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Helsing posted:Your questions are seemingly predicated on certain assumptions about people, the economy, etc. If you were forthright about those assumptions then this discussion would probably be more fruitful for all involved. The agricultural revolution changed what people woke up in the morning and did. It didn't change the fact that they had to wake up and do something. We're contemplating a world where that might change and I think it's important not to downplay the impact and risks associated with eliminating something so significant and deeply intertwined with our history. quote:I agree that it is worth discussing what kinds of meaningful and identity-forming activities might replace work in a society where work was either greatly reduced or eliminated altogether. That's something people have been talking about for a long time, and part of the value of a thread like this is that it hopefully stimulates that kind of discussion. Agreed.
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Oct 31, 2014 02:00
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Helsing posted:But it also seems as though "what are people going to do when society is %100 automated?" is probably a less relevant question than "can we make work more pleasant for the growing number of people who find it nearly intolerable?" That's true. One simple, in theory, thing we can do is act more efficiently, reduce the time wasting things that we ask people to do, and correspondingly reduce the hours required to work but keep the same pay levels. The part that is hard is our system of pay isn't really built around the idea of efficiency. Most work is paid by the hour and the social pressures of anyone not working 40+ hours a week is considered a slacker, so you are incentivized to fill up those hours even if the end result is no net benefit to anyone. As one of my teachers used to say "look busy even if you aren't".
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Oct 31, 2014 02:09
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I'm on lunch break at work thinking about work again. This might read a little ramble-y, but bear with me. Everyone enjoys having a weekend getaway with their lover. But is there a difference in the joyful experience between someone who has the money and time to fly their lady to Napa Valley whenever they like, and the guy who has to work overtime for months to save up enough to do it, and then have to coordinate his days off with the missus? Is the trip appreciated more by overtime guy, knowing the work he had to go through to arrange everything? Put another, more blunt way; do we have to know pain to truly know pleasure? That might sound dramatic, but I think that's actually the base question, and might also answer the question of the value of work. Does having to spend the majority of your time doing something you would rather not do give you a better appreciation of the time you do get to yourself?
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Oct 31, 2014 17:19
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Arri posted:I would much prefer a technology based gift economy. We're already post-scarcity, and we have the technology to automate most menial work but it isn't done because there is not yet a financial incentive to do so. Perhaps we should take finances out of it then. We are so far from post-scarcity that it is shockingly naive to even consider the concept as likely to develop any time soon. We can't even manage to reliably feed and house the entire population of any first world country you care to name. I suppose it might look like-post scarcity if you believe that the perspective of a middle-class American in a good city working a job that pays well is a universal experience shared by everyone. crack mayor posted:I'm on lunch break at work thinking about work again. This might read a little ramble-y, but bear with me. Everyone enjoys having a weekend getaway with their lover. But is there a difference in the joyful experience between someone who has the money and time to fly their lady to Napa Valley whenever they like, and the guy who has to work overtime for months to save up enough to do it, and then have to coordinate his days off with the missus? Is the trip appreciated more by overtime guy, knowing the work he had to go through to arrange everything? I don't think we need to know pain at all, so much as there being a deep-seated human need to not have the things we do be futile. There's a reason craftsmen take pride in and find accomplishment in creating. The same reason I am, to give an example, a lot more enthusiastic about and proud of the shelves I built in my basement last weekend than absolutely anything I did in the 200+ hours I spent at work this month, being what amounts to a remote pair of hands. A major problem in a lot of modern work is that much of it is futile at the end of the day. There's no appreciable progress to look at and feel as if your work has mattered, just another slog tomorrow to seem busy (in the white collar world) or keep up production quotas (for the blue collar side). Given assurance that their basic needs would be taken care of, people would opt to do what they find to be meaningful and constructive. For some, this is creative arts. For others, it is service. For many of them the worthwhile thing about work is that showing off something they've built gets notice and reactions from others, and this is the value that they're really after. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Oct 31, 2014 |
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Oct 31, 2014 17:38
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Liquid Communism posted:We are so far from post-scarcity that it is shockingly naive to even consider the concept as likely to develop any time soon. We can't even manage to reliably feed and house the entire population of any first world country you care to name. I suppose it might look like-post scarcity if you believe that the perspective of a middle-class American in a good city working a job that pays well is a universal experience shared by everyone. We absolutely have the resources to be post scarcity in the United States, but not the will to do so.
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Oct 31, 2014 17:55
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crack mayor posted:Is the trip appreciated more by overtime guy, knowing the work he had to go through to arrange everything? Yes. In fact, it's the secret to happiness. This is why I crush my nuts in a machine press every morning. So I appreciate the rest of the day so much more.
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Oct 31, 2014 18:00
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Talmonis posted:We absolutely have the resources to be post scarcity in the United States, but not the will to do so. If by 'post-scarcity' you mean 'glowing golden paradise supported on the backs of the third world'... Nah, even then it doesn't fly. We are still in a situation where there are a finite amount of resources and time, and an exponentially larger variety of wants and needs to be fulfilled. If someone in the US wants a thing, it has to be manufactured out of materials that are not in any great amount able to be recycled, using energy produced from limited resources such as fossil fuels, and shipped to them in vehicles that burn more of the same and require a person to operate.
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Oct 31, 2014 18:21
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Liquid Communism posted:If by 'post-scarcity' you mean 'glowing golden paradise supported on the backs of the third world'... There are absolutely enough resources in America alone to support food, shelter and clean water for its population. Anything in addition to that isn't (or at least shouldn't) what's being talked about. No poo poo we can't support a lavish lifestyle with a Hummer in the driveway of a McMansion for everyone. But terrible for the environment as they may be, we won't be running out of coal or natural gas in this country for a very long time. Basic needs should be met, and it's possible to do so.
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Oct 31, 2014 18:39
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Talmonis posted:We absolutely have the resources to be post scarcity in the United States, but not the will to do so. Post-scarcity does not mean what you think it means because even if we had magical replicators we are still stuck with a finite amount of natural resources/energy. quote:There are absolutely enough resources in America alone to support food, shelter and clean water for its population.
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Oct 31, 2014 18:47
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Typo posted:This doesn't qualify as a post-scarce society In that case, I was wrong. But why argue for a post-scarcity society until these basics (which are possible) are met?
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Oct 31, 2014 18:51
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asdf32 posted:You make an important point by suggesting that the status void currently occupied by pay will get filled in by something else. When I read threads like this I get the suspicion that some people are looking to liberate humans from external preassures and responsibilities, and assuming that they'll assume some higher state if this happens.
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Oct 31, 2014 18:52
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Talmonis posted:In that case, I was wrong. But why argue for a post-scarcity society until these basics (which are possible) are met? We shouldn't, and that's why I'm puzzled that you brought it up as it doesn't really have any bearing on the topic at hand. In a true post scarcity society, the question of the thread is meaningless because everyone neither has to to work nor wants for the resources to do whatever they'd like to instead. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Oct 31, 2014 |
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Oct 31, 2014 19:11
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Liquid Communism posted:I don't think we need to know pain at all, so much as there being a deep-seated human need to not have the things we do be futile. There's a reason craftsmen take pride in and find accomplishment in creating. The same reason I am, to give an example, a lot more enthusiastic about and proud of the shelves I built in my basement last weekend than absolutely anything I did in the 200+ hours I spent at work this month, being what amounts to a remote pair of hands. A major problem in a lot of modern work is that much of it is futile at the end of the day. There's no appreciable progress to look at and feel as if your work has mattered, just another slog tomorrow to seem busy (in the white collar world) or keep up production quotas (for the blue collar side). Today was the last day at my white collar job, and you pretty much exactly described why I quit: futility. Modern corporations are set up such that only a minority of the employees are actually doing anything of value (as in, either directly or indirectly contributing to the bottom line) and everyone else is just doing busy-work. One of our Account Managers literally spent half her day yesterday trying to get one of our resellers to resubmit a PDF document where a certain paragraph was bolded and in red. This was because someone higher up wanted it that way. In contrast, when I work on personal projects I'm just ridiculously productive. I make a list of things that need to get done, prioritize them, and knock them out one by one without any distractions, politics, bureaucracy, and so on. It's greatly fulfilling.
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Oct 31, 2014 19:22
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Liquid Communism posted:We are so far from post-scarcity that it is shockingly naive to even consider the concept as likely to develop any time soon. We can't even manage to reliably feed and house the entire population of any first world country you care to name. I suppose it might look like-post scarcity if you believe that the perspective of a middle-class American in a good city working a job that pays well is a universal experience shared by everyone. This is exactly right in my view. I myself am experiencing this right now. I get paid pretty good money writing documentation for a software company, and it's tedious as hell and I know flat out that most of our users don't bother reading it. I hate it. All of my coworkers hate it. I have programming experience and coded up some tools to automate some of the more tedious documentation we produce. What shocked me was that, even though I was working, I was having fun doing it and I actually lost track of time programming these utilities. And I still get a little thrill every time I use one of them or a coworker mentions using it. As a result, I talked to HR at my company and they are paying for me to finish my CS major so I can shift to software development full time. I feel happy to be working for the first time in my life, and I've been working since I was 14. There is a lot of importance in your work being tangible and in people appreciating it. Our world has a huge loving problem with fake makework paper jobs that nobody takes any pride in. And people do them because they pay better than mcdonald's but all these paper pushers are loving miserable and then they just take it out on the income class below them.
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Nov 6, 2014 06:09
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I do software documentation (technical specs, feature requests, etc) and I don't think that work is bullshit busy work at all. Whenever a conflict comes up with what the software was supposed to do or how it was built you can bet we're digging up the documentation for it. There's also potentially a lot of money on the line on those documents because it shows what we agreed to build and support. Can't say I really envy any of the developers I work with. Midnight Moth fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Nov 9, 2014 |
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Nov 9, 2014 19:30
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Midnight Moth posted:I do software documentation (technical specs, feature requests, etc) and I don't think that work is bullshit busy work at all. Whenever a conflict comes up with what the software was supposed to do or how it was built you can bet we're digging up the documentation for it. There's also potentially a lot of money on the line on those documents because it shows what we agreed to build and support. To clarify, I don't work on the technical specs, feature requests, etc here. Our developers are responsible for that. I produce the actual documentation our customers' system administrators use to configure and maintain the software. Like the big fat book that used to come with boxed copies of Windows 95, but 500x more content. The documentation absolutely serves a vital purpose in the abstract sense, but that purpose is never fulfilled in real life. What I mean is that many of our customers make it very clear that they won't bother to read the documentation and will just call our technical support to explain everything to them. We provide a really robust online documentation portal with a good search feature, so hypothetically very few questions are unanswered. Nevertheless, our technical support staff are constantly inundated with questions whose answers can be found by searching the documentation for that question. It can feel really pointless when you see that day in and day out. Obviously our tech support guys just refer to the documents I write, but they also know our code well enough that they wouldn't be helpless without my documents. As a result, I feel way more fulfilled by developing the software, because I get to see people use it and hear about how it improved something in their work or life. I go through all the same crunchtimes and such as our developers do, but I come out feeling way less accomplished at the end. But then again, our difference of opinion on this just demonstrates how there's not really an objective way to quantify the meaning or value of work. A similar type of work is able to fulfill you because how your work is used and valuated by others gives it meaning. A similar type of work on my part is used and valuated differently by others and drains it of meaning. Ultimately I think this points out that the only "value" of work for an individual beyond the compensation they get for it is whether they themselves feel as though they are accomplishing something by doing it.
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Nov 10, 2014 20:46
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