[daenz]

>Such is “work.” Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it’s forced. This is axiomatic.

Work and play are both voluntary to different degrees. You can survive without working, although your existence will likely be miserable. You can also survive without playing, but again, your existence will also likely be miserable. Play is something we prefer to do voluntarily, but if you don't force yourself to play every once in awhile, your life will probably be unhealthy. In that sense, it is not voluntary.

Even if I didn't work, I still have to do things that I don't want to do in order to keep my life at the level that I want. I need to clean where I live, keep myself clean, keep my body healthy by eating healthy food and exercising. Work is just an extension of that. It's a choice that I make in order to sustain or progress my life at the level that I desire.

Calling work non-voluntary reveals more about the author than it does about the system they describe: that they feel that they have no choice. They have a choice, but the choice is unpleasant. That is not the same as no choice. Declaring that you have no choice is a result of the inability to confront the weakness to acknowledge the unpleasant decision.

[avl999]

> You can survive without working, although your existence will likely be miserable.

For a large number of people not working is likely to directly lead to literally death. For most people it is not a choice at all.

[Iv]

In rich countries, less than 1% of the population work on agriculture. We could have a society without starvation even if 99% of the population did not work.

The fact that starvation is possible in a rich country is by design. It is not a necessary fact of the economy.

[remolacha]

The reason why less than 1% of the population can work on agriculture is because the 1% that work on agriculture are supported by highly specialized individuals that provide advanced farming equipment, weather modeling, genetically engineered seeds, financial products that help forecast demand and supply capital, etc. In a world where only 1% work, the supply chains for those things fall apart, and it then takes more than 1% of the population to feed the rest.

[astrobe_]

This is true but some of the technology needs to be done only once - the same way you only need to make a firmware once and sell thousands of devices. So a farmer today by him- or herself alone, does feed a lot more people than two centuries ago.

[pdonis]

> We could have a society without starvation even if 99% of the population did not work.

Only if nobody wanted anything else but food. Which is nonsense. People want lots of things besides food. And clothing, and shelter. And sanitation, and medical care, and...

What you are calling "rich" countries are countries in which people have way, way more options--where their lives are a lot more than just bare subsistence. And history shows that the vast majority of people want all those options; they don't want to live a bare subsistence life. (If you do, how are you even posting here? The Internet is not possible in a bare subsistence world.) And providing all the things needed for all those options requires lots of work.

[Iv]

I am obviously making an extreme reasoning there. It is just to illustrate the absurdity of the notion that unemployed people should starve because otherwise no one would work to produce food.

Society is designed in a way where non-working people are shamed and considered parasites and anomalies. If we want to transition to a non-working society, this has to change, or the fear of losing one job's to a machine will stall automation.

We have subway drivers despite the tech to automate this job has existed since the 1960s.

[pdonis]

> the notion that unemployed people should starve because otherwise no one would work to produce food

I don't see where anyone is making an argument based on any such notion.

I think the reason most people are suspicious of those who don't work for a living is fairness: we all benefit from the many goods and services that our society produces, so we all should contribute our fair share to producing them.

I agree that the market for jobs in our society is very inefficient, which means that many people are unemployed not because they are unable or unwilling to do productive work but because of our inefficient process for matching people to jobs that will actually be meaningful for them. However, no one has any more efficient process for doing that; there are processes that lead to less unemployment in the sense of fewer people not having a "job" on paper, but those processes (as shown by the Soviet Union and China) don't care about the actual job satisfaction of individual people, so they don't solve the problem we are discussing here.

I also agree that industrialization created many "jobs" that actually aren't meaningful at all; the only reason people were used to do them is that nobody (yet) knew how to build machines that would do them. I agree that those jobs should be automated. What should happen as a result of such automation is that the necessities of life--food, clothing, shelter, basic transportation--should get cheaper over time. The main reason this hasn't actually happened in developed countries (or hasn't happened as much as it should--there are areas in which it has) is governments artificially keeping prices high to serve special interests (for example, the US government paying farmers not to grow crops). That is a political problem, not a technical problem.

Even if all the drudge work is automated, however, people will still need to design the machines, make sure they are doing what they're supposed to do, take care of any malfunctions, and update the designs as conditions change. Plus, there are many services that only humans can provide. So I don't think we are anywhere close to having a shortage of work that people will pay other people to do.

[coffeecat]

> I think the reason most people are suspicious of those who don't work for a living is fairness: we all benefit from the many goods and services that our society produces, so we all should contribute our fair share to producing them.

This implies that an employee of a firm like Renaissance Technologies should have the same social status as an unemployed welfare recipient; I do not believe this is the case in our society.

[CuriouslyC]

People want to feel empowered to choose. If there are so many options that choosing is hard, then it's just another source of stress. Research indicates that the ideal number of choices is four, with anywhere from three to seven being good.

In an ideal world, we would have artisans that could craft high quality bespoke items for a fair price, and a small selection of popular items that suit most people.

[eloisius]

What the hell. How do you suppose energy, transportation, raw materials, fertilizer, paved roads, markets for distribution, etc. would materialize to allow for that 1% agriculture worker population to feed anyone?

[toomuchtodo]

Technology and automation. We’re arguing over how the productivity from those are distributed.

[eloisius]

Fully automated space communism has yet to provide automated self-repairing roads, agriculture equipment, etc. so not sure why we’d argue about that yet. The best it was able to produce was famine and the starvation of millions last century.

[toomuchtodo]

Humans will still be needed for agriculture production, but if enough people aren’t fed yet we’re able to produce enough food, you use taxes and benefits (EBT, SNAP, higher minimum wages) to fix the allocation issue.

This isn’t rocket science.

[chordalkeyboard]

> In rich countries, less than 1% of the population work on agriculture. We could have a society without starvation even if 99% of the population did not work.

Modern agriculture depends on the technology that is created by the other 40-70% of the population that works. Additionally you have to compensate the people in agriculture with something for their labor.

> The fact that starvation is possible in a rich country is by design. It is not a necessary fact of the economy.

It's also a consequence of human rights. We have decided that forcing people to work in the field so that other people can enjoy the benefit of their labor without due consideration is wrong.

[zeckalpha]

40-70% is a wide range. How did you get that number?

[chordalkeyboard]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment-to-population_ratio

Iceland is 81.8% and South Africa is 41.7%, according to the table on the page.

[zeckalpha]

That’s the total working population, not those who work on technology to support agriculture.

[taxcoder]

While that is an incredible number, have you factored in any workers for agricultural supplies and equipment, or for processing, distribution, or preparation?

[Iv]

If you count the whole field of agriculture, which would include most supplies producers and processing, you reach ~2% of the population (in France, I took my country as a reference, as I know it is a net exporter of food). I don't consider preparation to be necessary because if the food is free, I can wash the potatoes myself or even make my own bread.

[chordalkeyboard]

> I don't consider preparation to be necessary because if the food is free, I can wash the potatoes myself or even make my own bread.

Who provides the water? who provides the rest of the inputs for bread?

There are a lot of things that need to be done to provide a basic standard of living, even if 1% of the society are slaves who labor in the fields for the benefit of the other 99%.

[Iv]

Oh yes, to be comfortable you need far more than just food, I agree.

My point is that we are far past the point where mere survival requires the whole population to work fulltime.

Collective choices are made with the assumption that everyone should work but we have the means to create an entirely different society.

[HuwytNashi_002]

That's true of all living things. It's a choice.

You can sit there and twiddle your thumbs until entropy does its thing, or you can choose to work against it.

You can hunt, gather, and farm. Or you can do something in exchange for credits to get food from other people who do.

[avl999]

I have no interest in an academic debate about choice. Most reasonable people will agree that having a "choice" between x and the end of your existence (in most cases in extremely painful and excruciating way) is no choice at all.

[chordalkeyboard]

Biological needs are a fact of life, its not something farmers invented so people would buy their food.

[elindbe3]

At least if we're talking about the US (and probably EU as well), it isn't the choice between life and death. Anyone can go be homeless in California and get a couple hundred a month in food stamps and medicaid. Or panhandle a few hundred a month from tourists.

I agree you shouldn't literally die if you choose not to work in a first world country, but you should only receive the bare minimum to keep you alive (e.g. a tent, basic medical treatment and a steady diet of government cheese).

[marcus_holmes]

Change a single number in your bank account and see how everything you're saying here changes.

Work is voluntary for the rich. Poor people will do the things that rich people don't want to do in order to keep their lives at the level they want.

[chordalkeyboard]

Very few people are that rich. Most people work somewhere and those that do not are essentially dependent on those that do.

> Poor people will do the things that rich people don't want to do in order to keep their lives at the level they want.

Yes, that's a fact of life. The things that people don't want to do are still things that (mostly) need to be done.

[underslung]

>Calling work non-voluntary reveals more about the author than it does about the system they describe: that they feel that they have no choice. They have a choice, but the choice is unpleasant. That is not the same as no choice. Declaring that you have no choice is a result of the inability to confront the weakness to acknowledge the unpleasant decision.

The author is using the term non-voluntary in a different sense. If all your material needs are met, e.g. housing, food and hygiene — then working to acquire capital is voluntary. The pre-requisites mentioned are the foundation of an abundant society. Obviously someone in India is going to have a far greater need to acquire capital to sustain themselves' than your average metropolitan Australian; such is the wealth disparity that currently exists globally.

Don't get me wrong — I believe work is an important component of our lives'. Indeed it can give us meaning and joy amongst other things (perhaps routine as a fundamental). But what I think this author is trying to illustrate is that our current society as a structure leaves zero room for the disciplines that are either a) unexplored, or b) are creative in nature. If it's the latter then it is a mere pittance of what a full-time employee earns. That is the trade-off.

[roenxi]

And calling for the abolition of work is like calling for the abolition of death. Great idea, difficult to argue against. Difficult to implement too.

Given the current state of technology, it seems quite likely that all the actual plans for abolishing work will devolve into a small group of low status, probably socially voiceless, people being picked out and made to do all the work.

[Iv]

For more than 20 years I have advocated and pursued the idea that society should abolish work. I am astonished that in 2020 most of our production is not automated.

We have had the ability to automate most work for two decades. Food, clothes, furniture, electronic devices, all of these could be produced with close to zero human labor. Why don't we?

After exploring a market (agriculture) in order to launch my own automation company, I have come to the conclusion that it is not the tech that we lack, it is the will. A culture change is needed in order to make people realize that a work-less society is:

- possible

- desirable

- is not going to make them poorer

[didericis]

Many things we consider "automatic" require complex maintenance and upkeep, and inappropriate automation can actually increase the net amount of work needed to be done.

It often coincides with a loss of ownership. If you can't make your own value, and you're letting something else make it for you, you might save yourself labor, but you're giving up your ability to create that value. Yes, the system as a whole will produce more, which is good, but the loss of leverage is an important factor to consider.

There's also a wasting and dependency effect that occurs when too much of a system is automated. If people aren't needing to work on or maintain a system, they don't need to know how it works to use it, pretty much by definition. It's doing the work for them. That creates a dangerous situation where essential systems aren't really understood, and fewer and fewer people end up knowing how to fix things because there isn't the same need to distribute the knowledge of upkeep/understand the work it's doing personally by doing it yourself.

Automation is extremely beneficial, and I'm often frustrated by what seem to be clear cases of not taking advantage of it, but I think what you're saying here over simplifies things.

I think the solution is for more people to learn how to set up their own automation and to automate things without making them too centralized.

[Iv]

I am trying to not delve into a 20 pages presentation, but I have gone though and through these themes for most of my professional life. The question whether we can really go to 100% of automation is moot if we can go to 99%. Either way it means that full employment is unnecessary and leads to the creation of bullshit jobs.

> I think the solution is for more people to learn how to set up their own automation and to automate things without making them too centralized.

That's my sad conclusion as well. We could get to an automated society with far less pain and much faster if it was decided collectively though.

Look at car automation: if a city wanted to make automated cars a reality in their streets, there are tons of accommodations they could do: from radio beacons to official maps, standards on how to signal construction work, purposefully designed roads...

Instead, we are trying to design automated cars with the assumption that zero efforts will be made to promote them. Worse: we assume they are going to be so criticized that they have to perform better by a magnitude on day 1. That's making us waste 40 years.

[pfalcon]

> if a city wanted to make automated cars a reality in their streets, there are tons of accommodations they could do: from radio beacons to official maps, standards on how to signal construction work, purposefully designed roads...

Sorry, but that sounds hilarious. If "a city wanted", it's still people who would need to ensure "to signal construction work". And people don't care. And for other stuff, people would need to pay for it with their taxes. I'm sorry, but as an outsider, I would say the roads (usual roads!) in the US are in "perfect" condition only in California. In other states, it's the usual asphalt-with-cracks, which will turn into a hole when a heavy truck rides it thru the rainy/snow season.

Heck, majority of the world has problems with trash on the streets, and cities can't neither teach their people to not litter, nor clean up timely after them.

[astrobe_]

> And for other stuff, people would need to pay for it with their taxes.

Automation benefits cities as well, you know. For instance computers probably drastically reduces the number of manual processing of paperwork. That's tax money you can use for something else.

[chordalkeyboard]

> That's my sad conclusion as well. We could get to an automated society with far less pain and much faster if it was decided collectively though.

I disagree. I think we have decided collectively to progress towards automation as fast as possible without unduly impacting people's quality of life.

> Look at car automation: if a city wanted to make automated cars a reality in their streets, there are tons of accommodations they could do: from radio beacons to official maps, standards on how to signal construction work, purposefully designed roads...

I believe there already are official maps and standardized signs in the developed world. I agree that incremental improvement is possible and desirable, I also think people are working on these things already. It is possible that signs could be redesigned to make them easier for machines to read but I'm not sure that's much of a bottleneck.

> Instead, we are trying to design automated cars with the assumption that zero efforts will be made to promote them.

I see lots of effort to promote them, they just aren't technologically ready to perform at scale yet.

[Iv]

> I disagree. I think we have decided collectively to progress towards automation as fast as possible without unduly impacting people's quality of life.

We have decided to move all our factories to China instead of automating them. We still have subway drivers despite having the tech to automate subway since the 1960s.

[burntoutfire]

> Many things we consider "automatic" require complex maintenance and upkeep, and inappropriate automation can actually increase the net amount of work needed to be done.

As seen in some test suites and CI/CD pipelines...

[burntoutfire]

> Food, clothes, furniture, electronic devices, all of these could be produced with close to zero human labor. Why don't we?

For a large subsets of those categories, they already are. That's why, if you mostly buy food that's handled by automation (combines etc.) you can sustain yourself on a $50/month food budget. Similarly for furniture, check out IKEA factory videos to see the degree of automation employed in making cheap furniture. Electronics are mostly also produced by machines, humans do the last stage assembly only (and it's mostly because labor in Asia is just cheaper than sophisticated robots required to perform assembly).

Clothes are more difficult from a robotics standpoint (mostly because, unlike wood, cloth is not rigid/does not retain shape, which makes it insanely tricky to manipulate), so we're not there yet. But, on the other hand, making of the cloth itself, which previously required an insane amount of labor, has been fully automated for a long time.

Basically, once you own a place to live in, you can easily sustain yourself with a very part-time minimum wage job. Make the job pay more and you'd need to work maybe a month in year. Most people don't do that because they want the comforts and pleasures brought by market enough to work extra hours for them (usually up to a full-time job).

[neuronic]

Sustain yourself just means not die in your text. But there's more to it than that.

Most people won't do the $50/month food unless forced. The Soylent-junkies maybe, so if you're some robotic Western software dev whose sole purpose in life is placed in its optimization to be "productive" in a corporatist society.

Food is a central cultural part of billions of people's lives, provides joy and is a critical component in socializing. Food is more than just plain sustenance unless forced by natural or artificial circumstances.

[burntoutfire]

Fair enough, but even including all those extras that stil puts the cost at maybe $150/month? That assumes cooking for oneself, not buying a lot of meat or other expensive products etc. On that budget, you will probably not eat worse that a median human.

[neuronic]

That's probably true, yes.

[rayiner]

> We have had the ability to automate most work for two decades. Food, clothes, furniture, electronic devices, all of these could be produced with close to zero human labor. Why don't we?

Because we actually can’t do those things?

[d1amonds]

We do a lot of things that we couldn't before. A lot of it produced loud laughter 100 years before.

If I understand it properly the author suggests we should find the time to play with these things. Who knows what might happen? It will no doubt be interesting.

Our indevidual performance is certainly mind blowing in a play settings. I see "players" do what seems impossible to me every day.

[jackyinger]

The fact of the matter is that automation is far from perfect. There are many tasks that are simple for a human, but fiendishly hard for a machine due to their unpredictable nature. Take driving a car or cooking in a restaurant. How is a machine supposed to know if the meat is a bit too old to be palatable? Would it really be worth it to implement an elaborate apparatus to determine meat freshness, and deploy it in every restaurant? I believe such a thing is firmly in the realm is science fiction, where effort and energy are free, unlike the real physical world we inhabit.

Now consider this, can joy not be had in cooking? I can certainly tell you that I find cooking good food to be a very fulfilling task. Unlike engineering projects I can go from start to finish in under an hour. And it fulfills an immediate and visceral need.

I think that the argument for play is a good one. In engineering I encounter many people who engineer, not for the joy of it (which is spread very thin in many jobs anyway), but for the money. Now imagine if there was no quantitative social status (money) associated with engineering. You would see engineers self select purely on a basis of authentic interest rather than financial status seeking. Would that not bring more promising talent to the table?

Let me now attack the idea of automation from another angle; to claim that we should be able to automate all product is as outrageous as claiming that Atlas holds the earth up. How could we automate everything? Who makes the machine, and perhaps more importantly, who fixes them when they break. You cannot possibly convince me that you could make a machine to fix machines. Again, such a device would be in the realm of science fiction. In reality, even in the relatively controlled environments of factories things inevitably break in unpredictable ways, and there you are, back to needing humans to clean up the mess.

Now, automation does have a place; doing repetitive tasks. But I’d rather order a meal from an expert chef than a robot.

[Iv]

First, the disagreements: no, driving and cooking are not hard tasks to automate. They are stupidly easy if you decide to create the infrastructure for that. You have industrially cooked food, mostly through automated process, in supermarkets, sold as "prepared food". and actually, many cheap restaurants will have several microwaved prepared food in their menu items.

Automatic driving is a very easy task in roads and cities that are designed for it. Instrument all bus lines with ground wires, put a radio beacon on each crossing and sign, a front radar/lidar to detect obstacles and 90s tech is enough to automate a whole city. If it was desired, we would already be there.

Now, like you point out, there are many tasks that bring joy and people would do voluntarily. Said otherwise, there is a non-null amount of volunteer productive work.

Ergo, the goal of automating a society is not to automate 100% of the work, but to automate (100-V)% where V is the amount of voluntary work available.

"But I’d rather order a meal from an expert chef than a robot."

It would be interesting to make a Turing test for cooking. I am sure that there are many robot-made meals that are undistinguishable from chef's preparation.

[jamil7]

I’m not interested in or know much about self driving cars so I’ll leave it. I think your points about cooking are really off base though. It seems like you’re basically describing mass production which we’ve already had for a long time, a wasteful process that produces inferior food.

As for a turing test, we’re talking about a professional chef here. Someone you can take an enormous variety of ingredients to in various forms of freshness or preservation, who can produce something that tastes really good. Theres often a large amount of creativity, improvisation as well as fine motor skills and expert timing involved in the process. It would be a monumental, hugely expensive task to create a machine that could even produce something edible given the same constraints. This just seems so far fetched to me.

[lazyasciiart]

The fine motor skill and expert timing are a given in automation, so let’s start by assuming the chef is not doing the physical work. And if we are trying to recreate the experience of eating at this chefs restaurant, then we aren’t taking them any food to improvise with, we will just eat one or two of the dishes they have already designed - so you may be picturing something more complicated than what would actually do the job.

[NalNezumi]

>Ergo, the goal of automating a society is not to automate 100% of the work, but to automate (100-V)% where V is the amount of voluntary work available.

Isn't that the economic reality rather than "the goal"? And doesn't this also put an shade on your original argument that it is "the will. A culture change is needed"?

I haven't worked for 20 years but I work in certain automation, and from what I've deduced it is rather that the V in (100-V)% is quite high, and then there's W = a x V (a is an positive constant) that specify required labour, specialization & investment for automation; which is almost always lower in supply than "voluntary work available".

[chordalkeyboard]

> They are stupidly easy if you decide to create the infrastructure for that. You have industrially cooked food, mostly through automated process, in supermarkets, sold as "prepared food". and actually, many cheap restaurants will have several microwaved prepared food in their menu items.

Everyone agrees these products are inferior in quality to the comparable manually produced offerings.

> Automatic driving is a very easy task in roads and cities that are designed for it. Instrument all bus lines with ground wires, put a radio beacon on each crossing and sign, a front radar/lidar to detect obstacles and 90s tech is enough to automate a whole city. If it was desired, we would already be there.

It's not that easy to redesign an entire city to accommodate a second transportation network. A lot of buildings would have to be modified. Its probably better to approach this task incrementally using the existing road system.

> It would be interesting to make a Turing test for cooking. I am sure that there are many robot-made meals that are undistinguishable from chef's preparation.

I'd like to see a cooking Turing test as well because I disagree with you and this is in fact testable, one of us is mistaken.

[abyssin]

In rich societies with strong social safety nets, it is possible to live as if work had been abolished. One only needs a fraction of the ressources consumed by a normal Westerner to live a materially comfortable life. But what you realize when you try reaping the benefits of our already largely automated economy, is that work is about ideology. You'll be materially comfortable, but a social outcast. People don't like to work, but they hate non-working people even more.

[chordalkeyboard]

> People don't like to work, but they hate non-working people even more.

Probably because they wonder how those people are figuring out how to eat without contributing to the economy.

[abyssin]

I agree with you in the sense that's how they rationalize their reaction, although I think they don't actually wonder about it and you made a figure of speech, and instead they don't feel it's fair that some stop working until everything is completely automated.

But I see an inconsistency in their feeling of injustice, because some people have to work a lot to get comparatively very little benefits from our largely automated economy. Anyone who works should feel like they live a luxurious life. Instead we see a lot of addiction and despair, despite lifestyles that consume huge amounts of energy.

[avz]

Returns on investment in automation increase with the scale of the system being automated. Therefore, automation promotes centralization of control.

Be careful what you wish for.

[nradov]

The agriculture market already spends billions on automation. For example row crop tractors are mostly self driving. Machines milk cattle with no humans involved. Etc. If you failed in that market then it's not due to a lack of will by customers. It's because you're not a competent businessperson or engineer and failed to achieve product/market fit.

[chordalkeyboard]

Is your automation company still active?

[setgree]

> calling for the abolition of work is like calling for the abolition of death

subbing out death for aging, which is far and away the leading cause of death, I think this is a good metaphor. The first step is to persuade people that work, like aging, is bad [0], and that abolishing work is a comparatively neglected social cause relative to the harms caused.

We might have to live with work for a long time now, because scarcity abounds; but there's no point pretending that's good, or lionizing work for its own sake. It sucks to work at "a job that slowly kills you" [1], just like it sucks that we get old and die.

[0] https://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html (discussed previously here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24770566)

[1] Radiohead, No Surprises: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5CVsCnxyXg

[ianleeclark]

> Declaring that you have no choice is a result of the inability to confront the weakness to acknowledge the unpleasant decision.

Not everyone believes that these choices exist. The author offered the POV--although unstated--that the compulsions sufficient enough exist to either fully obfuscate or remove this choice, and you responded with the fact that this choice exists--not why or how this choice exists, just simply the assertion that it does.

[djrobstep]

> You can survive without working, although your existence will likely be miserable.

That entirely depends on your socio-economic class. I know a lot of rich kids that do no work but live very easy, pleasant lives.

> They have a choice, but the choice is unpleasant. That is not the same as no choice.

A mugger tells me to hand over my watch or get shot. Choice or not choice?

[chordalkeyboard]

> A mugger tells me to hand over my watch or get shot. Choice or not choice?

Choice, of course.

[djrobstep]

So taxation is voluntary? You'll upset a lot of libertarians with that attitude!

[chordalkeyboard]

Libertarians use "voluntary" to refer to a situation absent coercion. Taxation is prima facie coercive so we would just debate semantics if I went that route.

[djrobstep]

You just said that "hand over your watch or get shot" is choice. So then is "hand over your tax or go to prison", yes?

[chordalkeyboard]

I said that libertarians use "voluntary" to refer to a situation that doesn't involve coercion. I did not say that a coerced individual had no choice in the matter. Why would anyone bother to coerce someone who had no choices?

[ilammy]

> You can survive without working, although your existence will likely be miserable.

Miserable, but—be relieved!—short. Because you will die without food, and shelter, and the other things which you can't magically summon from nothingness: in the current society, you need to work to get them, or had to work in the past to amass appropriate wealth, or someone else has to do this for you. Few are lucky to be gifted it from their birth. As are those who can get those necessities incidentally from play, without deliberate planning in fear of not succeeding.

That's basically what this philosophical essay has to tell about the (non) “choice” that you are given: you work, or else you suffer. You do have this choice though, for sure. The play is when you don't have to choose.

[jakelazaroff]

> Calling work non-voluntary reveals more about the author than it does about the system they describe: that they feel that they have no choice.

Assuming I don’t want to starve to death, what are my other options?

I could beg, although that’s still work in the sense that I’d be trading my time for money. I could go around to places that offer free meals to homeless people, but that seems unreliable. And I could steal money or food. That’s about all I can think of.

I suppose that’s technically a “choice”, but only by the most ruthlessly literal definition.

[smnrchrds]

> Assuming I don’t want to starve to death, what are my other options?

Welfare in most developed countries is enough not to starve and not to become fully homeless. But in many countries, it does not go one inch beyond this. Subsisting on welfare is indeed a very uncomfortable life. But it is not literal starvation to death.

[phkahler]

>> Welfare in most developed countries is enough not to starve and not to become fully homeless.

Right, because even that requires someone do work to support people on welfare.

>> Subsisting on welfare is indeed a very uncomfortable life. But it is not literal starvation to death.

It would lead to quick death if we all tried to live that way at once.

[jakelazaroff]

As far as I’m aware, all welfare in the US (e.g. SNAP and unumeployment benefits) have some sort of work as an eligibility requirement.

I suppose you could add “move to a country with a better social safety net” to the list. But it doesn’t change the overall point, which is that every alternative to work requires you to turn your life upside down.

[smnrchrds]

> very alternative to work requires you to turn your life upside down.

Oh, yes, absolutely. But this is moving the goalpost. The question was not whether one could stop working without having to make changes to their lifestyle. The question was whether one could stop working without literally starving to death. In most developed countries, the answer is yes. No one really starves to death due to poverty in developed nations anymore.

I am not too familiar with the situation with the poverty in the US. Do people there still die from poverty-induced starvation in the 21st century?

[jakelazaroff]

My entire contribution to this thread has been an attempt to move the goalposts :) If the question is “is it possible to stop working without literally starving to death?” the answer is trivially yes, but I don’t think that’s particularly interesting.

Getting thrown in jail will get you fed without working. But most people would consider that an absurd tradeoff. So we pretend it’s not an option, moving the goalposts in order to have a more interesting discussion about how to stop working without upending your life or withdrawing from society.

[elindbe3]

I'd prefer not to have to keep making the "life or death" argument but people continually bring it up, probably to try to conflate it with the question of "should you be able to live comfortably without working?"

I would argue you can already live a comfortable life with a minimum of work (say 20h per week part time at big city minimum wage, $13/hr). For example, in Chicago you could rent a room with heating and AC, cook your own basic but flavorful meals, have healthcare through Medicaid and basic transportation on the bus/trains, thrift store clothing and a cheap cell phone with data plan for internet.

[AnimalMuppet]

Seconded. Move the goalposts, because the question without moving them is absurdly uninteresting. I can live a horrible, miserable, shorter life, but it's not a literal death sentence? So, OK, that's better than them taking me out and shooting me, but...

So we concede. smnrchrds wins the point. It's not a point we cared about, though, and we're going to move on to talk about a question we find more interesting: Can a person live a decent life without working?

[konjin]

Welfare is a full time job. Anyone who thinks otherwise has never had to get the right forms filled out, wait hours on end every x weeks at some govt building that takes hours to get to without a car and then fight the bill collectors that buy junk debt to be collected from the poor.

The point of welfare is to make not working so unpleasant that a minimum wage job is less work to hold down.

This is true across the whole developed world, the majority of which I have lived in.

[lazyasciiart]

I have been on welfare in the developed world and it wasn’t like that at all - I’m very skeptical that you’ve managed to get significant personal understanding of welfare across even a majority of the developed world. It sounds like you’re not thinking of pensioners, for one, who generally don’t have many recurring forms to fill out.

[nobody9999]

>I am not too familiar with the situation with the poverty in the US. Do people there still die from poverty-induced starvation in the 21st century?

I think the question needs to be a little more nuanced than that. Here are a few resources to get you started:

https://hungerandhealth.feedingamerica.org/understand-food-i...

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/27/912486921/food-insecurity-in-...

https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/food-insecu...

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

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/11/23/hungry-at...

https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/54-million-people-america...

[djrobstep]

Check out the correlation between poverty and lower life expectancy, and it will become clear that poverty is indeed a death sentence (not to mention its effects on quality of life).

[smnrchrds]

Again, you are absolutely right, but moving the goalpost once more. The lower life expectancy is not due to starvation to death. It is mostly a result of health issues, which is in all likelihood more due to the lack of access to healthcare than food.

[burntoutfire]

Correlation is not causation, it doesn't really explain anything... I thought that by 2020 at least people on HN get that.

[neolog]

I don't know what this website is, it might be bs but google found this:

> more than a third of the country still lives in an area where able-bodied adults are exempt food stamp work requirements.

https://thefga.org/waivers-gone-wild/

[chordalkeyboard]

> I suppose you could add “move to a country with a better social safety net” to the list.

How many countries allow people to move there for the purpose of collecting public assistance?

[inglor_cz]

Just board a boat in Turkey and you will see. Somewhat risky, true.

[chordalkeyboard]

> Assuming I don’t want to starve to death, what are my other options?

Well that's the rub, you don't want to work, you want to eat. The food has to come from somewhere. Even if you were a forager, other animals want to eat the same food.

> I suppose that’s technically a “choice”, but only by the most ruthlessly literal definition.

"Technically correct, the best kind of correct." More seriously we are talking about survival and food. Its hard to imagine a more ruthless domain of inquiry.

[elindbe3]

Buy a one way ticket to Southern California, buy a tent and apply for SNAP and Medicaid.

[Viliam1234]

> Even if I didn't work, I still have to do things that I don't want to do in order to keep my life at the level that I want. I need to clean where I live, keep myself clean, keep my body healthy by eating healthy food and exercising.

How all these things you mentioned are different from having a job: You do not have regular meetings with managers who evaluate your perceived performance against your competitors. No daily standups. Crossfit or not -- your choice. Paleo or not -- your choice. You can take a day off whenever you want to. You don't have to exercise in open space.

[thinkingemote]

I read it as him saying yes we have no choice but he wants one. Therefore change the system to anarchism.

Ultimately and quickly it comes down to philosophy and your view of the truth of the world.

[incompatible]

It's not necessary to change any system, just set aside a place where anarchists can live as they please. We already have millions of square kilometres devoted to capitalism, but why should capitalism be forced on people who don't want it? Sure, anarchism isn't for everybody, and people who prefer capitalism should be able to remain within that system.

[mehrdadn]

Even play isn't always truly voluntary... when your mom tells you to go play with your sibling or another kid... it's not really voluntary is it.

[eyelidlessness]

I’m not sure where Bob Black stands on childhood autonomy, but anarchists tend to agree with non-anarchists that there are and should be limits to it.

Autonomous adults generally aren’t compelled into recreation by an authority.

[mehrdadn]

> Autonomous adults generally aren’t compelled into recreation by an authority.

Haha, well it was quite recently when the mom of a friend of mine (over 18) with a sibling (under 18) made them go do some recreational activity, despite neither of them really wanting to do so. Legally I suppose nobody was obligated to do anything here, but practically speaking I'm not sure how "optional" this was; they basically did as their mom said despite not otherwise wanting to. It's not like families ties instantly break at 18 years old.

[eyelidlessness]

I probably should’ve picked up on the fact that you’re probably a youngn too. You’re right. It isn’t about legal adulthood or even legality.

Children and young adults who still live with or depend on their parents/guardians are usually under their authority to some extent, even for completely arbitrary things like “go play”.

As we get older and more capable those things usually relax but there’s definitely a transition.

An adult who has full autonomy would probably weigh a decision like you described and decide whether to voluntarily go play with their younger sibling even if it wasn’t play for them. Some will do it, others won’t.

I’ll put it another way. I’m getting older(ish, I’m 38), I don’t have all the energy in the world, but I have a puppy. She loves to play and she benefits from it. Sometimes I just don’t feel up to it. I could always decide not to, my only strict obligations are don’t abuse or neglect her. But I usually play even if I don’t want to, by choice, because I want my puppy to be happy and healthy too. That’s a kind of decision making that most young children don’t engage, and gradually becomes more common in early adulthood and becomes more solid as we get more of our own autonomy.

It’s totally voluntary. It’s just not always play for me. And with that said, my puppy wants a play :)

[pmoriarty]

He'd probably say that if it's not voluntary then it's not really play.