[hackinthebochs]

>the context is that you're saying we need to force people to work under the threat of losing their livelihood or they can't be fulfilled.

That's one (bad) way to frame the context of the conversation. The better way is that the need to work is intrinsic to our psyche and core to our self-worth, but the ability to self-actualize is not. The need to constantly work has been a steady feature of our environment ever since we left the trees. Self-actualization, on the other hand, has not historically been a part of this. Meaning in human lives has largely been external, deriving from one's place in the social hierarchy. And work was a key facilitator in securing ones social status.

It should be a given that drastically changing the environment away from the historical baseline will have serious psychological ramifications. The progress of technology has had strong impact, but the social environment overlaid on the technological milieu has largely remained constant. So people got by mostly just fine. The internet has changed this calculus and we've seen widespread psychological damage as a result. AI stands to explosively accelerate this transformation.

What I am asking is whether people as a whole will be better off without necessary work being a driving force in their lives. People like you take it as axiomatic that a post-work society will be better, and offer misplaced moralistic arguments in favor of it. All I am saying is that its absolutely not axiomatic and should be considered directly on its merits and demerits. We've already seen many of the problems I'm talking about materialize.

>And I wonder if those blue-collar workers would agree that guaranteed income would be "taking away" their purposes

For gods sakes, this has nothing to do with the blue collar, white collar division. It's a division between the self-actualizers and non-self-actualizers. I used "class" as a generic grouping term. Although I expect the non-self-actualizers to be overrepresented among blue collar workers. That is, people who don't have the skill or the interest to engage in intellectual pursuits, but just want to make an honest living and take pride in their work.

>The least we can do is not pretend that this arrangement is somehow created for their benefit.

That's obviously not what I'm doing. Spare me these silly moralistic arguments. We need to be willing to discuss this issue as plainly as we can, not be hamstrung by misplaced political correctness.

[danShumway]

> That's one (bad) way to frame the context of the conversation.

Is it actually a bad way to frame the context? Are you not saying that people need to be forced to work for their own benefit under the threat of losing their income? What you're saying is:

> What I am asking is whether people as a whole will be better off without necessary work being a driving force in their lives.

So... yeah, you're saying that people will be worse-off without an external force making them work, and it's good for them that they're forced to work. I think my phrasing is entirely accurate here. Losing the income requirement to work is the part you're concerned about, because stuff like UBI only gets rid of the requirement to work for income, it doesn't get rid of any social status that would be associated with work.

You're worried about people not needing to work for their financial security, and you're saying it's bad for them if they don't have a requirement to work for their financial security.

> although I expect the non-self-actualizers to be overrepresented among blue collar workers. That is, people who don't have the skill or the interest to engage in intellectual pursuits, but just want to make an honest living and take pride in their work.

You keep phrasing this like it's a compliment, but being able to make an honest living and being able to take pride in one's work has nothing to do with one's ability to self actualize. I'd push back again on this characterization -- the "non-self-actualizers" I know that make an honest living tend to be very involved in their communities. They go to church, they have social connections, they form meaningful relationships, they marry and have kids. They actually do stuff outside of work.

Self-actualization is not at all the same thing as whether or not you like academic pursuits.

----

I don't know whether or not a post-work society will have its own challenges or if it will be better, and I don't know if it's feasible to build one in the first place. I don't even know that people should be worried about GPT at all, I'm not sure it actually is going to take everyone's jobs. I don't think we're particularly close to a post-work-society, and I think programs like UBI are severely under-studied for the amount of praise they get.

But I do know that we're not doing people a favor by threatening them with financial destitution if they don't work.

And call that moralizing if you want, I'm fine with that. Call it politically correct, call it denying reality, whatever. But don't pretend that it's less empathetic to suggest that someone who doesn't go to college or learn to program isn't going to be intrinsically worse at self-actualization than everyone else. Don't phrase that like it's some kind of solidarity to call people unmotivated.

Yes, people struggle with deriving meaning outside of work, but that does not fit neatly into any singular social category, and it has a lot more to do with one's relationship with one's community and integration into non-work social institutions than it has to do with whether or not someone went to college.

[hackinthebochs]

>Are you not saying that people need to be forced to work for their own benefit under the threat of losing their income? What you're saying is:

Presumably you would take an antivaxxer to be dishonest by framing a vaccine mandate as "forcibly injecting me with chemicals against my will". This is no different. Stripping context alters the meaning and is dishonest. Notice how you defend this framing instead of just accepting my original words. It's clearly intended to give your argument some rhetorical benefit without needing to be explicit. This is a dishonest debate tactic.

One important difference is that no one is forcing anyone to work, that is simply the natural state of existence. There is freedom in battling against nature's cruelty. This is not equal to being forced to work at the end of a whip. Your phrasing doesn't distinguish between the two, mine does.

>You're worried about people not needing to work for their financial security, and you're saying it's bad for them if they don't have a requirement to work for their financial security.

I'll accept this phrasing. But notice it is importantly different than "being forced to work".

>You keep phrasing this like it's a compliment

I'm not ascribing any valence in my statements. I am being as neutral and non-judgmental as possible.

> but being able to make an honest living and being able to take pride in one's work has nothing to do with one's ability to self actualize.

Didn't say it did. Self-actualization is the process by which one derives meaning outside of their work/career. The point was that people who "just want to make an honest living" are generally not the self-actualizers.

>the "non-self-actualizers" I know that make an honest living tend to be very involved in their communities.

I agree. But the trends against church-going and community participation are steady. There is every reason to think those connections will eventually be severed for the working class folks as well.

>Self-actualization is not at all the same thing as whether or not you like academic pursuits.

Obviously. But academic pursuits are one avenue for self-actualization that the tech-class points to as ways people will fill the meaning gap in the future. The point is that this avenue is only viable for a relatively small percentage.

>Don't phrase that like it's some kind of solidarity to call people unmotivated.

That's just projection if anything. I'm interested in describing the world as it actually is so we can have an honest discussion about how not to drive society off a cliff. For some reason its damn near impossible to have honest discussions these days.

[danShumway]

> Presumably you would take an antivaxxer to be dishonest by framing a vaccine mandate as "forcibly injecting me with chemicals against my will".

A mandated vaccine means that some people are going to get injected with a chemical against their will, yes. We can quibble over the tone, but it is correctly phrased.

> One important difference is that no one is forcing anyone to work, that is simply the natural state of existence.

If you're actively opposed to efforts to change, then that's a very different situation. The context of this conversation is an author saying they wish GPT didn't exist, because they see GPT automating work as a real possibility.

If someone is opposing an attempt to transition to a post-work society, that is not just being in touch with the natural order -- it is an attempt to keep the natural order as it is. So yeah, I would classify that as playing an active role in forcing people to work. Again, I think that's just an accurate description of the position you're espousing; you might not like the tone, but you are encouraging us not to do anything about that natural state.

> The point was that people who "just want to make an honest living" are generally not the self-actualizers.

I disagree with this entirely. Most "down-to-earth" people I know are more engaged in fulfilling activities outside of work than academics are and have stronger connections to their communities in my experience. I don't think there are any stats to back up the idea that working-class/blue-collar workers are less positioned than tech workers to find meaning outside of work.

I don't just think that it's vaguely insulting to characterize blue-collar workers as if they're somehow more prone to being unable to self-actualize, a process that has nothing to do with one's education level -- I think if anything it might be the opposite. Silicon Valley is rife with people talking about how their companies and achievements define them, and is rife with people asking workers to "put in the grind" and "push through" to make something amazing. And I have never heard a blue-collar worker tell me that their identity and value as a person is based on their job as a sanitation worker.

> But the trends against church-going and community participation are steady.

This is particularly weird to hear, because trends against community participation have a great deal to do with the fact that our society increasingly pressures people to replace those institutions with jobs. There is a strong push to have your friends be your work friends, to have your meaning be what you do in your job.

And the increased drive towards validating ones identity through one's job inherently encourages people to disregard other social institutions or non-economic relationships that don't fit into that framework.

----

> For some reason its damn near impossible to have honest discussions these days.

This conversation has moved from:

> those from the (lets call it) "productive" class are absolutely convinced everyone is like them and if only given the opportunity they would be just as productive and fulfilled as they are. Some of us know better.

to

> What's so insidious about this thinking is that its framed as benevolence. But the mistake is thinking that your way is intrinsically more valuable and so it must be a disparagement to assume that not everyone can reach the intrinsic good that you have reached.

to

> You want to see what people get up to when they have endless free time, just see what idle young men get up to.

to finally

> I'm not ascribing any valence in my statements. I am being as neutral and non-judgmental as possible.

This is some revisionism.

[hackinthebochs]

>I think that's just an accurate description of the position you're espousing; you might not like the tone, but you are encouraging us not to do anything about that natural state.

We've wasted enough time debating semantics.

>I disagree with this entirely. Most "down-to-earth" people I know are more engaged in fulfilling activities outside of work than academics are and have stronger connections to their communities in my experience.

This may be true; I have no horse in this particular race. The substantive issue isn't which class is more represented among the non-self-actualizers, but what proportion of people fall into this category and what a post-work society looks like for them. I don't know how we ended up spending so much time on the tangential point of who are the non-self-actualizers.

>This is particularly weird to hear, because trends against community participation have a great deal to do with the fact that our society increasingly pressures people to replace those institutions with jobs. There is a strong push to have your friends be your work friends, to have your meaning be what you do in your job.

I'm not sure I understand what this means, but this doesn't sound right. The secularization of society isn't due to work pressure, nor is the disconnection from your local community. The latter is due to the pressures and competition of the modern world, the fact that people move frequently and so do not have "roots" in their local community, multiculturalism that creates barriers between people geographically close people, and so on.

>And the increased drive towards validating ones identity through one's job inherently encourages people to disregard other social institutions or non-economic relationships that don't fit into that framework.

Similarly, I'm not sure this gets the cause and effect correct. We increasingly validate ourselves through our jobs because of the loss of other means of validation.

>This is some revisionism.

Perhaps if you were more interested in understanding my points than finding things to nitpick, you would recognize that my point about being non-judgmental was towards my characterization of the self-actualizers and non-self-actualizers, and how the working class fits in. You gave my claims a moral prognosis, not me. I only defended against unproductive valence claims.

[danShumway]

> The secularization of society isn't due to work pressure, nor is the disconnection from your local community. The latter is due to the pressures and competition of the modern world

Where do those competitions and pressures come from? If someone feels a strong pressure to make a career for themselves, to get out of their hometown -- that doesn't read to you as being something that's related to the status we've placed on career and work?

What do the stats say about why people typically move away from their hometown communities? I'm going to guess that job opportunities will be a pretty large proportion of answers in any survey about that.

> multiculturalism that creates barriers between people geographically close people

Hm.

> We increasingly validate ourselves through our jobs because of the loss of other means of validation.

I disagree, but sure. It's hard to clearly establish cause and effect when looking at correlations, and there are multiple ways to read the correlation between a decline in social institutions and an increase in people using work to self-actualize. I'll grant that.

----

> You gave my claims a moral prognosis, not me. I only defended against unproductive valence claims.

You very literally, directly compared people who have trouble finding meaning outside of work to idle children.