have to be taxed at some insane rate, I think.

Which would not be a problem, since all other super rich people would be taxed at the same "insane" rate, leaving the "getting ahead" relative to your peers completely untouched -- if that was really the issue, if people really couldn't think of ways to stand out amongst others other than the amount of money they "make" (it's just shifted around after all).

The problem is exploitation I'd say, and even that is not an end in and of itself, it's just a necessary nuisance that is optimized away wherever possible, leaving pure ownership of pure [0] means of production in very, very few hands. The rest gets nothing, and since humans cannot persist on that, cease to exist shortly after.

Compared the trajectory we're on -- the scenario we're in -- the technicalities of how to make the world somewhat human and livable instead of just an insane runaway train seem rather minor to me.

[0] As in, basically no workers, no more than you can personally oversee or even be yourself. I know that will never be "fully achieved" but I think that's splitting hairs. It's the trend, we keep accelerating and making previously thought impossible tools of dystopia real, who cares if there will ever be just one dude in a toga living forever commanding a blob of energy that can do and create anything, except make him sane.

Of course, those who do want to show up on that 30 under 30 list can make different choices to get ahead in the way they interpret that meaning.

UBI brings more options for people to dedicate to new ideas, new inventions, new ways of thinking. It doesn't restrict the choices of any citizen, it opens up more choices. Getting ahead still exists, and those who want it can go for it, that option wouldn't be taken away from them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_King...

It never truly answered where the non replicable resources come from.

All it does is give everyone access to enough resources for basic survival, not ferraris, which will still exist and continue to motivate some to be Vikings.

Yes, and then firms like OpenAI come in and automate those BS jobs, and take away all the societal upside of their existence. OpenAI will thrive, at first, by undoing the intricate scaffolding of lies that buttresses BS jobs. The country will either embrace socialism at that point, or perhaps there will be a Butlerian (buttressarian?) jihad of some kind in foolish attempt to put two genies back in the bottle.

And who knows what will work to keep us alive and relatively thriving in the future? It seems clear to me that belief in a fantasy panopticon, if not taken to an extreme, was a useful part of society. It is strictly better than a real panopticon or no panopticon - and who could have guessed that from first principles? Perhaps it really is better to have BS jobs than overt socialism. Maybe people really do feel better believing their work makes a difference rather than just existing and knowing they do nothing. Idealists want to believe that people will thrive with the truth, but I think that's demonstrably false.

People will point out that the solution would be the opposite: a decreasing population.

But that is not cost-free and basically is swapping a set of problems for another set of problems. Even then "swapping" is a promise at-best. We could end with two sets of problems instead of one.

With all due respect to mister Fuller, this sounds like bullshit from someone that hasn't worked in manufacturing.

Quality manufacturing processes are hard, and this complexity only increases with the sophistication of what's being produced. Usually, the measurement systems in place are a tradeoff between cost, efficacy, and regulatory requirements - and I guarantee if an inspection can be removed, some engineer is begging to do it.

More than that are capable of great work and breakthroughs, but they're too busy doing bullshit work.

This is an amazing precursor of the current software equivalent: https://xkcd.com/1629/

It takes a huge amount of actual human effort to do all the most important jobs in society: grow food, transport food, make clothing, transport it, build housing, repair housing, build things for growing food and transporting clothing, healthcare, building hospitals... we are not remotely close to replacing the need for vast amounts of human labor for our most basic needs. We have huge trade shortages. We have bridges collapsing. Fuller's assertions are total fucking nonsense, only someone extremely insulated from the real world could believe what you just quoted.

The number of bullshit jobs is always small; first level managers manage a team of people. You have mid level managers managing several managers, etc, but the frontline workers always vastly outnumber management, even in bloated organizations.

And yeah, people should justify their existence by contributing to society. Dismissing that idea off-hand is absurd.

So what are your intentions regarding those who won't or can't satisfy your criteria for contributing?

Obviously I mean everyone who is capable of doing so. Those who are capable but unwilling? I wish them luck, but they are owed nothing by the rest of us.

There's always more work to be done. There will always be details discovered that are not automated yet. There will always be new topics unexplored that robots have not been built for yet. A general purpose robot is by definition a "jack of all trades" compromise that cannot do what specialized humans do first.

This need for humans to explore is where all the progress and all the money is, and how you fight off both the bullshit jobs and AI taking our jobs.

As tech enthusiasts, we often envision a Star Trek future where all value originates from science and technology, and everyone else has to justify their existence. To some extent, I understand this view, but it will never fully materialize.

Any practical system will be shaped by its current participants: politicians, governments, etc. So, by definition, "bullshit jobs" will be recognized as respectable in any system designed by humanity. In fact, they will be enshrined as the elite class, and then the entire utopia morphs into a mirror of our existing society. Those at the top remain entrenched indefinitely, while those at the bottom are viewed as providing no value—except now, this perception might be closer to the truth.

This comment misses the alternative - continue working and produce even more. No, not more production for things like cars or other consumer items - more production to pay for things like social benefits, better healthcare, etc.