[messe]

I’m not concerned about AI eliminating humanity, I’m concerned at what the immediate impact it’s going to have on jobs.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love it if all menial labour and boring tasks can eventually be delegate to AI, but the time spent getting from here to there could be very rough.

[tharkun__]

A lot of problems in societies come from people having too much time with not enough to do. Working is a great distraction from those things. Of course we currently go in the other direction in the US especially with the overwork culture and needing 2 or 3 jobs and still not make ends meet.

I posit that if you suddenly eliminate all menial tasks you will have a lot of very bored drunk and stoned people with too much time on their hands than they know what to do with. Idle Hands Are The Devil's Playground.

And that's not a from here to there. It's also the there.

[messe]

I don’t necessarily agree that you’ll end up with drunk and stoned people with nothing to do. The right education systems to encourage creativity and other enriching endeavours, could eventually resolve that. But we’re getting into discussions of what a post scarcity, post singularity society would look like at that point, which is inherently impossible to predict.

That being said, I’m sitting at a bar while typing this, so… you may have a point.

Also: your username threw me for a minute because I use a few different variations of “tharkun” as my handle on other sites. It’s a small world; apparently fully of people who know the Dwarvish name for Gandalf.

[tharkun__]

FWIW I think it's a numbers game.

Like my sibling poster mentions: of course there are people, who, given the freedom and opportunity to, will thrive, be creative and furthering humankind. They're the ones that "would keep working even if there's no need for it" so to speak. We see it all the time even now. Idealists if you will that today will work under conditions they shouldn't have to endure, simply in order to be able to work on what they love.

I don't think you can educate that into someone. You need to keep people busy. I think the romans knew this well: "Panem et circenses" - bread and circuses. You gotta keep the people fed and entertained and I don't think that would go away if you no longer needed it to distract them from your hidden political agenda.

I bet a large number of people will simply doom scroll Tik Tok, watch TV, have a BBQ party w/ beer, liquor and various types of smoking products etc. every single day of the week ;) And idleness breeds problems. While stress from the situation is probably a factor as well, just take the increase in alcohol consumption during the pandemic as an example. And if you ask me, someone that works the entire day, sits down to have a beer or two with his friends after work on Friday to wind down in most cases won't become an issue.

Small world indeed. So you're one of the people that prevent me from taking that name sometimes. Order another beer at that bar you're at and have an extra drink to that for me! :)

[messe]

> Small world indeed. So you're one of the people that prevent me from taking that name sometimes. Order another beer at that bar you're at and have an extra drink to that for me! :)

Done, and done! And surely you mean that you’re one of the people forcing me to add extra digits and underscores to my usernames.

[not2b]

Some of the most productive and inventive scientists and artists at the peak of Britain's power were "gentlemen", people who could live very comfortably without doing much of anything. Others were supported by wealthy patrons. In a post scarcity society, if we ever get there (instead of letting a tiny number of billionaires take all the gains and leaving the majority at subsistence levels, which is where we might end up), people will find plenty of interesting things to do.

[colinflane]

I recently finally got around to reading EM Forster's in-some-ways-eerily-prescient https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/... I think you can extract obvious parallels to social media, remote work, digital "connectedness", etc -- but also worth consideration in this context too.