[sytelus]

Eventually technology should kill pretty much all of the jobs. Human time and energy should be spent on what they find interesting, not on mundane stuff such as farming, housing, construction, database plumbing - all of which could be easily automated. No human should have to work to pay bills because there should be no bills. That should be the promise of technology. Only jobs left for humans should be things that require creativity, higher level reasoning and new ideas. Of course, there may be AI one day that does better than us on these areas as well and that's just part of evolution. It doesn't necessarily have to mean humans will go extinct. Universe has plenty of space for all of us and next generation of intellectual species.

[jackcosgrove]

If it were still up and running, I'd link you to regretsy.com for a primer on most people's level of creativity. But it's gone so now all I can say is that it showed the worst "user-generated stuff" people posted to Etsy.

Not buying it - we have specialization and professionalization in part to maintain quality of work. Everyone cannot be, and should not be, an artist.

Anyways, if no one had to work, most people would just do drugs.

[sytelus]

No one says everybody needs to be creative or artists or mathematicians or scientists. All I'm saying is human life is too precious to keep assembling iPhones for 12 hours a day or bag groceries at Walmart. I think assertion that everyone start doing drugs if they need not do jobs shows utter and incomprehensible ignorance. Sure, not all are creative but that's not the requirement to have a life without mandatory jobs you don't want to do. People may turn in to beach bums or surfers or just hippy wanderers - whatever. It's their life they got one shot at living and it's still better activity than forcing them to flip burgers mechanically at McDonnalds 10 hours a day.

[forgottenpass]

Anyways, if no one had to work, most people would just do drugs.

And when people do have to work, they just alternate between drugs that make them better workers, and drugs that let them forget work.

[Florin_Andrei]

It seems like the basic blueprint of the human being, at every level, requires a certain amount of constant stress to function properly, an external challenge to the capabilities or even integrity of the system. At every level. Purely physical (motion), immunity, emotional level, intellectual level, etc.

Unless we change the blueprint in a massive way, we won't do well in a life of complete leisure.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

What humans consider leisure is simply enjoyable work. If there is no "work" work and just leisure, we're fine.

But not if there's nothing to do at all.

[kaybe]

If they had fun making it, why not? Not everyone will go to the Olympics..

[jackcosgrove]

People aren't thinking enough about what life would be like with no responsibilities. The sort of internal reward you're describing would be hollow because people would still see others' work that was better than theirs, and they would feel jealous. And ultimately everyone would know that it was all a sham, and that humanity was unnecessary and living in a zoo of its own creation.

Most of my sense of self comes from overcoming obstacles, and I'm sure a lot of people would agree with that sentiment. I'm all for automation and AI doing the grunt work, but I don't want to live in a zoo. We should take the benefits of automation and continue to struggle and exert ourselves, and seek out greater challenges than we could before. Automation as an escape from work? I'll pass.

[xnxn]

> The sort of internal reward you're describing would be hollow because people would still see others' work that was better than theirs, and they would feel jealous.

Well, that's the status quo.

> Most of my sense of self comes from overcoming obstacles, and I'm sure a lot of people would agree with that sentiment. [...] Automation as an escape from work? I'll pass.

You would be welcome to work as much as you like, of course. Obstacles would be self-selected, not assigned by chance or force.

If you live in my hypothetical utopian society and truly feel that humanity must suffer so that you can derive meaning from "the struggle", you might have to emigrate to a polity of like-minded masochists.

[jackcosgrove]

I'm arguing we can't get away from the status quo. If everyone can follow their muse, muse-following will devolve into a pissing contest. And if some people choose to work and others don't, those who work will become wealthier/stronger/more advanced than those who don't. Then there will be conflict between the two. A surplus of resources does not eradicate human foibles.

People were saying the same things in the Edwardian era about progress solving all of life's problems. Then we started World War I to a large degree because people were bored and wanted stimulation. This is just another utopian prediction that won't come true.

[dclowd9901]

Why do you think people wouldn't/couldn't challenge themselves in ways they care about (rather than arbitrary bullshit they have to do for someone else)? Why do you think challenge or accomplishment only comes from your 9-5 job? Have you ever done anything but work?

[jackcosgrove]

Lots of assumptions in your post.

The work we do is not arbitrary bullshit. Civilization takes work to maintain and grow.

[kaybe]

Maybe we have different visions of the future.

I don't think there will be robots to do all the housework for everyone. And there are many areas in the world where it will just not be worth it to automate many things unless you have robots that are as cheap to make and run as humans, and want to exist there by their own right, and also behave like biological beings in the face of environmental influences (sea spray, I'm looking at you).

So take away the hard work in large-scale agriculture, production, research, medical care..., and you are still left with a large amount of things to do. Also, there is a lot that just gives satisfaction from doing it yourself, like making clothes, a house, or cooking. I don't have to make the best meal ever to find it worth it.

[Udik]

Obligatory reading here: Riders of the purple wage, by Philip José Farmer.

[bcook]

Some people find farming, construction, housing, etc interesting. Something like cleaning toilets... the robots can have that. :)

Though, I must say that I subscribe to the notion that creating AI will very likely be the last big impact we will have on history. We will just live while AI will thrive.

[lazaroclapp]

Plenty of people now a days find knitting interesting, and continue to indulge in it. Despite the fact that industrialization, automation and globalization has made home knitting in developed countries utterly unable to compete at a commercial level. Same for a lot of things in the maker movement.

The people whose hobby is farming, building or something else of the sort would be quite able to keep doing that in a post-scarcity robot utopia (assuming we really get there). It would just not be something they do for commercial gain.

[undersuit]

>We will just live while AI will thrive.

Why let them thrive uncontested? What's stopping us from using our own resources for self improvement of our mental facilities. I don't necessarily want to be a Jupiter Brain, I'd be willing to settle for a intergalactic iron man suit with brain enhancement, interfaces, or reworks.

[bcook]

I meant it relatively. AI will be capable of near infinite growth. Us, not so much. I guess some sort of AI-cyborg hybrid could allow us some level of enhancement, but our brains are only physically capable of so much.

[Florin_Andrei]

> Universe has plenty of space

True, but that might actually be the challenge. There's too much space out there.

I live in California. Let's say the Sun is a soccer ball right here next to me. Then the Earth is a large grain of sand a few meters away. Jupiter is a marble a few blocks down the road. Speed of light is like an ant running.

And the nearest star is another soccer ball way out in Greenland. Think about that for a second.

http://florin.myip.org/blog/i-had-no-idea-just-how-big-solar...

To get out of the confines of the solar system, we need some massive breakthrough. Probably entirely new physics.

[blacksmith_tb]

Or to accept that we'll have to settle for expanding throughout our own solar system, which has quite a lot of real estate (especially moons and asteroids). We might even manage some probes to nearby stars.

[anon1mous]

No, if we really wanted we could build an H-Bomb spaceship in a decade or two and fly to the nearest stars in a few decades.

[Florin_Andrei]

It takes forever to get there. We know of no habitable exoplanet yet, so when you do get there, you still live in a tin can in orbit.

I'm not saying we'll never make it. I'm saying the magnitude of the effort is enormous. In a sense, Sart Trek and Star Wars have done a disservice to space exploration by making it seem so easy.

The scales of energy, time, and complexity involved are colossal.

[csense]

Yes, eventually [1] we should reach a utopia where robots produce all the food, clothing and shelter needed so that 100% of humanity can play video games or watch Netflix all day, and still survive and have at least what's today thought of as an upper-lower-class to lower-middle-class lifestyle.

But if we have to go through intermediate point where 50% of humanity needs to be on the job to keep the lights on and the other 50% can live the life of leisure, how do we decide who's in which 50% without dangerous social upheavals?

[1] Assuming we don't kill ourselves or get sent back to the stone age with nuclear weapons or AI run amok.

[Xcelerate]

As great as this sounds (and I'm a full supporter of the idea), I don't think it's going to happen. Humans have what seems to be a somewhat innate desire to "work". If there aren't enough jobs, we'll just add eight more layers of management positions to fill the gaps. If an improvement in technology led to more free time, then we should already have vastly more of it than we did in the 1800s.

[Rumudiez]

And so we do. Two surveys placed mid-1800s average work weeks in manufacturing at close to 70 hours per week[1] with modern hours hovering around the common 40 hour work week, which is still actively being challenged[2].

1. https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/

2. http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/02/news/economy/sweden-6-hour-w...

[undersuit]

No one is proposing we stop people from working. Go ahead and be a farmer, you may not be efficient as the robofarmers, but that's OK you aren't going to have to sell the farm.

[dclowd9901]

I think this idea is almost unfathomable to humanity, which is funny, because who doesn't day dream of not "working" anymore (in which the meaning of "working" is doing something that you don't want to do to earn livable income).

An obvious first step is a basic income, paid for by military spending cuts and increase on corporate, capital gains and high earner taxes. This will show people that such an idea is sustainable, so they can prepare their mind for the coming utopia.

[rawTruthHurts]

Meanwhile, in Sierra Leone...