Comment by spongebobstoes
1 day ago
this whole blog post is basically "people need jobs to be happy, so we should design our society such that they need jobs"
not only is the premise wrong, but forcing people to work is not a good or ethical way to address this problem
most people like the social aspect of work, but not being beholden to their boss
we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money
we can do better than this
This isn't what the piece argues. It doesn't claim people need jobs to be happy, and the word "happy" doesn't appear in it. The argument is structural: when capital depends on labor, labor has political, economic, and democratic leverage. When that dependency ends, the leverage ends with it.
Whether people find meaning in work or outside of it is a separate question the piece doesn't take a position on, because it's not relevant to the point being made. The question isn't whether we can give people meaning without employment (I would argue that most of us find most of our meaning outside of work), but who has bargaining power in a system where human economic participation is unnecessary.
> Whether people find meaning in work or outside of it is a separate question the piece doesn't take a position on
There’s an entire section in the middle about this exact position. Search for “opioid” to find the part where he says people fall into suicide, drug use, and despair when they lose their jobs.
I unironically love arguing on the internet, because you're replying to the author of the essay, but I think the text supports your comment and not his hahah.
"We lose any sense of economic purpose, and with that, social status and a perceived future." Sure sounds like someone weighing-in on the meaning of work and life outside of it...
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The leverage doesn't end unless the AI-owning capital class Terminates the rest of the population.
Or visa-versa. Somehow I feel like this gets missed when discussing this topic. And consider which direction do you think this is likely going to go? Betting on the "AI-owning capital class" seems a bit delusional to me. Does money or gold have much value in Zombie apocalypse shows? How much are bullets worth in those shows? Please, for the love of god, think this through.
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> "people need jobs to be happy, so we should design our society such that they need jobs"
No, this is not what the article said. It's more "people need jobs to have any kind of leverage in society" which is something different.
I don't think that "people need jobs to have any kind of leverage in society" is actually true, though. Retired people without jobs are (in-)famously known to be politically powerful, both regarding elections and regarding local political questions apart from elections (like city planning commission decisions).
Their leverage is a result of having the time to be involved in politics, which is itself a result of working for decades to build up to the point that they could retire. They're an end result of the system, not an exception to it.
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The jobs they worked turned into capital which is where their leverage comes from. So it's still applies.
To be fair they argued both. Jobs suck but we need to feel useful to other human beings. Jobs (either paid or volunteer jobs) are the only ways we consistently contribute.
Like maybe instead of making requirements docs you could pivot to counselling at risk youth... but AI is rapidly improving at that, too.
Star Trek isn't real life, when human labor stops being valuable the humans who's labor was previously vital will be at best left to rot in squalor.
The Expanse would be an apt sci-fi example where almost no labor is needed and everyone survives on a bare minimum UBI unless they want to risk it all and go into space.
A generation of people left behind. The birthrates will continue falling.
The bitrates, on the other hand...
Couldn't have said it better myself. The only reason we are worth keeping around is because what we do is necessary to keep the machine running. The idea that the AI singularity would lead to infinite free stuff for everyone is ridiculous.
For some reason programmers start thinking that we'll transition away from a whole world of societies built around the concept of individual ownership, i.e. your landlord charging you rent, company owners owning the company and the resulting product and paying you what they deem the work you own is worth, and move towards something like communism, all because people working in IT or marketing departments are having a hard time.
I'm sorry but us programmers didn't invent capitalism, and it wasn't our consent under the condition of having a good run under it what kept it in place.
If AI only blows away programming, sure you are probably right. If AI blows away white collar labor, which is at least half of jobs, then yeah something would give way.
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>we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money
I think people get hung up on "job bad" and forget what the job is actually doing, functionally.
We are animals, on earth, attempting to survive. We have evolved where we actually really suck at doing it alone, but we do really well if we delegate the various needs of survival. Now, how do we make it so if you chopped wood in the forest you get a piece of the fishermans take? You can do it in kind, although that would quickly become logistically complicated due to the size of the logs and fish catches. Instead, we use money out of sheer convenience and its amazing properties of being a store of labor both past, present, and future.
So give everyone no jobs. Who fishes? Who chops wood? Someone or some thing has to do it right? And it needs to be delegated in some way. We can't all go happy go lucky and rave all day and fuck all night and have dozens of kids. Resources on the earth are finite. Forests will be depleted, fisheries crushed. There needs to be some counter to what would otherwise be runaway hedonism and resource depletion.
Pregnancy and childbirth are physically taxing for women. Most people of reproductive age want sexual relationships. Many people want children. Very few women want to give birth to 12+ kids. Even the wives of billionaires don't have that many children, despite having more than enough material resources to support them. (Elon Musk's 12+ children required several women.)
Replace dozens of kids with any piece of wanton consumption then. How is it checked? Hoping we get bored of orgies and parties and feasting and this is enough to ensure we can reproduce indefinitely and continue to orgy and party and feast? I don't think so. At the end of the day, the world cannot sustain everyone living with the carbon footprint of a wealthy person living life to excess. It can't even sustain the carbon footprint of everyone living how they currently live.
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I am not sure most do.
> not only is the premise wrong
The blog post offers several studies as evidence, where's yours?
the studies are set in a society in which the main way of existing in society and contributing to it is via employment.
Some generations ago females in this society were regularly without jobs but were "homemakers", in that time if one were not a homemaker and a female how was the person's feeling of well-being?
Reports conflict about that, but in that time of course females were often kept from employment by being homemakers and thus relegated to secondary status.
Perhaps the studies you look for would be related to feelings of social well-being among hunter-gatherer societies, however maybe those studies are not actually needed? Because probably now that the possibility has come up you will realize hunter-gather societies do not have traditional jobs or employment and that people were evidently able to feel happy in those societies.
Now you may respond with examples of how maintaining hunter-gatherer societies would mean death of much of population etc. because the best kind of goalpost moving is the kind that is true. Nonetheless the point should be clear that people can be happy without typical modern jobs and employment.
Whether or not a modern lifestyle and world can be constructed that does not need jobs and still keep people happy is a different question. And there we are back with something for which there are no relevant studies.
> the studies are set in a society in which the main way of existing in society and contributing to it is via employment.
That's the one we live in though, so I guess that seems fair
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A study obviously can’t prove that people need jobs to be happy.
If you can so much as imagine a society organized around some other source of happiness, there’s your evidence by counterexample.
I have no opinion either way but this doesn’t follow. I can imagine a world where people don’t need oxygen to breathe but they still do. If we say people need oxygen, the argument is obviously about the world such as it is rather than the world as it could hypothetically be.
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I don't think that's how "evidence" works. I can imagine a lot of things in a lot of domains, but that doesn't make it real.
I absolutely can imagine a society organized around some other source(s) of happiness, but the fact is we don't have that society, and humans are not acclimated to that society. Humans are acclimated to the society we have, and there's plenty of research out there showing that many, many humans derive a significant chunk of their self-worth and life's purpose from their jobs.
And when they lose their job and can't find satisfying work, their quality of life is meaningfully impacted, in ways that cannot be fully explained by the financial impact of losing a job.
Another fine example is retirement. Many older people end up finding work again in retirement, not because they need the money, but because it helps them find purpose. Others don't retire until the day they die because they can't imagine a life without work. Yes, some people love retirement and are happy and thrive, but there are also many who aren't and don't.
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We have a word for imagining a society with different sources of happiness: utopian. We generally don’t regard utopian musings as evidence of anything.
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There's a massive spike in mortality for those who retire from work versus those who keep working. In fact, working just a single year after you're 65 is associated with 11% lower risk of death for healthy people and 9% for unhealthy.
Working is objectively good for your health. Stopping work is associated with an extremely large increase in mortality risk, for both healthy and unhealthy people.
Any alternatives must weigh the resulting death it will cause.
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The problem with the studies is that they're cases in which specific groups within the broader economy lost jobs. Those aren't really comparable to the (theoretical) path of job displacement of AI for a couple of reasons:
1. Those people didn't get substantial, ongoing financial assistance. If we end up in a UBI world, particular one where the UBI people get is high enough to get more or less anything that's not very scarce (e.g. land in coastal cities), the negative economic component of job loss is removed. 2. Everyone else still had jobs. When you lose your job and everyone else continues to work and be successful (or at least you perceive that to be the case), there's a big hit to the status and meaning in your life. If everyone is affected in the same way, then your relative status to others remains unchanged, and everyone collective needs to reorient society to find their meaning.
I'm not saying it will go well, but I do think there's a theoretically possible path where there is large scale unemployment but because we have nigh infinite productivity, everyone has access to unlimited non-scarce resources (including luxury cars and fine foods and whatever medical treatment they need), and we end up with an enormous number of competitive leagues of everything, events centered around music and arts, dinner parties and all manner of other social activities that are what give people meaning.
Your counterargument is basically just... vibes? It'd be a lot stronger if you could also back it up with studies, like the author has.
Let's grant the premise. UBI, significant enough to live well on, luxury cars and dinner parties for all.
Who sets the amount? Who controls the infrastructure producing the unlimited resources? What happens when you vote the wrong way, or protest the wrong policy, or simply become inconvenient?
A population with no economic function has no leverage with which to resist a reduction, a condition, or a withdrawal. You're describing a world where 99% of the people are entirely dependent on the goodwill of whoever owns the machines, and you're treating that goodwill as an unchanging variable. The history of every human institution suggests that power without accountability eventually behaves like...power without accountability. Even assuming the benevolence of the people holding all the cards isn't naive optimism, it's the same mistake that makes people say real communism just hasn't been tried yet.
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If you know happy rich people that don't have a job, you got your counter example, and one is enough.
I do.
People usually need to have a purpose, but it doesn't need to be a job.
I agree "people need a purpose to be happy" is much more digestible than "people need a job to be happy". However, it has to be qualified with "some people need a purpose to be happy". Defining, or worse dictating, happiness for everyone is a fool's errand and, ironically, usually leads to large scale mass murder or starvation.
You may not need to have a job to be happy, it varies person to person. However, the idea that the billionaires will save us and our leverage is not needed is ridiculous. It is much more likely we would see poverty like is seen in much of the rest of the world.
> people need jobs to be happy
The happiness of the aristocracy depends on the spectacle of miserable workers performing humiliating tasks.
Solution: take turns every other year.
> we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money
In a world where all of the necessities of life were free--not as in "not having to pay any money for because of some social policy" but as in "not costing any resources to produce"--i.e., the way air is free now--then this would be the case, yes.
But we're not there yet. And I think a big part of why we're not there is that tech giants who could be spending their entrepreneurial efforts on making the necessities of life cheaper, are instead spending them on things like AI and getting people to click on ads and monetizing users' data.
What do tech giants have to do with food production, clothing, medicine, housing?
Nothing. That's the problem. The people running these companies say they're among the smartest, most driven people on the planet, the movers and shakers, the ones who are determining the future course of society. So why aren't they figuring out how to make things like food, clothing, medicine, and housing cheap, so cheap that everyone on the planet can have them easily? Why is it more important to figure out how to get people to click on more ads, or ask more questions to AIs that hallucinate wrong answers?
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Maybe people don't need jobs to be happy.
But it's a big change, and a better way to go about it, instead of huge layoffs is:reduce the hours of work gradually and equally. And possibly create some social infrastructure in the background, to fullfil the social roles of work.
You are ignoring the part where human labor is the leverage required for democracy to work.
This same point was also made clumsily in the OP; I’m very unconvinced.
The obvious question marks in that theory:
Lots of human labor happens in nondemocratic polities; slave-owning/repressive societies create lots of labor.
Democracy historically doesn’t advance in lockstep with labor; it’s arisen with many contingencies. The model (English Parliament) seems founded on concerns with right of some wealthy barons v. Kings.
Traditional common sense alternative is that military victory goes to people with largest army, so voting saves time. That’s been debatably less relevant with deadlier weapons, so democracy could be cooked.
I don't think it is required, democracies aren't designed that way
not everyone in charge is a cartoon villain
Most are...it's pretty much required to be a psychopath to climb the ladder to the top
> we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money
I agree, but those people will still need to eat and pay rent so I guess they're stuck either working or dying. People will always find something to do with themselves. You don't need to encourage people to explore their own passions much when they're able to do it. The need for jobs isn't really an issue as much as the need for money is.
I agree in theory, but this is so extremely far from the US political and social system that I think no nation has ever changed so much without being overthrown. So unless you’re talking about plans for a post-US world, this idea will always be theoretical and not how “the world” works.
I'm not sure it's that far out of the Overton window. US already managed to do some small-scale UBI trials, after all. Maybe one day it can do a countrywide trial.
No it hasn't. To actually try it requires giving to a large enough population that it can impact prices and inflation.
Also, every time this has ever been tried it ended in atrocity. Lookup "War communism" to see what happened. Money literally predates civilization. The first writing we have are sales invoices.
"a post-US world"
I see, so you like large scale warfare then. Did you run out of WWII docs and want some more history for content?
Parent didn't say they liked it; I'm reading it as an expression of concern (that I share).
The problem is that he relies on a dubious Acemoglu estimate, without realizing that at best it's temporary. AI will be better than humans in doing tasks (the qualifiers don't matter in the aggregate). Any jobs then would be bullshit jobs, and everyone will know it.
LMs are literally trained on Reddit. The idea they are "super-intelligent" is anthropomorphism and marketing. So far no independent research has seen AI be better at anything than humans. And that's unlikely to change with larger NNs.
If they're good enough at useful tasks and cheaper than any human, the economic and political effect is the same regardless of whether they are 'intelligent' or 'pretend-to-be-intelligent'. The philosophical debate does not change the practical effect.
> we can do better than this
In theory we can do better than this, in practice we can't.
40% of the people in the US would rather starve to death themselves than live in a world where people they hate for their skin color get anything without toiling for it.
I appreciate that there is a significant chunk of people that are like this, but I think if you really believe the 40% number or anything like it, you're giving yourself a false worldview.
The majority of people aren't racist nor do they have a problem with government helping them out. What was happening (are you referencing 2024?) in 2024 and today was a government saying the economy was fine when it is not. When that happens, people are going to pick the person that isn't in power, who says they are going to fix it, even if they aren't. "It's the economy stupid". People care about their own well-being above pretty much everything else most of the time.
I don't think putting this on racism or anything else (though it is a smaller factor) helps, it's just rhetoric. 40% of the people in the US aren't dedicateed racists, they are, however, in working groups that the government has ignored for decades.
So do you expect Republicans to be thrown out of office en masse in the upcoming election?
I personally expect plenty of them to get reelected even if they claim that everything is just fine.
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> if you really believe the 40% number or anything like it, you're giving yourself a false worldview.
> The majority of people aren't racist nor do they have a problem with government helping them out.
40% is ....not a majority
the current POTUS has a 37% approval rating and this is considered to be historically low, due to wars, corruption, etc.
but even with all of that corruption and failure, 37% of surveyed adults, *still approve*. This includes his frequent, deeply racist tirades on Twitter. They approve!
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This is a very strong exaggeration of the reality. It's similar to saying "almost all Democratic Party voters want to turn the US into Soviet communism", and is about equally inaccurate.
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https://aeon.co/essays/what-if-jobs-are-not-the-solution-but...
this essay is asking the right questions
Assuming that’s true and AI is part of the solution, are you implying we should expect the AI overlords to create such a system? That will never happen. They have literally no incentives to decommodify the economy it’s what gives them power
The solution is The Matrix.
The "real world" is just computers/AIs running everything in a pointless loop.
Humans aren't "batteries" (that never even made sense to begin with) but instead are living their happy lives in the simulation to provide something to simulate investment and shareholder value.
It's dumb, but it still seems more plausible than people accepting an overnight switch into the "space communism" of nobody needing to work. Everyone is too invested in their own spot in the hierarchy.
The original idea I think was they were biological components in a digital/biological computer complex. The Matrix sets up scenarios, and the human brains interact with them in human ways which are sometimes of use to the machines. Meanwhile, the machines see all of it and can monitor for problem humans. ISTR this was tossed as too intellectual for an action movie.
Another option to either The Matrix or Star Trek is Idiocracy, only there’s an elite group of humans and AI in charge over the deteriorating masses. Let’s not count out The Hunger Games or Elysium.
Isn't there an entire r/antiwork thread dedicated to not working?
I'm sorry... you didn't understand the article.
The goal of having a job isn't happiness. At least not immediately. The goal is to have something to bargain with: employees offer labor, employers buy it. If employees don't deliver, they get fired, if employers don't deliver, employees leave / strike. This is what keeps system in a semblance of balance. But once would-be employees can be employees no more, they have no way of influencing any aspect of their governance. Not economical, not political, not military, not ethical.
In other words, people need jobs to try to secure their place in the world on multiple levels. It's not about socializing at work, at least, that factor is absolutely not a priority.
Nice thought, but who controls the production (AI Compute) that enables this lifestyle? Those who control the production will control the non-workers.
So there’s one reference to happy, investor happiness. There’s 4 to meaning though.
I don’t disagree with you but you’re also missing the scarier point that economic collapse will come before the meaning even is missed.
This article ideally should have been two. One about how a consumer economy without consumers cannot be an economy. Another about what comes next.
Reminds me of this story.
Milton Friedman was once visiting China when he was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors, thousands of workers were toiling away building a canal with shovels. He asked his host, a government bureaucrat, why more machines weren’t being used. The bureaucrat replied, “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton responded, “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, you should give these workers spoons, not shovels!”
> most people like the social aspect of work, but not being beholden to their boss
From what I see out there "being beholden to the boss" is the social aspect people like most. It is what gives the work purpose; knowing that you are pleasing someone else.
Some are quite capable of being their own boss, but the people who can actually sustain that long term seem few and far between. It seems that it becomes easy to spiral into a pit of depression when there is no clear feedback in the value being created. Having to regularly deal with another person is not always desirable but having to regularly deal with another person also forces the feedback loop to occur.
A utopian dream. The world has heard this story before. It completely ignores the jungle we find ourselves in.
Yeah, people need a creative output, not just for creativity sake but something that feels productive/constructive and beneficial to them and their society/community.
Open source is an example of such work, and amazing things have been achieved - arguably far more impressive and useful than any private tech company has achieved ( and arguably more than all for-profit tech companies combined).
We should focus on expanding the open source cooperative model to all other areas of society/productivity. With modern technology, knowledge availability, and AI, I don't see why people couldn't organize at the grassroots level and build/solve real problems their local (or global) communities may be facing.
I really don't see why we need all of the VCs, marketers and MBAs... No offense to anyone but the typical SV tech company structure and operations just don't even seem efficient... much of the focus is on marketing/manipulation, enshitification, dark patterns and other dishonest and ultimately counter-productive bullshit.
We should be able to organize and build open/cooperative alternatives to SV shitware (and not just software) and we should be able to outcompete the tech shittocracy.. simply because it's actually terribly shitty and inneficient.
> I don't see why people couldn't organize at the grassroots level and build/solve real problems their local (or global) communities may be facing.
Usually it's because when they do, their de facto owner - "the state" - goes after them with guns and trained sadists.
>I really don't see why we need all of the VCs, marketers and MBAs... No offense to anyone but the typical SV tech company structure and operations just don't even seem efficient... much of the focus is on marketing/manipulation, enshitification, dark patterns and other dishonest and ultimately counter-productive bullshit.
That's called value creation: manipulating human populations to perceive certain arrangements of matter (or of notions) as "valuable", i.e. that those forms have some inherent quality which legitimately causes individual volition to subject itself to outside command for the sake of the given arrangement.
> we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money
What's your proposal if not traditional work? The realistic outcome I see is shifting labor to unautomatable sectors like hospitality. That will keep people employed, but unhappy as they increasingly find themselves unable to find jobs they enjoy, or at comparable levels of income.
edit: I realize many people are unhappy with their jobs now, but by dint of labor, they can improve their lot. I am lamenting the closing of this window.
A couple of options off the top of my head: art, research, athletics, the humanities
AI is already coming for "art" and "research" - by "slop metrics" it's already there for "art".
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Or maybe the problem is that exchanging labor for scarce necessities only makes sense when labor itself is scarce.
We all see the incipient decoupling of labor from capital, while still having bills to pay. We are at the stage where we need to trial solutions, like a Pigouvian tax.
Milking unicorns.
The vast majority of people do not work jobs that they enjoy, that is a middle-class indulgence and ideal that they don't even live up to; almost all their literature is about why they should be enjoying things that they don't or how to discover the things that they might enjoy, and they stuff themselves with drugs to make themselves pay attention and not want to die.
And that's the top 15% of the population. The rest are not romanticizing digging ditches, scraping the dead skin off people's feet, or putting catheters up senior citizens.
Your "realistic" scenario is how 95% of the world lives already.
Getting meaning, community, culture, and "growth" from your job is middle-class religion, and they're constantly having crises of faith. The default state is to find these things in something other than serving people in order to eat.
We would all love to move to a society where we don't have to work for others to survive, but our current system is fundamentally not set up to handle this situation. Capitalism is a useful system for employing scarce resources productively (most of the time) but it doesn't really have an answer for a post-scarcity world. If technology is developed to allow us to end scarcity, instead of everyone having enough, we will end up in a situation where the owners of that technology end up with far, far more than enough while the large majority of people who do not have anything to offer those owners will starve. That sounds dystopian (and it is) but I don't see how we avoid that fate with our current economic system.
no? this isn't what it argues at all. did you read it?
You're absolutely right, and people will cite this while pointing to The Culture and saying "see, this is what we mean, everything will be fine."
Except nobody wants to get into the guts of how those systems came about. Nobody wants to discuss policy changes needed to ensure these sorts of outcomes, opportunities. Nobody wants to discuss regulations, tax schemes, land use requirements, accountability, ownership, shared prosperity.
Citing a potentiality as a certainty without any discussion as to how to get there is about as productive as daydreaming you're a billionaire and how you'd spend all that money. You have to do the fucking work, first, before any sliver of that outcome even becomes possible.
And if there's one thing the AIBros are adverse to, it's doing fucking work.
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