[mewpmewp2]

I am probably different to most people, but I always have trouble understanding why people want to have jobs so much. The obvious and direct answer immediately of course is "to be able to pay the bills".

But of course if we automated those jobs with AI, we could direct AI produced value into universal basic income so people wouldn't lose their income.

Then the concern is of course, that the owners will not share the produced value.

But the answer to that in my view is that we should rather do work to be able reach a society where this value will be shared, and not rely on "jobs" being the key thing ultimately.

If I could choose, I would rather not work, and just do what I want to do all day, stress free, for the rest of my life. Also what is the point of doing the same jobs generation after generation? Most of the jobs in modern world aren't really what fit our evolutionary primitive desires in the first place, and it's forced stress.

[w29UiIm2Xz]

Nobody who trades their labor for income would legitimately trust simply getting money for existing because we created such surplus. What happens if the checks stop rolling? It is undesirable to be that dependent on the state, in an environment where faith in institutions has declined. To give up labor is to give up any leverage one possibly has in our system.

[StevenWaterman]

> What happens if the checks stop rolling

Late 18th century France

[undeveloper]

in a post gun warfare world where the state has weapons far exceeding what is legal or really possible for a organized militia to hold this is a pipe dream. muskets used to be state of the art.

[HeartStrings]

Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Don’t forget that laws of physics don’t prevent that from happening. Think about it this way: if you’re being left behind to starve and die, what do you have to lose?

[mxkopy]

All of these advanced death machines need equally advanced supply lines and staging grounds, both of which would run through civilian populations. Look at Afghanistan as an example: with all the might of its war machine the US couldn’t kick the Taliban out, who we love to tout as fighting with sticks and stones.

In fact the only issue stopping a worker’s revolution in the US is the lack of organization. The technology factor is really small in comparison to the inherent asymmetry of the situation.

[Teever]

The last few years have proven that it is quite trivial to take out a high value target with a drone.

The fact that it isn’t routine is a testament to how accepting people are of the status quo.

[HeartStrings]

They told musk electric cars are a pipedream too

[bluefirebrand]

Let's hope if it comes to that sort of action, we do it before the noble class has easy and free access to autonomous terminator robots

[HeartStrings]

As it should.

[evenhash]

Sure, but wouldn't the leverage of labor go to zero regardless, in this full-automation scenario?

[byebyetech]

That is the reason why Oligarchs and Governments are salivating at AI. To make everyone dependent for a paycheck. Any dystopian fantasy can come true after that.

[wiseowise]

> Any dystopian fantasy can come true after that.

Why after that? AI hasn't even kicked in yet fully and we already have millions of engineers trembling in fear. Gone the golden days of techies demanding things, corpo is back with revenge.

[phil21]

Corpo was never gone. It’s just that it’s culling a bunch of useful idiots who thought they were part of the club. Most of whom gleefully automated other folks out of jobs without a moment of introspection. The mafia boss tying up loose ends with his hitmen after a successful mission and no other targets left to deal with.

[geophph]

I think for me it's hard to conceptualize what "do what I want to do all day, stress free, for the rest of my life." really means. Maybe it's just because i've been conditioned since a child to expect to "work" and "do things", but periods of my life where i've had that similar amount of freedom have always felt somewhat aimless and purposeless to me. But would i feel that way if i had never felt the need to work and be productive? Not sure.

For me personally, having the right job is actually more interesting to me than doing whatever i want all day then given my conditioning. I think because without the job I wouldn't have the same opportunity to encounter the "problems" i enjoy "solving" at work with critical thinking. It's kinda like training for a sport? Sometimes having a competition or a game is a nice forcing function to make it all feel real?

[mewpmewp2]

I could think of so many fun things to do. Sports, video games, building things for fun specifically, learning, films, books, shows, travelling, being with family, etc. You could still do competitive sports in different avenues right. I feel like I could focus so much more on health and wellbeing, and things that I actually enjoy etc. It's not like in grand scheme of things any job realistically matters, except for the paycheck it brings me. I'd rather have humanity reach new levels where we discover something new about universe, but for that we'd have to evolve via tech, than people doing the same job over and over. What other tech besides AI could take us there?

[kevinsync]

I agree with you completely, but I also have never been able to square the idea of how any of that stuff would still exist if we didn't have jobs.

Sports (in some aspects) needs facilities, gear, arenas, other people to participate with. Building things usually requires materials (unless you're bushcrafting) that requires a fully-functioning supply chain. Video games and shows and films (at the quality level we expect them to be) require herculean efforts from thousands of people each, and massive investments, to go from concept to completion. Travel in and of itself is predicated on the ideas that the hospitality industry exists, infrastructure for flight, rail, bus, car all exist (and are operational), that the very people that are the fabric and heartbeat of the culture you're traveling to experience exist, and are operating restaurants, businesses, etc.

Every leisure activity that we think of occupying our time with instead of a job requires the collective efforts of the rest of society to even exist, and kind of implies that your ability to lead a life of leisure is an anomaly. Some things can arguably be replaced with AI and robots, but the texture and tactility that we crave from most of these activities would be gone. Traveling to Scotland to get a plate of haggis and hang out in a pub just wouldn't be the same if your driverless taxi took you to the unmanned airport full of kiosks and humanoid sentries, to be loaded half-conscious into a metal tube and flown across the planet, ultimately driven to the ends of the Earth and dropped off at a 600 year old crumbling building where you're met by R2-D2 wearing a kilt and a tam o'shanter, talking like Groundskeeper Willie LOL

[mewpmewp2]

If AI replaced jobs one by one, these things should still have to exist, right?

I'm not sure I follow the logic here. I would still see all of this existing and even more due to demand. The idea with automation would be that everything that people want would still be there and even more. I would think we build more football stadiums, more hobby facilities, replacing business offices and other things we don't need with those.

I would also see e.g. video games being even greater than they are now, because people would be able to follow their passion and creativity and build games that won't require monetization and are unaffected by outside pressure. I have massive amount of video game ideas that I think would be super awesome, but not really easily monetizable. I would probably build a lot of them, especially with being able to do those so much faster with AI. If AI can do all the games by itself and doesn't require my or anyone's creativity, then super, I will just play them, because by definition they have to be better than anything so far, and if they are not, then by definition human creativity still matters there and they can build, either way seems good to me.

As for travel, I think there would be people out there doing this out of hobby, having pubs as a hobby thing, hosting people as a hobby, spreading their existing culture out of passion, not because they need to make money. I would actually prefer that type of travel over feeling like they only act friendly to me because I will be paying to them. In this case it would be visiting people who want you to visit them with no exchange of anything, both sides would be doing it out of curiosity or desire.

[scruple]

I just got back from a 12 mile trail run. I'd love to be on the trails more often. And I'd love to explore more trails that are further away. But I have to work all week and that leaves me with my weekends. I also like to read, write, garden, hike, bike, strength train, I have other hobbies like woodworking that I'd love to get back into, homebrewing, I bake bread, and on and on. I love spending time with my wife and my kids and my/our friends. And I have to ration my time heavily because I've got ~50+ hours every single week that's wrapped up in making my staggeringly massive corporation employer more money than it knows what to reasonably do with.

[jaggederest]

I think the core disconnect here is that, to some degree, people have a hard time conceptualizing the difference between needing a job and wanting a job.

I can tell you, freely, that if someone dropped $10m in my lap, I would not stop programming - I started before I was paid, and I will continue as long as my input methods, perception, and/or brain permit.

The difference is in the quality, texture, and structure of how you work, and of course what you work on. I almost certainly would be working in the structure of larger organizations.

There is some interesting post-scarcity fiction out there, speculative and otherwise, that tries to answer the question "what do we do when we are no longer required to work for pay". Manfred Macx would say that it's great fun to make other people incalculably wealthy. Or, you could simply be kind and generous with your time in service to causes you like.

Frankly, if someone dropped $10m in my lap, I'd almost certainly take 2-3 months sitting on the beach, but after that, I'd try something even more ambitious. Surely there are hard problems we could be solving that we're constrained by paid work from pursuing.

I'd probably also expand my hobby practices - there's lots I could do with better tooling and toys (my pottery studio could use a pugmill!), and discover new ones as well.

[rurp]

I think most people, correctly in my opinion, look around at the powerful people in our society and think that there is ~0% chance they willingly hand over most of their wealth for the betterment of humanity. Pretty much every single action from people like elon/trump/altman/thiel shows the exact opposite. They would much rather have millions of slaves they can treat how they like, rather than a bunch of independent citizens with rights and opinions.

If AI does live up to the hype the surpluses might end up distributed to support basic needs for everyone, but there's no clean path to get there; it will take a long messy and likely violent fight to get there. Most people are currently comfortable enough to not want to go down that road, things will need to get a lot worse before they get better in this respect.

[ethagnawl]

> we could direct AI produced value into universal basic income so people wouldn't lose their income.

I wish we lived in this reality. After what's happened in the last 10-12 years (in the USA, specifically) I think a significant enough number of people would rather watch their neighbors starve than give them or vote to give them anything they "didn't earn".

[cedws]

UBI is never coming man. Rich countries don’t even properly provide healthcare or take care of pensioners, let alone handing everyone a paycheck every month for doing nothing.

[dosisking]

UBI is intended to replace Pension Funds, which are collapsing because they were forced to invest in government bonds. ECB had negative interest rates for a long time, and pensions need 8% to survive. There is an imminent sovereign debt crisis which will probably start in the UAE or somewhere in the Middle East. So UBI is simply a rebranding of Pensions.

[testing22321]

> Rich countries don’t even properly provide healthcare

ONE rich country doesn’t. The rest are great.

[cedws]

Even countries with public healthcare struggle to provide it at a good level of quality. For instance in the UK where I'm from getting medical attention for anything less than a heart attack is difficult to impossible. Family members have suffered as a direct result of the poor quality care we have.

[testing22321]

The NHS is much better for most people than what the US has, but I don’t think a person on earth would suggest using it as a model to build great universal healthcare.

[cedws]

Is it? From what I hear US healthcare is good, just expensive. As long as you have money you can get the help you need. Which is the same in the UK to be fair, we just end up having to pay for both public and private healthcare.

[testing22321]

> As long as you have money you can get the help you need

Tens of millions can’t pay for it, and virtually everyone else is chained to their job because of it.

[HeartStrings]

UBI not coming cus its not possible economically.

[saulpw]

It is absolutely possible economically. It may not be possible politically (right now) but that's a very different reason.

[HeartStrings]

Explain how it is possible economically, debunk all arguments experts have claimed of it being mathematically unfeasable, you can use GPT latest deep research extended thinking consortium. Thanks

[m-hodges]

> But of course if we automated those jobs with AI, we could direct AI produced value into universal basic income so people wouldn't lose their income. Then the concern is of course, that the owners will not share the produced value.

We have a few hundred years of tax policy and politics to draw on here.

[suzzer99]

I think most humans have some intrinsic desire to feel useful to their tribe, to feel like they earn their keep. I know people on the equivalent of UBI, and they're all miserable. I don't think we're wired to do nothing all day, and I don't think everyone has it in them to be self-motivated artists or craftspeople.

This is all just my personal experience, obviously. I don't have any data to back it up. But I know that even though my job bugs me sometimes, I'm a lot happier when I'm busy than not, and I work remotely. I like the feeling of accomplishment. But do I like it enough to build things for free? Probably not. I'd probably just sit around and spiral, like I've seen friends do on extended unemployment.

Anyway, this all is a moot point imo because as long as one person still has to work, the billionaire class will turn the "lazy freeloaders" on UBI into scapegoats. See: current politics.

[randycupertino]

> we could direct AI produced value into universal basic income so people wouldn't lose their income.

This would never get approved in the USA. Think of the backlash here against "Obamaphones" and "welfare queens" - we can't even get paid parental leave approved! Let alone disability, social security or SNAP/food benefits. UBI is not even an option. Even now we're taking away food benefits and tying it to mandatory work- ie moving in the opposite direction. https://ktla.com/news/local-news/stricter-work-requirements-...

American voters are far too resistant against any sort of welfare and/or social assistance for UBI to ever be feasible.

Even during the great depression FDR was only able to get work for pay programs approved that assigned jobs like Conservation Corps, Public Works and WPA rather than just handing out cash. And to get that passed we needed widespread bank collapses, failed farms, starving people and catastrophic unemployment there was STILL heavy opposition to any/all government assistance programs because there is a very deep fear entrenched in the American psyche that government aid creates dependency and weakens individual responsibility.

There is a widespread false narrative in the USA that any sort of government help, assistance programs and/or payments is leftist socialism and communism.

[ryandrake]

The USA would rather pay half the population to dig holes and the other half to fill them in, than simply provide a basic standard of living for all.

[suzzer99]

The CCC and WPA produced a lot of valuable stuff that still stands today.

[wiseowise]

But what about Japan? Sorry, I meant Germany. Sorry, I meant USSR. Vietnam? Iraq? Iraqistan, or was it Afghanistan? Iraq, yes! Russia, Russia! Oh, look, China!

Knock, knock. Who's there? I ran.

[duskdozer]

It's all about the framing. Lots of people love the Affordable Care Act (ACA), but hate Obamacare, or demand politicians "keep your government hands off my Medicare" (non-US: "Obamacare" is the ACA; Medicare is another government healthcare program)

I don't know if it's possible to replicate this though.

[shuckles]

This is a superficial complaint. In practice, the US doles out enormous amounts of social assistance. Disability, social security, and healthcare are an enormous part of the federal budget. Maybe it will be gated behind make-work or some other scheme.

[bluefirebrand]

> This is a superficial complaint. In practice, the US doles out enormous amounts of social assistance

Good point. So we should ask those people how the reliance on social assistance has really worked out for them. Do they generally feel respected and valued by the systems that pay them? Are they happy with the amount of assistance they receive?

[HeartStrings]

It would get approved when 80% of populus is unemployed

[HeartStrings]

UBI economically unfeasable. And ok, you give some shit 2000 USD to every American to sit on their ass. You think humans are engineered to sit still? If there are no problems, human will invent them. And what about other locales, what about Kazakhstan, what about Yakutia, what about Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Philippines. They gonna do 2000 USD airdrop too? No, they would get constantly mogged and beaten down by richer countries, perhaps invaded. Do you think they gonna sit on their ass? No! They would start wars and crimemaxxx. Why? Because: a) nothing to lose b) it is far more preferable for a human to be shot in the face than sit and do literally nothing forever. There have been actual studies on this.

Basically, buckle up and start socializing A LOT (iykyk), because to survive this one, you better be allied with one fraction ir another.

[bluefirebrand]

> But of course if we automated those jobs with AI, we could direct AI produced value into universal basic income so people wouldn't lose their income

Why would I ever believe that this would happen at all though? I don't trust the people making decisions to actually do this

And even if they do, what does that look like for me? I find it difficult to believe that we would live unchanged. Are we talking nice urban apartments, big suburban houses, or shitty cyberpunk megacity apartment habs?

My sense of worth is tied to the work I do because the work I do can provide the income to afford the life I want and choose to live. Which is probably very different from the lifestyle that will "be provided for me" under a UBI plan

[duskdozer]

Some want jobs because it's all they've known and they don't know what to do with themselves without one. I imagine some of these people would find things to do if they had more time and energy to spend on things other than recovering from/for their jobs.

Some have that answer because they think it is entirely unrealistic to create or have the idealistic society you describe. I am part of this group. There are many things I have on my backlog that I'd like to accomplish, but too much of the required time and energy is taken up by my job. Yet, I still hold onto it desperately, because the alternative is much worse, and I have no way of fixing that.

[yonaguska]

> just do what I want to do all day

Are the things that you want to do productive in any way? A sizeable portion of people have an innate drive to "produce" actual value.

[mewpmewp2]

Productive in which ways? I wouldn't be producing value for the society right, because AI would be doing that. But I could be doing things for my physical/mental health, right?

Other things could be just satisfying own curiosity, sports, hobbies, video games, films, books, shows. Kind of like being able to be child again?

[HeartStrings]

I lived thru this… “do what you want all day" gets real old real fast. Cosmic purpose is mandatory

[krackers]

>if we automated those jobs with AI, we could direct AI produced value into universal basic income

We've seen this play out twice in history now (industrial revolution, then globalization/offshoring). Every time the pitch has been that automation would make life easier by trickling down the surplus productivity gains. And yet here we are still working 5 days a week with more intense competition than ever. Fool me once...

And also most of what AI can automate today is the "services" economy which was never really that crucial in terms of biological existence. ChatGPT will not build housing, raise livestock, or perform surgery.

[dag100]

> ChatGPT will not build housing, raise livestock, or perform surgery.

I have a bad feeling that it's closer than you'd expect at all three of those things. Especially the last one. Robo-surgeons, remotely controlled by another surgeon somewhere else, already exist. Maybe it won't happen in the next 5 years, but do you really think AI capabilities won't get there in 20-25 years or so?

[HeartStrings]

ChatGPT won’t, BuildGPT will

[testing22321]

For about 20 years now I’ve been working the least amount possible to get the life I want.

I snowboard over 100 days a year, spend tons of time with my daughter, walk, write, camp and cook lots of great food.

You’d be shocked how good life can be on ~$20k a year. And you really don’t have to work much to earn that!

[lurking_swe]

what you say about your desires makes perfect sense. I too would enjoy that kind of world. But how do you envision that playing out in reality?

Would you just nicely walk up to the White House and ask them to pass a law for UBI? Would you politely knock on Jeff Bezos’s door and ask him to share his billions?

no disrespect intended, but your comment strikes me as one that a young child might say. what I mean by that is - it feels very naïve about the (political and greed) problems we face in the world. Reality is there is a small club of extremely powerful and wealthy people who run the show. It’s a small club and we ain’t in it. if we lived 500 years ago, we could just force them to share. But that’s not going to happen in 2026 with a military and a police force, etc.

[jmclnx]

>But of course if we automated those jobs with AI, we could direct AI produced value into universal basic income so people wouldn't lose their income.

That would be very nice, but,

Will not happen in the US. For example in the US, minimum wage. That was suppose to be the minimum people needed to get by. Now with factoring in inflation, minimum wage does not pay for hardly anything now.

So in the US, if AI does what some people think it will do, we will end up with 2 classes. A small very rich class, probably segregated from everyone else, and a huge very poor class, maybe something like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporated_(TV_series)

[dsign]

> and just do what I want to do all day, stress free, for the rest of my life...

In a saner society, jobs would be the measure of how we are mutually useful and bound to each other, and UBI would be there so that people are not coerced with freezing and starvation into doing things. But, when was the last time people got to negotiate the social contract at such a deep level? The French Revolution? Maybe the Bolsheviks? If we could, would we be able to do a good job of setting up something like that? When one remembers that the biggest democracy on the planet keeps electing Trump, one loses hope.

[ChiperSoft]

I am effectively retired at 45, my spouse and I have enough investments that neither of us has to work again for our lives.

I still want to code, because I enjoy coding. I like the puzzle and the reward when my solutions work. Sure I can code on my own, but there is a joy in working with multiple people of different backgrounds and skillsets. I liked being on a team.

As it currently sits, there is little place for me in the AI driven workplace. It feels like an enormous loss.

[tayo42]

> The obvious and direct answer immediately of course is "to be able to pay the bills".

Slight correction, is that it's I want to pay bills now. And not deal with uncertainty for a decade while other people try to direct the economy or what ever.

[bigstrat2003]

I want a job because I need to pay the bills, as you said. But also, I like my job. It is a big part of my life, and I truly love what I do. Moreover, this is the one job skill I have, so if this career dies I'll have to resort to manual labor and the like. My job going away is an extremely unpleasant prospect for many reasons.

> But of course if we automated those jobs with AI, we could direct AI produced value into universal basic income so people wouldn't lose their income.

There isn't the remotest possible chance that this would happen. Any surplus (if indeed one exists, which isn't certain) would be pocketed by the mega rich who own the corporations.

[lowbloodsugar]

We’ve been there for nearly thirty years. We make more than enough food for everyone on earth. Yet it hasn’t happened. Why? Now ask if you and me getting fired changes the answer.

[mrdependable]

How do you envision that playing out? It would basically be like everyone that didn’t still have a job living off minimum wage. Would no one be allowed to work also?

[mewpmewp2]

So I would envision that, as AI starts to makes jobs obsolete, the people whose jobs were made obsolete, would get some sort of balanced percentage of what they were making. The more they were making the lower the percentage would be. But it would balance to around median/average, so if you were making current median, this is around what you would still get. So it should not go under that. If you were making 3x median, maybe it would be 80% - 90% of that. To be able to still incentivise automation, but keep people's quality of life without drastic changes. I haven't thought this through, so these are just initial ideas. But main ideas would be to keep income level similar, while trying to find them other things to do.

Initially they would get it under some conditions that they might be studying something else or whatever else makes sense productivity wise. Ultimately not minimum wage.

Depending on how fast AI would automate things, the balance should change, but ultimately income should provide similar quality of life as was before, but increasing as time goes on for the less fortunate who were making less before.

So if someone who is making 3x median now, they might be getting 2.3x while doing nothing, and 2.7x while learning/doing something else productive. Someone who was making 1x median, would still get 1x median, but as AI produced value increases and more replacement happens, the 1x should climb and eventually e.g. in 10 years everyone's would equalize in such a way that no one's quality of life due to job displacement shouldn't suffer, but who previously had lower income would reach similar levels of income gradually as all jobs are replaced.

And you would be allowed to work or switch work if you wanted, but there would be some sort of formula for decreasing what you get, while still incentivising you to work if you want to. E.g. if you were making 3x being a software engineer and want to take up hand crafting something or construction, you could but, you might be maxed at getting total of what you were making before, so construction + bonus could make up to only 3x.

[ricardobayes]

Has it ever occured to you, presumably, a white collar worker, to "give back" to others less fortunate than you? With your presumably, well-above earnings, does it ever cross your mind to give a recurring stipend to some other people, even though it could make a real difference to someone?

Not really? I guess you got your answer.

[mewpmewp2]

I personally do have a monthly automatic donation set in the bank, it's not a lot, but I wouldn't say it hasn't occurred to me. I do try to save money for specific things however, if I made more and I didn't save e.g. I for sure would be happy to increase what I give monthly. My goal is to be able to do whatever I want, so for that reason I'm trying to save. Whatever I want would also likely be valuable to society (until AGI), and if I made more thanks to that, I wouldn't have problem sharing more.

[nubinetwork]

Has it ever occurred to you that some people don't work in the private sector? Working at a hospital for 20 years is enough public service for me, thanks.

[ricardobayes]

Of course, but the comment is not aimed at you, I'm even a little surprised you read it that way. What I tried to point out, is billionaires and CEOs, are still people, and mindset change regarding universal basic income is likely not going to be top-down. I see people (hoping?) that wealthy people eventually start disbursing money out of the blue, but is that really going to happen realistically?

Perhaps in some societies, like France, where profit sharing is more culturally common.

[jmyeet]

That's easy to explain. We live in a society that will absolutely NOT do that. We will let people starve and die on the streets like it's some personal moral failure while we start minting trillionaires. Your job is food, water, shelter, transportation, health insurance, education and everything for your children.

There is an alternate reality where the benefits of automation are shread with society so that we don't have to work as much, collectively. But in the US in particular, that's "communism".

We are (IMHO) bouldering a future that I can only describe as neo-feudalism where nobody owns anything and the only housing and jobs are working on the estates of trillionaires, a techno-serf if you will. The intermediate stage is probably fascist apartheid states with ever-shrinking in-groups where an increasingly militarized police force is used to enforce order as wealth inequality spirals out of control.

Google has ~190k employees (according to Google) and an annual profit of $133 billion. So despite a bunch of people being comparatively well-paid, the profit per employee is still ~$700k. There were times when that was well over $1 million. So by other measures, you're still being underpaid at ~$500k+/year.

[moron4hire]

If the US did not spend more than ever Western country combined on "Defense", and stuck to just, IDK, 75% of every Western country combined, we could do it today. At a bare minimum, we could eliminate homelessness and starvation, today. But we live in a society that believes cronie capitalism for capitalism's sake is more important than people's lives, because of the off chance some of them might be "lazy". UBI is never going to happen.

[derektank]

You could completely eliminate US defense spending and you would only be able provide every individual with roughly $3000 annually.

Also, your comparison to other countries is confounded by the fact that Western countries (i.e. Europe) maintain a low level of defense spending because they have an explicit guarantee of defense under the North Atlantic treaty and a promise of being covered by the US’s nuclear umbrella. If the US were to cut defense spending, other Western countries would need to substantially increase their own.

[ericfr11]

If the US stopped getting into futile wars, the world would be very different

[mewpmewp2]

I'm not from the US, but the reason to want to have jobs is disbelief that UBI could not happen then? If there was a way to make grounds to get to UBI, would it be fine?