[fnordpiglet]

I think the next level is post scarcity. In a post scarcity world maybe we don’t labor and toil to live because it’s unnecessary to tie home, health, food, and life necessities to labor if our labor isn’t useful. Maybe life becomes about something other than working to live and living to work. Maybe tying labor to life necessities was necessary given scarcity of labor, but when labor scales independently of people we need a new way of allocating resources.

[VLM]

Why do contemporary discussions of post scarcity always require something in the future rather than appearing in the past due to "the assembly line" or "agriculture"?

Surely in the vast universe of past human discovery it seems likely if post-scarcity were possible in any form, that we'd have already discovered what will initiate post-scarcity so it should be here now... and it seems unlikely that any individual invention in the future will kick it off if none of the past inventions did.

[fnordpiglet]

Because productivity still scaled linearly with consuming humans, even if the constants improved. AI and other advances offer a potential for nearly autonomous productivity allow for productivity that scales independently of available labor.

Additionally I would say that each advance brought us closer to post scarcity. We have close to eliminated extreme poverty globally. Compared to hunter gatherer society’s we already live post scarcity.

Finally we may very well be post scarcity, but the notion of nobility in work and morality of labor means we can’t yet seriously consider decoupling work from life necessities. At some point there won’t be enough bullshit jobs left to justify pretending people need to labor to eat, and society will either collapse or we will move beyond work to live.

I would posit however the invention left undone is the one we use humans for now. Their ability to reason, make independent decisions, synthesize new ideas in any situation, learn new and different skills, interacting with a complex field of visual, auditory, and sensory stimulus effectively towards a goal, etc. That’s why we research AI. If our tools have that, then our tools don’t need us. If our tools don’t need us, we don’t have to do the work. If we don’t have to do the work, there is no scarcity because work scales independent of us.

There are also other inventions we know of but haven’t perfected that help here. Efficient fusion is one. With that energy is cheap and plentiful and presumably clean. Energy is the ability to do work. With artificial minds that can produce minds that can in turn produce minds, fueled with plentiful energy, what’s left?

So I disagree that we’ve invented everything that might be useful, or that what hasn’t yet been invented won’t lead to improved productivity to the point that human labor is redundant and all human needs can be met without it.