Comment by pdonis
20 hours ago
> 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?
I've worked for giant tech companies for the past 20 years and have literally never heard anyone refer to themselves or their coworkers as the smartest, most driven people on the planet, or movers or shakers. The biggest talk I've heard is developers thinking they're some of the better developers, like 95th+ percentile.
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