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on the left posted:What do the people seeking self-fulfillment have to offer to the portion of humanity who is doing all the work that is not fulfilling? Fulfillment is a state of mind, and people can find fulfillment in anything given the right circumstances. And, any job can be made miserable if you feel you must do it in order to avoid the suffering of starvation and homelessness. And you have bosses who are cruel and arbitrary. And society puts you down for down that particular work.
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Oct 27, 2014 19:52
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Talmonis posted:You mean one that provides a minimum income for all citizens? It's pretty self-explanatory. People can provide for themselves through the mincome, and would only "need" to work if they wanted more material goods and luxuries. And even then, only so much as they desired. Automation would be a net good for society (as less and less jobs would be required to run it effeciently), instead of just a job killing sword of Damocles over the heads of the working class. But who is making the stuff that you buy with your minimum income? How does society afford it? Is it all robots made by robots? That's the part that doesn't work imo.
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Oct 27, 2014 20:37
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wateroverfire posted:But who is making the stuff that you buy with your minimum income? How does society afford it? Is it all robots made by robots? That's the part that doesn't work imo. Most manufacturing is currently done via automation, but that's really beside the point. Most people would still seek work solely because luxuries are awesome. But the key difference is that you don't fear losing your job so much that you'll let sexual harassment, abuse, degradation, humiliation or hostility slide. The owning and management classes will have lost their leverage that makes dealing with the workplace such a pain in the rear end. As for paying for mincome? Proper taxation on capital gains, earned income and estate taxes. Pretty simple, but politically impossible in the current environment.
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Oct 27, 2014 20:47
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wateroverfire posted:But who is making the stuff that you buy with your minimum income? How does society afford it? Is it all robots made by robots? That's the part that doesn't work imo. The labour force participation rate in America is around 63 percent right now and it is probably the richest society to ever exist. Also that wealth is unevenly distributed and arguably could be taxed much more extensively without harming economic efficiency. Given these conditions I think it is reasonable to assume that our society can already support a poopulation of tens of millions of unproductive persons whie still creating enough wealth to support an unprecedented level of affluence. Also most CEOs have more than enough money to provide themselves with an apartment, food and books, games magazines, movies and other essentials. Yet CEOs are known for working long hours. Why? They could live a life of leisure without starving yet they choose to work for more money. So some of the people working the longest hours are choosing to do this despite having enough accumulated savings to live as though they did have a minimum income. That suggests that providing everyone with a basic income will not magically erase everyone's work ethic.
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Oct 27, 2014 22:11
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wateroverfire posted:But who is making the stuff that you buy with your minimum income? How does society afford it? Is it all robots made by robots? That's the part that doesn't work imo. Manufacturing jobs are already heavily automated, in part because they paid well enough that automation was a viable alternative to human workers. A huge number of service jobs can (and probably will) be automated, but they haven't been yet because we still pay service workers practically nothing. It's getting a little bit outside of the bounds of this thread, but "how do we deal with a not insignificant number of people being permanently unemployed?" is almost certainly a question we're going to need to answer as a society within our lifetimes. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Oct 27, 2014 |
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Oct 27, 2014 22:41
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Don't worry the economy will magically invent more jobs but it can't if you make us pay lazy slobs waiting tables a decent wage. Also I won't tip them because they should have to face the consequences of their chosen career field.
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Oct 27, 2014 23:15
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Obviously, changes would have to be made to the manufacturing process to make it more rewarding. It is a change in focus, that's all. Ditto with things like janitorial duties and such.
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Oct 27, 2014 23:42
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Shbobdb posted:Obviously, changes would have to be made to the manufacturing process to make it more rewarding. It is a change in focus, that's all. Ditto with things like janitorial duties and such. I'm not sure about this. Until we invent self-cleaning toilets and the like, I don't think scrubbing toilets will ever be fulfilling beyond giving the scrubber money (or, in the case of your own toilet, a clean toilet to use). You can certainly increase the pay level to a point where it's an attractive job to someone with a mincome, but that doesn't mean it can be made "fulfilling."
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Oct 28, 2014 00:24
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Sorry, I'm not going to answer questions that are predicated on one person being "more valuable" than another based on their economic output.
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Oct 28, 2014 00:25
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Arri posted:Sorry, I'm not going to answer questions that are predicated on one person being "more valuable" than another based on their economic output. Good thing my question isn't based on that, then. Would you care to answer it?
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Oct 28, 2014 00:39
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PT6A posted:I'm not sure about this. Until we invent self-cleaning toilets and the like, I don't think scrubbing toilets will ever be fulfilling beyond giving the scrubber money (or, in the case of your own toilet, a clean toilet to use). You can certainly increase the pay level to a point where it's an attractive job to someone with a mincome, but that doesn't mean it can be made "fulfilling." So close. The way you make janitorial duties fulfilling is paying top dollar for them. Or incorporating them into a larger framework, like a rotating duty at a co-op (or your house) where no one really likes it but we all do it. Since nobody has to be a janitor, nobody would be one for peanuts.
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Oct 28, 2014 00:49
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What happens when we use automation to get rid of food service jobs without doing anything else? A McDonald's could be completely automated and only have two people on staff. I like to believe that the government would do something but that seems less and less likely as time goes on.
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Oct 28, 2014 01:26
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PT6A posted:I'm not sure about this. Until we invent self-cleaning toilets and the like, I don't think scrubbing toilets will ever be fulfilling beyond giving the scrubber money (or, in the case of your own toilet, a clean toilet to use). You can certainly increase the pay level to a point where it's an attractive job to someone with a mincome, but that doesn't mean it can be made "fulfilling." For some people, "fulfilling" is very much "earns a fair amount of money for a physical task." The key difference is the amount earned for it will actually reflect how much value is placed on clean toilets, rather than coercing people to clean toilets with the threat of starvation. If your society requires the threat of death to accomplish tasks, it's an unsustainable, dysfunctional society.
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Oct 28, 2014 01:41
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Waaaah the Christians are out to get me
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PT6A posted:I'm not sure about this. Until we invent self-cleaning toilets and the like, I don't think scrubbing toilets will ever be fulfilling beyond giving the scrubber money (or, in the case of your own toilet, a clean toilet to use). You can certainly increase the pay level to a point where it's an attractive job to someone with a mincome, but that doesn't mean it can be made "fulfilling."
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Oct 28, 2014 06:06
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Quantum Mechanic posted:For some people, "fulfilling" is very much "earns a fair amount of money for a physical task." The key difference is the amount earned for it will actually reflect how much value is placed on clean toilets, rather than coercing people to clean toilets with the threat of starvation. Well, that relates back to the question posed by the thread, more or less: does work create any fulfilment outside of meeting financial needs/wants? For some jobs, I would say the answer is obviously yes. There are many people, though far from a majority, who enjoy what they do and derive value from it outside of financial gain (not to say that they would necessarily do it in the absence of financial gain entirely). I'm guessing, though, that the person who scrubs toilets for a living will only ever derive value from that job in a financial sense. If they can, all the best to them, I just can't imagine how or why it would happen. I agree that people shouldn't be motivated to do it because they'll starve otherwise, and even as a generally right-wing person, I firmly believe that a mincome would be a wonderful idea. As an aside, I'm not sure why mincome is such an unpopular idea: it's great for everyone, unless you already have money and your life's plan is to sit on your rear end and do nothing. As a rich person that already has capital to fund entrepreneurship, you'll enjoy access to much larger markets for whatever it is you plan to do to make money, because suddenly more people have more money to spend. Whatever you pay in extra tax to fund such a program, you should easily be able to make back through the provision of goods and services to the new, wider market. A mincome would, then, essentially be a tax on the idle rich, and that's something that I'm quite okay with. Shbobdb posted:So close. The way you make janitorial duties fulfilling is paying top dollar for them. Or incorporating them into a larger framework, like a rotating duty at a co-op (or your house) where no one really likes it but we all do it. Since nobody has to be a janitor, nobody would be one for peanuts. Is financial reward "fulfilling," though? It's certainly beneficial, but I don't think it creates a sense of fulfillment by itself. I know plenty of high-paid lawyers and such who hate their job, and hate their life even though they're well-compensated. I agree that people would probably be happier than they are now if poo poo jobs were at least well compensated, but I don't think it will fix the problem of people feeling unfulfilled or unhappy with their lives.
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Oct 28, 2014 06:28
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Grapplejack posted:What happens when we use automation to get rid of food service jobs without doing anything else? A McDonald's could be completely automated and only have two people on staff. I like to believe that the government would do something but that seems less and less likely as time goes on. You literally see this already if you go to Japan. Go to any restaurant, there's a vending machine in it in which you punch in your orders and put in money, out comes a ticket. You give your ticket to 1 person at the counter. It pretty much eliminates the entire need for cashiers or at least reduces it to like 1/5 as much as before. Granted I don't think you can do this with cooks (yet at least).
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Oct 28, 2014 06:39
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Typo posted:Granted I don't think you can do this with cooks (yet at least). It's just a matter of mechanizing things properly. There are vending machines that can make pizza now, I'm told. Eventually I have no doubt that low-skill cooks will be obsolete, though I'm not sure if fine dining will ever be financially feasible to mechanize.
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Oct 28, 2014 06:44
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Shbobdb posted:So close. The way you make janitorial duties fulfilling is paying top dollar for them. Or incorporating them into a larger framework, like a rotating duty at a co-op (or your house) where no one really likes it but we all do it. Since nobody has to be a janitor, nobody would be one for peanuts. Artificially propping up wages works up to a point, but when you insist on paying the janitor the same as a professor chances are people will just start investing in self-cleaning technology to replace said janitors as much as possible. Maybe this is the desired endpoint for you though.
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Oct 28, 2014 06:44
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Typo posted:You literally see this already if you go to Japan. The pseudo-gourmet burger niche already has a fully-automated burger cook that is looking for interested buyers: http://momentummachines.com/
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Oct 28, 2014 06:45
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on the left posted:The pseudo-gourmet burger niche already has a fully-automated burger cook that is looking for interested buyers: http://momentummachines.com/ I went to what was suppose to be a fully automated Sushi restaurant in Tokyo, turns out it didn't work out and they had to add a couple of guys back in. But then again, given improvements in technology this one could very well have solved whatever was it which broke the Sushi restaurant.
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Oct 28, 2014 06:51
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PT6A posted:Well, that relates back to the question posed by the thread, more or less: does work create any fulfilment outside of meeting financial needs/wants? That wasn't the question posed by the thread, though. The question posed was does work have value beyond meeting financial needs; that is, is there inherent good to working and, if we reached a post-scarcity world where the entirety of manual labour was 100% automated, is it an inherent good to still have people be made to "work." That's a different question to can work be fulfilling outside of meeting financial needs, because the obvious answer to that is yes, where as far as I'm concerned the answer to the first question is no, there's little to no inherent value in work for work's own sake.
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Oct 28, 2014 07:02
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Quantum Mechanic posted:I'm concerned the answer to the first question is no, there's little to no inherent value in work for work's own sake. So for like a 10 week period of my life I did nothing, I didn't work, look for a job, and I finished school already. I was absolutely miserable and bored and felt like I was going insane in that time period. I traveled for a bit in Asia afterwards, but got bored of that after a month or two. Then I got another job, and subsequently went back to school, I can absolutely say I that even though the job was kinda boring it was a much better period of my life than those 10 weeks. I mean, maybe there are a portion of the population which can play around and invent stuff or create art or whatever, I'm just someone who'd rather be working. And I suspect most of the population isn't too different and the % that could enjoy actually create art in their free time is pretty small.
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Oct 28, 2014 07:08
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Typo posted:Then I got another job, and subsequently went back to school, I can absolutely say I that even though the job was kinda boring it was a much better period of my life than those 10 weeks. That's fine, it's not what the question is asking. If YOU find value in working beyond the financial gain, go for gold. As far as I understood the question posed by the thread, though, it was is there inherent moral value in the concept of "work," in the sense that having to do things you don't want to do is character-building or whatever.
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Oct 28, 2014 07:42
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Typo posted:Then I got another job, and subsequently went back to school, I can absolutely say I that even though the job was kinda boring it was a much better period of my life than those 10 weeks. That's fine, but it doesn't say much one way or another about the value of wage labor. To put it another way, I think a lot of people would continue to work if they hit the lottery, but they wouldn't necessarily continue with their current jobs or careers. One thing you might want to read up on is the basic income grant pilot program that ran in Namibia, where the benefits (among other things) included higher rates of entrepreneurship and community participation. A city in Manitoba that ran a Mincome (not quite the same thing, admittedly) experiment had similar results. I'm of the opinion that there's a huge amount of personal value in work, but that the need to work to survive diminishes that value tremendously.
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Oct 28, 2014 14:06
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Paradoxish posted:It's getting a little bit outside of the bounds of this thread, but "how do we deal with a not insignificant number of people being permanently unemployed?" is almost certainly a question we're going to need to answer as a society within our lifetimes. I'm starting to think this is going to be one of the central "civil rights" style questions of the next twenty-five years or so, especially in the developed world. I mean, hell, they're automating McDonald's now. quote:By the third quarter of next year, McDonald’s plans to introduce new technology in some markets “to make it easier for customers to order and pay for food digitally and to give people the ability to customize their orders,” reports the Journal. Mr. Thompson, the CEO, said Tuesday that customers “want to personalize their meals” and “to enjoy eating in a contemporary, inviting atmosphere. And they want choices in how they order, choices in what they order and how they’re served.” A guaranteed minimum income seems like the only morally acceptable answer, but even with that, we're dealing with thousands of years of cultural inertia; "work ethic" is a phrase for a reason, and that reason is that our culture tends to view work as inherently ethical and non-work as inherently unethical. This isn't just an external opinion either; most people probably have it internalized to one degree or another. So it seems like over the next twenty-five years or so we're going to see two major societal forces run into each other: the moral objection to unemployment and the (unfortunately, I fear much weaker) objection to letting the long-term unemployed sink into neglect and decay and the abyss of stifled hope and choked opportunity. After all, it's not like the unemployed and poor have much voice in our political system. I worry.
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Oct 28, 2014 14:24
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PT6A posted:It's just a matter of mechanizing things properly. There are vending machines that can make pizza now, I'm told. Eventually I have no doubt that low-skill cooks will be obsolete, though I'm not sure if fine dining will ever be financially feasible to mechanize. I think having people who are, if only for an hour, below you is part of the appeal for a lot of people.
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Oct 28, 2014 14:38
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Pope Guilty posted:I think having people who are, if only for an hour, below you is part of the appeal for a lot of people. ...that would explain a lot of the dickish behaviour I encountered when I worked at Subway. Seriously, though, what kind of rear end in a top hat believes that (consciously or subconsciously)?
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Oct 28, 2014 15:58
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PT6A posted:Seriously, though, what kind of rear end in a top hat believes that (consciously or subconsciously)? Cops
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Oct 28, 2014 16:14
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Typo posted:Then I got another job, and consequently went back to school, I can absolutely say that even though the job was kinda boring it was a much better period of my life than those 10 weeks. Not to pile on, but the choice isn't just between wage labor or creative endeavors taken up for their own sake. Most people apply to a job with finances in mind. If finances were not a concern, you could apply to a job based on your interests, or proximity to your house, or whatever. And you could leave if the working conditions became poor. I also was unemployed recently, and I found it miserable because I felt like I couldn't do anything other than look for a job and stay at home. I didn't know how long it would be before I found another job, so I had to stretch my savings as much as I could. I think your suspicion is correct. Most people would work. But I think it's because we are socialized to believe that work is what validates your existence. People are taught to accept a day off here and there, and maybe a multi-day vacation once a year as the best they can get. I think if you can even fathom a life without work as the focus, you're probably better off than 90% of the world's population. Everyone else knows how disposable they are in the current system and acts accordingly. But just because that's the way it is doesn't mean that's the way it should be.
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Oct 28, 2014 17:11
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Volunteers who are volunteering for reasons other than adding to a resume should be enough to answer the title of this thread. Volunteers rooting out invasive species or leading tours or doing hard work to restore an old airplane or building or whatever exist. Some people read literature and write about it for a living. Others do it for pleasure. So, yeah.
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Oct 28, 2014 18:59
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Just came from work, so please excuse the language and the shifting focus. It has been a long (but rewarding) day! I suppose I should preface this by saying that I live in a Scandinavian country. On top of the huge vacations (relative to the US) that are the norm there, I am in a career (in)famous for having long vacations (teaching). That's not even counting all the perks of living in a welfare state. Safe to say, I am in a very cushy, privileged position compared to perhaps the majority of people. I am very happy at work. I have some bad days where I would rather have just stayed in bed, but those are handily outweighed by the days where I feel that I am getting something worthwhile out of what I do. I am still quite new at the job, but I enjoy it very much so far. This "something worthwhile", I suppose, is a sense of pleasure derived from doing my work and succeeding at it, helping people learn, and seeing some of them even enjoy it. I get good feedback, and am happy to take on extra duties and do favors for co-workers (within reason), who I like. I am compensated very well, which I suspect is a big reason why I enjoy doing the work, but is not the sole reason why I feel my work has value. However, I was quite miserable in my apprenticeship a couple years ago. The conditions (commute, student population, workload) were quite similar to what I am working with now, but the difference in how I experienced it is huge to how it is for me now. I have narrowed why I think that is to following factors:
I still got the fuzzies from having done a good job occasionally, but those positive feelings were mostly drowned out by the stress. The occasional fuckup turned into crushing defeats, which I agonized over well into the night, keeping me from getting sleep, leading to more fuckups. Already hectic days were made heavier by busywork and bureaucracy. Heavy drinking in the weekends didn't help any of it at all. You could argue that I was/am a whiny bitch idiot about most of these things, and I wouldn't disagree with you too much, but that doesn't lessen the fact that if I wasn't there already, it brought me very close to a depression. All these things combined made the work feel thankless and gruelling, and crucially, without value. What was supposed to be free/rest time was dominated by being stressed about work-related poo poo. I suppose you could argue that it wasn't a job in the sense that there was no wage, but it certainly was work, and rarely felt anything like fulfilling. In hindsight I am glad I had the experience, but would pretty much rather eat dogshit than do it again. But with those bad factors removed from the situation, work sometimes feels like free time even though I'm working harder than I have in years, and while I go home tired, I feel happy and refreshed. I grin at my paycheck, and thinking about it makes me happy on rough days. I'm unsure if I'd continue for very long if there was something like universal/guaranteed minimum income, because I'd like to maybe get another degree. But that's so I can teach in some specialized topics, so I would definitely return to teaching in a year or two. *** I'm the kind of guy who likes to sit on my rear end and play games for weeks if I have nothing else going on. But I will always eventually get a bad conscience about it, because I'm not engaged in any kind of productive work, either related to self-improvement or otherwise. Being unemployed after writing my thesis this summer lead me to, amongst other things, try to (re-)learn arithmetic, algebra, economics, (sadly abandoned after a few weeks, but hey I learned a few things, followed by:) exercise and weight loss, working with music, helping edit  my girlfriend's novel, reading quite a few books on various topics, and (eventually successful) job hunting. That took place in about two and a half months, which I think is a modest achievement!*** This is really rambling on and I apologize, but I want to weigh in on what I suppose you could call the coercive moral compulsion to do certain kinds of work in modern society. It is somewhat similar to the US over here (puritan work ethic cultures unite!) so people who are seen as not participating in what is viewed as acceptably intensive, prestigious, and culturally privileged labor are certainly looked down upon. People on disability are increasingly viewed as shiftless parasites in political discourse. For instance, the unemployed who are supported by welfare, like jobseekers, are similarly disparaged. The fact that the activity of applying for jobs (which for many takes enough time and effort to reasonably be regarded as a part time job on its own) entitles you to some welfare payments drives quite a few people into a rage these days, because being out of work is a moral failing that must be punished. Not, as it often is, a consequence of factors outside of the unemployed's control, or at least not indicative of their moral fortitude (or lack thereof). The lack of a wage is not enough punishment; these people, in addition, must be spat on. I think it is partly the need to feel elevated above another person, often mentioned here, that drives this kind of attitude. The recent, rightwards drift in politics might be another factor. It is unfortunate, but I don't think it is a sustainable attitude. As some people here have pointed out, I believe that automation will replace more jobs than will be created by new industries. If we do not change our attitude and thinking to accomodate for the changes that will be required to make sure that the people pushed out of the workforce can survive (either by some kind of free, comprehensive educational programme to teach them how to build the robots that build the robots, or more likely, some kind of GMI), I fear there will be more suffering and unrest than society can tolerate without using excessive coercive violence to control itself. So the attitude and thinking will either self-correct out of existence, or we will learn to love Big Brother. Haha wow, this took a sudden turn into speculative bullshit. Pretty much the universal sign that I should stop now. *** TL;DR: 1. I believe work definitely has value outside of meeting financial needs, but this nebulous value is dependent on factors (often external to the work activity itself) that in my experience can make the difference between lovely miserable drudgery and rewarding labor, without the work itself being much different. 2. I think humans are innately driven to undertake some kind of rewarding activity/work if left idle long enough. Remaining idle indefinitely is probably a sign of depression or some other dysfunction, but is not a moral failing. 3. Pious, protestant work ethic in modern society will either become passé or will usher us into a dystopian hell-future when the robots take over. murphyslaw fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Oct 28, 2014 |
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Oct 28, 2014 19:36
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I work a depressing 9 to 5 as a programmer and I'll never be able to get out of it because it pays the bills. It doesn't matter how much I switch jobs, I will always hate it because it serves no purpose but to make the company more money. I make video games in my spare time and have had several opportunities to show my games out in public and the smiles my games create makes me happier than I've ever been. I'd say it's twice as hard to make a game in my spare time than it is to go to work everyday. I'll never make enough money making games to support my family which means I'm stuck in a 9 to 5 rut for the rest of my life. I wish I had the option to do what I love and can see the very obvious net benefit to society it has but no, if it's not making someone else rich, it's not considered work. I envy you murphyslaw.
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Oct 28, 2014 19:49
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If it's any consolation, I don't the relative utopia I live in by accident of birth and luck will last very long. Or it might spread, who knows!
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Oct 28, 2014 19:59
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poemdexter posted:I work a depressing 9 to 5 as a programmer and I'll never be able to get out of it because it pays the bills. It doesn't matter how much I switch jobs, I will always hate it because it serves no purpose but to make the company more money. I make video games in my spare time and have had several opportunities to show my games out in public and the smiles my games create makes me happier than I've ever been. I'd say it's twice as hard to make a game in my spare time than it is to go to work everyday. I'll never make enough money making games to support my family which means I'm stuck in a 9 to 5 rut for the rest of my life. I wish I had the option to do what I love and can see the very obvious net benefit to society it has but no, if it's not making someone else rich, it's not considered work. Not to be an rear end but if your games are good why can't you make money from them?
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Oct 28, 2014 20:02
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wateroverfire posted:Not to be an rear end but if your games are good why can't you make money from them? There are a lot of dubious assumptions bundled up in this question.
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Oct 28, 2014 20:08
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wateroverfire posted:Not to be an rear end but if your games are good why can't you make money from them? You are just precious.
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Oct 28, 2014 20:25
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This probably belongs in the game dev chat, but to offer a few points to wateroverfire: From what I understand of the games industry, without an advertising and publishing budget or significant free time to do these things on your own, it's quite unlikely for games to turn a good profit regardless of their quality, at least until enough people think it's worth their money. Advertising can be superseded by word-of-mouth, but the indie/early access market seems pretty flooded, so barriers for entry are high. Also the amount of money required to support a family is almost exponentially higher than the amount of money it takes to keep a bachelor programmer from starving to death and being kicked out by the landlord. Bachelor programmers living on ramen seems to be the standard for most one-person game development teams, unless their game is so genius that it starts a new genre (see: minecraft), which is unlikely to happen for most developers, regardless of skill. So there's that too.
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Oct 28, 2014 20:32
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wateroverfire posted:Not to be an rear end but if your games are good why can't you make money from them? You forgot the  at the end.
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Oct 28, 2014 20:44
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poemdexter posted:You forgot the I'm asking a question because I don't know, dude. murphyslaw posted:From what I understand of the games industry, without an advertising and publishing budget or significant free time to do these things on your own, it's quite unlikely for games to turn a good profit regardless of their quality, at least until enough people think it's worth their money. Advertising can be superseded by word-of-mouth, but the indie/early access market seems pretty flooded, so barriers for entry are high. Does this sound pretty much right, poemdexter?
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Oct 28, 2014 20:58
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wateroverfire posted:I'm asking a question because I don't know, dude. No offense, but your question comes off as naive in almost any context. Products fail to be commercially successful all the time for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the product itself. Games have the added hurdle of requiring months (often years) of unpaid development just to create, all with the constantly looming risk that you're burning your savings and/or working yourself to death for nothing. And then, if you are successful enough to make a living, odds are you'll be making less money than you would be with a stable, boring development job. Entrepreneurship in general is just unrealistically risky for most people with familial/financial obligations, which is actually a problem that's pretty relevant to the topic of this thread.
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Oct 28, 2014 21:09
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