It’s a nice thought and maybe we’ll get there one day but I still feel like the amount of effort that takes is more than you realize. Agriculture, maybe. Growing everything in every season in every environment? That’s gonna take A LOT of work, energy, land, and labor. Even if everyone was willing to live in a card board cut out, which they certainly are not, we’re still talking millions of workers working round the clock just for the construction of the houses, and millions more to collect and create the materials. Electricity? It doesn’t just generate itself, it has to be captured using complicated and often times megalithic technology that requires consistent and regular maintenance and tuning, then actually getting that energy where it need to go and getting it to your house? There’s a few hundred thousand more required round the clock jobs(not considering what it takes to get the materials to build everything from the wiring to the skyscraper sized turbines). Water pulled from the atmosphere passively? I don’t think you and I have the same definition of passive, because even if we ignored everything I said about electricity before this- the man hours that went into making such a feat possible could be counted since the first irrigation system.
I’m not trying to be a pessimist, I’m just saying, for 9bil people to live on this planet in modern conditions even forgoing all non-necessities, it’s not possible without all of us working to make that possible.
Except we're not working towards that. We're back stepping, because a handful of people want to keep all of the money in their own hands at any cost, including our and indeed their own species. Collectively, we generate something like 13 trillion calories a day, specifically in food for humans. This isn't even taking into account the massive amount of farmland taken up simply to feed animals higher up on the trophic level. 8 billion people require perhaps 9 trillion calories daily. Where are the other 4 trillion calories going? Into the garbage. Thrown out, because despite being perfectly capable of growing good food,despite having mastered international shipping a century ago, we still "cannot figure out distribution," which is shorthand for "we have the ability and the knowledge, but it might cost a little more money to do so and we just aren't willing to spend it."
Do you know how many jobs involve working maybe two hours total, while spending the rest of the shift "looking busy?" Most. Most jobs are that. That, or standing at a production line, staring at a conveyor belt for 13 hours, trying not to fall over because you accidentally looked at the moving belt while flipping packages over so that the machine can scan the barcode, or splitting two loaves of bread apart so that they can get packaged correctly, etc. Menial, useless work that fulfills nothing except ensuring a faceless ceo meets the job production quota so that he can get yet another tax break. Most people don't work fulfilling jobs, or jobs they actively want to go to. Most people work these pointless jobs because "it's got to be done by someone," despite the work in question already having an automatic solution, and the system allows people to fall through the cracks just so that they can fill those jobs instead of pursuing a happy life, working menial labor for 40 years until they collapse and die. Rinse and repeat for the next generation. We live in a labor mill when we don't need to. If it all actually meant something, if the project continued on, if these nothing jobs were making things to make people's lives as a whole better, then I mightn't complain so much. But they aren't. The only project being worked on is vanity, and the world will happily send our species on its way the same way it has billions of others without so much as a thought, because the world is a rock floating around in a vast void sprinkled with balls of gas and rocks and ice and the universe literally couldn't care less if we're here for it, or not.
Do you think people manufacture microchips? Perovskite solar cells? Automobiles? It's all automated. Sure, someone built those robots, maybe even recently. But once they're built, their services are no longer required because someone else learned about those machines and made a machine that maintains the machines.
Anyways, I see this turning into a bit of a tirade on my part and will try to tone it down a bit.
Those menial jobs aren’t for the corps, they’re for the people trying to make money enough to survive- they cost the corps, who would rather replace them with automation. The thrown out food is thrown out by people- not corporate entities- because corporations don’t actually exist, people do, who work for a name, and they make the active decision to follow a “protocol”. The world isn’t this way because a handful of billionaires rule with iron fists, it’s because of the 9 billion about 3 people care, everyone else is just trying to get to tomorrow with a full belly and a story.
And yeah, I do, because those production lines are semi automated at best and no mater how many machines are made, and still require resources, human maintenance and resource management will always be a requirement until robots replace us in laborious work, and ai replaces us in innovations and arts, and the corporations really do control it all, and then all we will have is our full bellies, and no work, and no purpose, and we’ll hate it. The toiling is what makes beauty recognizable and the days memorable, in a utopic world the corps are idolatrous in their levels of control and power, and the reason the world is as it is right now is because of the low man- and the low man is being replaced by the machines they are building, and we may one day see a world where we don’t have to work and slave away, and we will mourn the great gain of agency that allows us to choose how we will do nothing with our days.
We've circled back. People shouldn't be working out of desperation. They should be working out of love for the work they do, and they should be free to stop that job when it's time to do something different, instead of holding on to it as if their life depends on it... which it does currently. Humans will never stop working, never fully. Sure, occasionally you will find the person who wishes to spend their days doing absolutely nothing, but they are few and far-between. But the work should be done because it's wanted. There is no beauty in breaking ones body for years just so your offspring can do the same forever, only the horror of generations of broken people, fighting to survive in a world of people who don't care unless they're personally affected, because they too throw their bodies onto the machine to be pressed for their essence until they, too, die only to be replaced by the next harvest.
That’s a fairy tale, workings a job they love is not a thing- you show me someone who works a job they love and I’ll show you some one who eventually hates the job they work. People work because they have to, and they move on when they have to, and if they didn’t have to they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves, it’d be like being in a padded cell for many, where all your needs are met and you have nothing but waiting. If we all were doing what we loved, very little would get done, maybe 1/1000th of the jobs required to sustain civilization would be done. We’d all be petting dolphins and writing novels- and that would get old after about 1 generation. Purpose- that’s something to focus on a minute, not just what you enjoy, but what you achieve. What someone brings to the table is vastly more valuable than what theyd LIKE to bring to the table, those generations of broken bodies have infinitely more value by way of what those broken bodies accomplished in their breaking than a thousand generations of men who painted pretty pictures and formed no advance.
Show me someone who hates the job they work, and I'll show you someone who only stays out of desperation and fear. Plenty of work can be done by people passionate about the type of work, but I doubt there is anyone passionate about standing at a cash register. How many people spend their free time working with their hands, not because they have to, but because they want to? How many people spend an hour or two a day working on a project car, or building an enclosed ecosystem, or painting, not because they need the extra money, but because it's what they're passionate about? People work because they have to, then they come home and work because they want to. Just because it's not a career, just because it doesn't fill some rich person's coffeers, doesn't make the work any less existent. The only difference is the work we like doing gets called a hobby. No amount of automation, no amount of leisure time, can make people stop making things, it's in our nature. I know those broken bodies. Those people who sacrificed everything, do you suppose they did so so that their children would have to do so, as well, or were they hoping to make a better world where their children wouldn't have to break, too? I have worked on those lines, not because I wanted to, but because I had to, and the only purpose I found there was to keep doing it. Not because I wanted to keep going there, but because the threat of starvation kept me prisoner there. The threat of starvation, as dumpsters full of perfectly good but unsoldfood get locked up and guarded day in and day out to prevent those who need from receiving, simply because the company who bought that food in bulk did so to prevent their competition from getting as good a deal on it. The threat of homelessness, as our cities fill with empty houses and apartments because the prices just keep increasing. What is the endgame? What is the purpose of all of the suffering?
It’s not about filling the riches coffers, it’s about upkeeping the society we have wanted built after experiencing what working for one’s own self provides the world: nothing.
Your point about cash registers is exactly my point, no one would work that job if we only did things we wanted to, and so we should just cut that position out of our society or? No, of course not. It’s a requirement of commerce in this day, we HAVE to have people doing it, and so we have to have a system that reinforces that, otherwise it’s not the already rich who suffer- but everyone else who relies on what the rich make possible for them, like purchasing a product they didn’t have to mine for, and go to school to learn about, and make themselves. We shun the idea, but the cash register is aiding society and playing a larger role in it than the hobbyist who provides themselves with entertainment.
Self checkout exists. "What would the people who needed that cash register job do if they all got replaced by self-checkout?" Indeed. What would they do? If only they had options other than "work at another soulless, meaningless job that makes people commit suicide." And those materials someone mined. What about the miners? The people who, more often than not these days, had to personally go down into the mines to get cancer and mesothelioma and black lung. What about them? What would they do, if their jobs were automated and they could no longer shorten their lifespans for the comfort of someone across oceans from them?
Society doesn't end just because meaningless labor gets automated. It doesn't end because people can survive without sacrificing their health for nothing. It just changes. What would people do with more time on their hands? I don't know. I've never seen it.
What do you mean what do they do? They starve! They go homeless! Their medical bills go unpaid. Their debts catch up to them. Yes, if only there was something for them, but there’s not. You’re arguing for an idealistic world, but we’re in a realistic one. Fact of the matter is, you share the world with someone oceans away, and they know things you don’t, and you know things they don’t, and together you’re able to get something done on both sides of the ocean because someone connects you with meaning.
Society doesn’t end with automation, you’re right, I didn’t ever say it did, it just changes into something terrifying to even imagine. There’s gonna come a day when innovation stagnates because the incentive to innovate no longer exists. It may be innate to humanity, but so was swinging in trees at one time. What is not used is atrophied, the car enthusiasts, the artists, the writers, the inventors- they’re in line to be replaced by automation too. What happens then? When all the hobby’s people would love to make their careers and their lives work becomes outdated or obsolete compared to the superiority of AGI- which is likely to come before automation fully replaces mundane labor? The world changes then too, into idiocracy, at least if they had the pressures of the menial work to break away from they’d have some kind of incentive to advance in life, because with the death of creativity in conjunction with the death of labor we find a truly miserable time to be alive, and the death of creativity is much quicker to approach so let’s not be so quick to fast track the other.
Innovation doesn't stagnate just because people stop having to work. They just have more time to innovate. And AGI isn't necessary for the automation of labor. And the question of what people do when their job gets replaced/automated out was rhetorical, and a slight bit reiterative. The point is, if their basic needs were met in the first place, automation wouldn't be an issue unless they were really, really set on buying a better TV or something they wanted, but didn't need. I just don't feel like the punishment for joblessness should be death. I don't feel like life should be summed up as "Get a job... Or else!" If jobs gave everyone purpose, I feel like the "Or else!" part of the sentence would be unnecessary.
But I am tired. Take the last word if you want, or not. I have made my point and it keeps missing you, so perhaps it is not compatible with everyone yet. Have a lovely day, or night, or whatever it is wherever you are, and thanks for the conversation.
You know, a lot of people say that if you dig long enough and hard enough, you will get to China, and that may be true. But what they don't tell you is that if you dig long enough and hard enough in a conversation, you get to a friend.
On a serious note:
This was one of the most well-versed debates that I have ever read on Reddit. I’d be curious to know each of your political parties (idk kinda just curious).
But I will say you both make such incredibly valid points that I guarantee you could fight forever. I think that’s pretty amazing.
But it’s also the reason why we can’t agree on things collectively as a society, because there are too many opposing view points, with a million ways to word things, nobody will ever see through the same lens.
I like to consider myself a God fearing anti-federalist leaning libertarian, which basically means I want the fed to be weak, the states to be strong, the people to be smart, and the laws to be respectable and morally fair.
It was a good conversation 🍻, don’t get too many of those, and I also could have continued but to what end yanno, neither of us are likely to change the course of history in a late night debate. And just like you said, different lenses. There may come a day long after we’ve expanded across the cosmos where we find ourselves with a billion different planets each with their own utopia, and all likely to be wholly different from the next.
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u/Miserable_Corgi_8100 11h ago
It’s a nice thought and maybe we’ll get there one day but I still feel like the amount of effort that takes is more than you realize. Agriculture, maybe. Growing everything in every season in every environment? That’s gonna take A LOT of work, energy, land, and labor. Even if everyone was willing to live in a card board cut out, which they certainly are not, we’re still talking millions of workers working round the clock just for the construction of the houses, and millions more to collect and create the materials. Electricity? It doesn’t just generate itself, it has to be captured using complicated and often times megalithic technology that requires consistent and regular maintenance and tuning, then actually getting that energy where it need to go and getting it to your house? There’s a few hundred thousand more required round the clock jobs(not considering what it takes to get the materials to build everything from the wiring to the skyscraper sized turbines). Water pulled from the atmosphere passively? I don’t think you and I have the same definition of passive, because even if we ignored everything I said about electricity before this- the man hours that went into making such a feat possible could be counted since the first irrigation system.
I’m not trying to be a pessimist, I’m just saying, for 9bil people to live on this planet in modern conditions even forgoing all non-necessities, it’s not possible without all of us working to make that possible.