[siliconunit]

Zooming out: I think lots of comments suffer from a combination of workcentric view of life and old school puritan values where work is holy and good no matter what. In a true 'smart' society first thing you would do along with your skilled and big headed friends would be to figure out a way to fully automate everything and NOT work... Yes fix the odd broken stuff and help out when is needed, improve and innovate for the sake of optimization/discovery and scientific curiosity, but nothing mandatory to the actual single in order to have basic needs covered, food, housing etc. Money and all the financial system is a lame excuse to keep the status quo and everyone else under its control, with enough computational power you can forecast and implement very nice lifestyle for everyone, the ability to measure and compute nearly everything to a very good degree is something that only recently we achieved and we are not taking full advantage of. Simple example: Japan... too many old people too few to support them, yes we could automate most of the food chain and provide free housing for all of them, but we don't have -fantasy resource x (money)- to accomplish it, this is frankly ridiculous. If you can measure resources and make sure you use them in a reasoned manner you can cover most basic needs for everyone, the reason why it doesn't happen is the heritage of a feudal society who prized violence and subjugation of others and believed in invisible entities that would punish who was against them and/or the established power, and power needed slaves/workers. This was a blink of an eye ago historically.

[bradlys]

No joke. Where are the teenagers on HN? This place seems to be full of angst-ridden middle-aged people who decry the lack of backbone and work ethic of the modern man - who cannot imagine not working because they’ve finally hit the peak of their career and are doing so well in middle management!! I mean, I just got a damn raise for shipping that product! I worked hard and so should you god damn it!

[UncleOxidant]

Those middle management jobs tend to be the first to go in a downturn.

[throwaway0a5e]

When will we retire this trope? People decrying these hypothetical middle aged cynics and their puritan work ethic seem to outnumber people actually promoting a puritan work ethic 10:1.

Except maybe some deep down comment threads in an article about programming side projects turned business ventures HN does not really favor people working a lot.

[logicslave]

Alternative view: people worked hard and are now making 400-600k in middle management and are 5-8 years from retirement.

[CountDrewku]

>Yes fix the odd broken stuff and help out when is needed, improve and innovate for the sake of optimization/discovery and scientific curiosity, but nothing mandatory to the actual single in order to have basic needs covered, food, housing etc.

Unfortunately, I think this is just a fantasy utopian outlook. Humans have HAD to do things almost their entire existence in order to survive. When you take this away a lot of people fall in to depression. I'm not convinced our minds are able to cope with the option of doing nothing. We currently have to do very little to exist in 1st world countries, at least compared to what we had to do in the past and yet you've got a plethora extremely unhappy individuals. I think the problem is not having to do stuff but having to do things that aren't directly giving you a sense of purpose.

>improve and innovate for the sake of optimization/discovery and scientific curiosity,

Maybe I'm pessimistic but I don't think many people do that just for the sake of curiosity or discovery. They do it because they have to in order to provide for a living or keep themselves and their 'allies' alive. I think you can look at your hobbies and see how you treat them to get a good perspective of how far simple curiosity will take you.

[rland]

The pandemic made this crystal clear to me. The phrase "essential worker" is pure comedy.

If like 80% of the population is not an "essential worker" why the fuck do we need to coerce people to work under the threat of eviction, homelessness, and withholding healthcare?

That's why the phrase "essential worker" had to be drastically expanded. To the point of completely destroying any chance of preventing the spread of covid19. Because if we actually took that term at its true meaning, it would destroy these myths that we have about work and the necessity of work. Even containing covid, which we all believed was pretty goddamn important, was not as important as preserving this myth.

We are living in post-scarcity. Which is why everyone except the "essential workers" are so alienated by their work. If you went to college, you're doing yoga and taking prozac to deal with the anxiety of your alienation. If you didn't go to college, you're ODing on fentanyl.

This problem will not go away with more culture and more myth-making.

[bennysomething]

We're living in a post scarcity world? Really? So if all the people who worked to get food on your plate just stopped it would all be fine? Thats just one example and the list of exchanges required so food just appears in the super market is too long for me to even begin. Take any other product you use and it will be the same. No idea how this is post scarcity, all of this thing called the modern world takes work, it's not magic.

[rland]

Those people are the essential workers I'm talking about. They are a small portion of the population.

Do you notice how during the pandemic, none of them stopped working? How many do you know personally? And how large that group, the everyone else who stopped working, is?

[pdimitar]

> I'm not convinced our minds are able to cope with the option of doing nothing.

You conflate "doing anything" with "working".

A lot of people would be extremely happy partying every other for most of their lives.

> We currently have to do very little to exist in 1st world countries, at least compared to what we had to do in the past and yet you've got a plethora extremely unhappy individuals.

You don't know how strongly those two are correlated and why. I'd claim that a lot of unhappy individuals are such because they have no direction in life and that direction can be a ton of other things who are not paid work.

> Maybe I'm pessimistic but I don't think many people do that just for the sake of curiosity or discovery.

Correct, I'd optimistically say 20% of people would but the cynic in me says 6-7%.

Still, as said above, there are plenty of activities that aren't paid work that are enjoyable. Plus you don't need to have only hobby.

I've known some rich people who have anywhere between 7 to 10 active hobbies at a time and they successfully alternate them to keep themselves busy and engaged.

[courtf]

For most of humanity's existence, we were nomadic hunter-gatherers. The majority of what we HAD to do was keep moving. We traded that life for a more predictable food supply during the agricultural "revolution." That was when the back-breaking labor, long hours and slavery really took off.

We might not be good at sitting around doing nothing, but it's the sitting around part that is really the problem.

[CWuestefeld]

with enough computational power you can forecast and implement very nice lifestyle for everyone, the ability to measure and compute nearly everything to a very good degree is something that only recently we achieved and we are not taking full advantage of.

This isn't correct. Friedrich Hayek showed (and won a Nobel Prize for it) that this kind of thing is fundamentally uncalculatable. It's not just a matter of scale, it's that important information like how different inputs can be substituted for each other and at what cost are spread across a huge distributed emergent machine. No one entity knows this stuff, or even knows what questions to ask. Heck, even the individuals that are cods in that distributed machine don't even know what logic they're applying.

So throw as much computational power at it as you like, you're still going to wind up with shortages and quality problems if you try to have any centralized agency make these calls.

[bennysomething]

I didn't know about this (the Nobel prize bit), I've heard the argument in different ways. I find it infuriating that this amazing machine of pricing just gets ignored, taken for granted or worse.

[kazen44]

mind you the soviet tried something like this in the early 1980's. Using computers and mathematical models to see where changes where required in the command economy.

This did not work, obviously.

[twiddling]

Francis Spufford's Red Plenty touched on this in some of the vignettes in that book. Fun book to be read as historical fiction set in the USSR.

[anoncake]

> and won a Nobel Prize for it

In Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, or Peace?

[CWuestefeld]

LMGTFY: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=friedri...

[jerven]

The comment is that "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1974 " is not really a Nobel prize, as it was not set up by Nobel.

[isoskeles]

> Money and all the financial system is a lame excuse to keep the status quo and everyone else under its control, with enough computational power you can forecast and implement very nice lifestyle for everyone, the ability to measure and compute nearly everything to a very good degree is something that only recently we achieved and we are not taking full advantage of.

I'm not following what you mean by this, even after reading your example. I would not trust an algorithm to "forecast and implement" a lifestyle for me. What algorithms exist that currently do this? Are they open source? Who wrote the code, or are they AI/ML driven, and if so, where did the data used to train the algorithms come from? And what does it look like for an algo to implement my lifestyle? (Does my phone send me notifications such as: Time to go get a coffee at Local Cafe #277?)

I also think this doesn't take into consideration how complex peoples' lives are or what people do when they feel some sense of inertia in life and decide to make a change (e.g. find a relationship, get a pet, change habits like diet or exercise, have children).

Another source of confusion for me is that your comment seems to just address the decision-making process, like a sort of AI/ML centrally-planned economy. What about the work of extracting resources and converting to goods/services? Outsourcing the decision-making to automation without outsourcing the work seems like the worst of all possible worlds, the most oppressive solution to organizing society (that I can think of). But, I may have misunderstood what you were getting at here.

Nonetheless, it's an interesting thing to think about.

[esyir]

Conversely, we're nowhere near that yet, so that bit is meaningless. And work is essentially still a means of producing value. As such, it's a heuristic for people's contribution to society and cooperation. Why would we, as a society, wish to incentivize the defectors?