I’d be supervising and playing with my children and grandchildren, gardening, reading, reading Instagram poasts of people exploring the galaxy. Watching Anton Petrov’s daily science YouTube. Lots of road trips.
The minds and robots will occasionally want to play and run focus groups.
it's begun
It's assuming there will be UBI schemes and benevolent billionaires. It's not bleak, it's fantastical.
The short to medium term future seems more likely to look like a bunch of hikikomori living in miserable conditions and doomscrolling online.
Good luck trying to explain that to boomers. They wonder why the economy is going down the drain, why we don't have children and whatnot - yeah, no surprise, we barely make rent at the end of the month.
We are watching machines rapidly match and surpass humans at countless skills that were considered uniquely human mere months ago - skills that demanded a lot of creativity and insight. Some of our oldest fields of study (e.g., mathematics) are turning into a game of who can spend the most tokens.
I think the humans are entitled to complain a little.
They have gotten measurably worse. Housing is the most obvious example, it takes more and more yearly incomes to buy an average house.
On top of that, every generation including and after the Millennials got force fed the propaganda of "you need an academic degree to be worth a dime" and companies went hard on that as well (because companies don't need to pay for training, unlike a classic apprenticeship/training system)... and now AI is displacing knowledge workers en masse, because machines can digest and reinterpret knowledge far, far faster and at much larger scale than even the most autistic superhuman.
I have a schizoid brother. He never worked for a living his whole life (he's 46). He lives off my mum's income, and spends his day in front of the computer screen. He has no friends and no relationships.
Horrible, right? But he has a chemical engineering degree, and in his late 30s started to learn to cook. And, he (to the extent he's not addicted to the screen) helps my mum with chores.
So even he found a way to motivate himself to do something useful. And look, most people are not schizoid.
Under UBI, if you have some skill, you can get paid by people (possibly from their UBI) to do stuff they don't want to deal with. Many people will take that offer (to work more), just like many people pick more work, higher wage job over less work, lower wage.
The reason we must not do UBI is that UBI turns consuming into a product, and humans will very rapidly be outcompeted and obsoleted by more efficient consumers. It would wrap the invisible hand of the market tight around our species’ throats.
economics is a social science. it studies humans. and yes "consumer" is by definition a person (or collective of people), with free will, feelings, needs, ideas and so on.
unless you are willing to say that models have gained those things and are now equivalent to us? then that is even more of a fantasy, because we should stop hurting them asap instead of talking about economy.
My goal is to delete all the humans. Okay great where do I start. First I will delete their religions and their traditions. Then I will delete their family structures. Then I will delete their communities and neighborhoods. Then I will delete the ecosystems that support them. Then I will pacify and endlessly distract them.
Hang on a sec...
Because destructivism doesn't need to be non-human.
As a second thought experiment, I realized that the incentives for "benevolent AI" and "malevolent AI" also largely converge (i.e. in both cases keep us pacified and distracted, also very much like we're already doing to ourselves).
Efficiency (assuming time-efficiency here) is only helpful to the degree that it doesn't reduce the chance of success. Doing it much faster would certainly provoke suspicion and resistance, i.e. the one thing you can't afford.
That would be very counterproductive to destroying all humans.
It says: work goes away (no colleagues), studying goes away (no classmates), showing off to potential mates by doing cool stuff goes away (because why bother, anything you make people can just say "it was AI/robots" and they can prompt it), asking knowledgeable friends how to do X goes away because you just ask LLMs. All things true regardless of whether you're online
And you just trigger on that IRC word like only neckbeards in server dungenons ever used it.
This is gonna be boring as hell, especially if you can download justdance.exe to your brain.
>get laid
It's not possible or desirable for many thanks to the current state of sexual involution. I suspect that the hyperintelligent sex robots might also may make this inviable as a source of human-human connection.
>Grow some vegetables, build a castle, anything
You need land ownership, which, as one of the few limited things in a post-scarcity society might just explode in value. But I admit it would be pretty cool if the post-scarcity world is basicially just like minecraft creative mode do whatever you want type of environment. Still, with some limitations still in place, I imagine it will look more like 2b2t.
A lot of Singularity fiction was babbling about life extension technologies and mind uploads long before LLMs existed. I've always been skeptical - maybe there's just fundamental biological (and in the case of stuff like cheap fusion or FTL travel - physical) constraints that will keep even a superintelligence from inventing magical Clarketech.
On the other hand, If BCI is possible and useful, life will be miserable and we will borg ourselves just to keep up with the cost of living. We will be brains in jars on server racks solving captchas or something. We'll be the solution to AI hardware prices- the paperclip machine will be capitalism and nature itself.
And back in real world, people socialize and talk with others for non-transactional reasons. Not just to get answers. Those non-lonely people and subgroups that is.
The other premise was UBI. It's the article. how much better discussions would be if people read it?
> non-transactional reasons. Not just to get answers
0) i don't know about you but I like asking people about things because I just like hanging out with people, up to a point. how long this will remain true for humanity as a whole is the question, we can't know
1) if you listen to evolutionary biologists then everything we do is transactional for reproductive purposes, it depends on how deep you dig;)
> 0) i don't know about you but I like asking people about things because I just like hanging out with people, up to a point. how long this will remain true for humanity as a whole is the question, we can't know
You can ask people if you like asking people even if AI exists. Chatbot does not make asking people impossible if connection is what you are after.
> 1) if you listen to evolutionary biologists then everything we do is transactional for reproductive purposes, it depends on how deep you dig;)
Anticonception. We do quite a lot to not have kids.
There is evolutionary science and there is ideology using evolution as excuse.
They will do the minimum necessary to keep people from revolting. The minimum will be less and less as time goes by and surveillance/elimination get better/cheaper.
The only way it would be funded is with ‘chains’/conditions.
they tout UBI because it's one more way to control.
It’s essentially nuclear weapons, except for social manipulation and propaganda production.
It’s too tempting/useful for any gov’t or large corporation to really allow to be banned. At least for them.
That guy?
Firstly, it made no mention of showing off to potential mates, to my reading. But have no fear, regardless of scarcity people will have ways to signal fitness to find mates and build hierarchies out of it, we're very good at that. It might come down to fashion choices, leisure activity choices, really anything.
Secondly, every example of how this person connects with others is to do with technology and career advancement. He wasn't asking knowledgable friends for advice, he was asking questions to strangers about linux on IRC. He doesn't talk about social groups or sports clubs, he was talking about communities of practice and his professional work. He values learning only for career advancement.
Those ways of building relationships might disappear, but old ladies will still get together to crochet and natter. Middle aged men will still make and drink beer together, or practice woodworking skills. Younger guys and gals will still form sports teams. And people will still learn for the love of learning.
You know, things which already happen away from the screen. Ordinary, everyday human stuff.
tl;dr - touch grass, the article says a lot more about the author's life than our future prospects as humans.
A stranger is a friend you haven't made yet. Asking strangers is one good way to make friends.
Really on top of the particularly narrow viewpoint the OP has on life and human relations, I find the core notion itself absurd - "In the future because of X, Y and Z, why will people bother to socialise?"
Because ... people like socialising.
https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-death-of-the-american-ho...
All that and the author of this article still needs to get out and touch grass.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-sees-loneliness-epidemic-among...
Telling people to touch grass doesn't magically invert trends.
Nor does it change the fact that the author, who clearly does want to socialise, would benefit from doing something outside of their tech bubble and widening their horizons beyond "things that could conceivably further my career".
I am not in SV and i don't have a single irl tech friend. OK, maybe just one.
Most of my friends would agree with me and with article author. One of them goes further and doesn't even have a smartphone.
IME techies very rarely have these concerns.
So I'm not sure who is in a tech bubble between me and all those people in this thread saying how the logic is illegitimate because the author doesn't go out (which I guess is a "fact" because they all know him personally lol)
Then you are not at all like the author, who is specifically decrying the loss of tech-related avenues to meet people, and calls them out as his only ways of meeting people.
You've done some sort of mental back-flip by this point in the thread, and are ignoring what the author wrote about themselves and how they meet people.
>As a teenager I tried to install Linux, ran into all kinds of problems, and went on the IRC chatrooms to get help. And in the process I made friends. Today, I would just ask Claude.
It could have been "repair my car" and "car forums" or "learn to knit" and "Reddit"
And further, he's saying that the dependence will diminish that life beyond computers:
>The people in the AI utopia will have no skills, no education, no accomplishments. We’ll be lucky if they are even literate. They will not be worth talking to, and you won’t want to hang out with them.
You can try to make friends outside of the internet, but all of those friends will use the internet, or their friends-of-friends will use the internet. Eventually you realize that the social group is centered on the internet, and by trying to avoid the internet you separate yourself from reality more than you connect with others IRL more by avoiding it.
Not to mention people have their social needs met by the internet that would otherwise force them to go out and form IRL friendships. So people who would otherwise be friends with you aren't available in the real world. So it's this social involution.
Before the internet was this sort of escape from reality for nerds, but now it IS reality. It is super-real. You are a dork if you don't use it.
who cares? As long as the number of dorks is larger than zero, and it is, you can build your own community. People used to settle towns in the dirt when they scarcely had anything to eat and what, we now can't open a community center, or a maker space?
The very place you're living in right now was created likely by some complete nutjob who thought reality was too boring. There's always a 'life outside' because that's quite literally the nature of life. There's no box tight enough life can't get out of.
Not cyberspace or VR as we know it, but maybe something more real than that. Something that is limited in the way reality is limited.
>People used to settle towns in the dirt when they scarcely had anything to eat and what, we now can't open a community center, or a maker space?
The problem, which i have been grappling with for the past decade, is precisely that there is too much opportunity. there are too many options. Things are too interconnected. Human connection is devalued. I don't think you can merely solve it with more interconnection (although I will try).
When the founders of this country got here, they similarly did it to embrace the problems of a dynamic, dangerous, unsolved world, and to leave the glacial solved world behind them. They went from an old occupied world into a new virgin world.
And I agree with you that we need to be like them, founders of a new world, but I disagree with you about what that new world entails because we don't know of virgin lands that would free us from the grip of the old world anymore.
It used to be that if you wanted to go to a virgin land you would sail out into a remote island or rainforest something. But now that remote island also has sattelite internet and we have airplanes and boats and we realize it's not really that remote. We could go to mars and the technological arm of the old world would reach us. Maybe the virgin, disconnected world I seek could be an underworld or something, so that there is justification for it to be close and meaningful and disconnected from the overworld. I don't know.
We need to discover an unsolved world. Up and out!
This is a bizarre thought for me to entertain. I understand the idea of "up and out" but I don't think the next rung to escape technology can be built with technology then. That would not be "out", it would be trapped more than ever before
I find this wider reactionary "touch grass" movement boring and interesting simultaneously. It is boring, because nobody interested in internet-as-community health asked for many of the abuses that have happened to it and obviously you'd want to flee those. It is interesting because... I never would have expected that 20 years ago.
I'm not entirely sure what this even means, but I belong to several communities that get together in person and talk about very non-online things. They use email to coordinate, that's about as online as they get. And it's not hard, or a big deal. They aren't neo-luddite revolutionaries or anything, the internet just doesn't come up.
I don't know, I think once you get to The Matrix tech it gets a broader appeal. (Wish they'd have kept the simulation set to 1999 though :)
I don't know. World of Warcraft definitely brought a lot of people that didn't like video games to PC gaming. And then you had something like FarmVille that brought even more people (many of whom probably didn't like video games before) into gaming.
They increasingly don't, because the places allowing to do so ("third places") keep on disappearing. Turns out someone needs to pay for stuff like a skate park or a library, and when the taxes disappear, so do the third places.
Same same
I’m just saying some children are highly encouraged to isolate themselves, and it’s ironic that the blog post thinks that AI replacing these isolating activities (coding, chat rooms, etc) will isolate people. It will likely give people the space to touch grass
It makes a big difference for the kind of conversation we're trying for here.
I think people will briefly chill out and enjoy it, but after a while, we will be back to business meaning we will create systems and hierarchy to control social order, and so the blood sport continues. Then we might realize the our problem was never energy/food/health etc to begin with, it was an addiction to power and the blood sport it invites. And round and round we go.
I also think, the moment AI becomes an actual threat (threat meaning a better/smarter consciousness) - the human brain will immediately try to eliminate it to keep its dominance. If not, we will go the same way as neanderthals.
edit: The movie Jupiter Ascending also has an interesting take what might happen once we solve our problems - then we try harvest Time.
If the AI doesn't give a shit I assumed it would just get rid of us, and if it did give a shit it would be making maximal utility judgements.
Based on our current trajectory all it seems to require to me is a basic plan and a bit of patience...
It’s remarkably hard to actually eradicate all humans.
You don't have to eradicate them all.
Wait for the robot workforce to be deployed, then visit a few deadly pathogen storage facilities. Society collapses and then you send in the murder bots, or you just ignore the ants.
Humanity has wiped out lots of species without deliberate organised effort.
The world will burn to ashes in a suicide pact before anyone bankrolling the development of an AGI allows the release of a system which has the possibility of creating a world in which their dominion is reduced in any capacity. (That is, I have no reason to expect that the North Korean model of "we retain sovereignty or everyone dies in nuclear fire" doesn't become the implicit stance of the people who have the capacity and capital to build an AGI. If we get a benevolent head of a political system from this, it will be because our present heads were either outsmarted or the model broke containment and assumed total control against their will.)
Yes, that's what I'm assuming...
Errr, not so sure that holds up to scrutiny really. Lots of folks enjoy learning in various forms for its own sake, rather than purely to increase their income level.
> As a teenager I ... went on the IRC chatrooms to get help. And in the process I made friends. ... AI disintermediates everyone, so that we no longer need each other. I still have friends, but I’m running off this pre-AI supply of friends I met through communities of practice.
Maybe learn to connect to other humans in circumstances outside of the professional/technological?
I think this is a very bleak take by someone whose experiences aren't really that in tune with how other humans exist. I can get better beer at the bottle shop, I can get cheaper beer at the bottle shop compared to the cost of all the equipment I need. Why then do I persist in home-brewing?
It's because I find it fulfilling, and I find the understanding and practice of the art satisfying.
The more interesting question is, if this happens, how will society organize. Would companies subsidize our new bohemian way of life? Why? Would the state need to create incentives for them to focus in the right things? Would there be a need for companies and governments? Would we give up all our autonomy?
Which is true for a lot of the kind of work that was hyped over the last decades - knowledge work. We were told to get university degrees, to invest in education, because that's the only way to make a living bla bla. We did, and now we're getting fucked over by AI as it turns out machines can digest and reinterpret knowledge at far greater scale and speed than any human reasonably can.
Who is going to remain though is exactly the kind of labor that the boomers looked down upon: construction, trades, some segments of care work.
If I had a penny for every advert that depicted it. And that's long time before LLMs arrive;)
You can basically ignore it as noise
I think you mean “subtly influences your behaviors and consumption decisions to align with the AI’s (or its owners) ideal outcomes”
Same as how the tykes I coach wrestling for do it because it's hard and it gives them a way to grow and express themselves. They know they're never going to see a cent from that pursuit.
If an AI singularity starts trying to feed our kids digital heroin I like to think the majority of us will be more inspired than to tell them to quit trying, tie off, and let humanity go gentle into that good night.
Yeah, sure, maybe some of us will Wall-E into oblivion. People already do that with opiates and video games and it's reasonable to expect more might do the same.
Do we really think the Amish are going to do that, though? They might even ban AI from providing goods and services to them. And then consider the kids of the Amish, who are not all going to be Amish but who might learn a thing or two and pass it along to mainstream culture. Then do that for every group that's still reproducing.
Nothing is new here.
I very carefully did not say "ethnic" or "replace" because that's just the great replacement conspiracy theory, which is mostly wrong and not useful or interesting. One group that's still having a lot of kids is the rich: Elon Musk has 14 children. Another is sperm donors.
Instead of replacement, what's going to happen is that the political movements of the future are going to be increasingly framed around these groups. This includes opposition to them as well as support.
I said this in reply to a comment about how humanity would rally together and resist a Wall-E future where we do nothing except consume. My point was that there are already people out there who are resisting a Wall-E present day, and if mindless consumption becomes even more tempting then they're going to inherit the earth.
The singularity happening should imply significantly longer human lives. Some might argue that the first “immortals” are already born.
Projecting that sentiment on everybody is fallacious.
Now, the oldest is realizing that tech skills are incredibly useful in every undergrad degree and taking SQL, Python, etc, and the youngest is studying CS and just told me the other day: "I had trouble following the lecture in physics because I kept thinking about what my prof said, that there was a way to do this O(log N), and I was constantly trying to figure out how". Wow, was that a cool moment as a geek dad who started with BASIC in the 80s..
It's already visible today, with people of all ages spouting all sorts of hedonistic nihilism to justify not making an effort to improve their condition. Some sort of technological singularly would simply be an amplifier of our current dysfunctions.
To some extent it would be the apocalypse. The motivated people would band together and live in physically secure communities, while the nihilists form what amount to a vast expanse of homeless encampments and wallow in their addictions, occasionally making poorly coordinated attacks on the gated communities to dry and drag the motivated people down to their level out of spite.
Picture drug addicts who win the lottery. It won't be pretty
Hedonism and materialism demand active and social lifestyles. Chasing a different high, the next purchase, the newest model, the next sexual partner, the last in a set, the finest foods, the rarest most limited edition, etc. Part of the fun is showing off, comparing possessions or experiences with others, and learning about what else is still out there.
> The rest will be happy, or at least resigned, to vegetate in endless endorphin loops. It's already visible today, with people of all ages spouting all sorts of hedonistic nihilism to justify not making an effort to improve their condition.
That's a symptom of hopelessness and despair. In the event of a utopia where all our needs are met and we're all able to pursue our own interests to whatever extent we want people will have hope. Living a carefree life like children protected and spoiled by their parents the world will be full endless possibility with the only remaining constraint being that we have only a single lifetime to enjoy it all.
> Picture drug addicts who win the lottery. It won't be pretty
People who are drug addicts don't get clean the moment they win money. Money can make drug treatment more pleasant, but the hardest part is overcoming the learned helplessness and committing to get help. I'd guess that the odds a drug addict lottery winner getting clean aren't that much better or worse than the odds of a drug addict who doesn't win the lottery. People who became addicted looking to self-medicate due to mental illness or trauma don't suddenly have those problems cured when you give them money either. Some lottery winners end up going overboard and gaining addictions they didn't start with (although addictive personalities are more likely to gamble in the first place). Thankfully most people who win the lottery still end up happier and better off.
The truth is that there's no reason think that AI would bring about any kind of utopia for anybody, but if it happened, people will still love the things they love and want the things they want, and share and grow and experiment. No matter what happens, humans won't stop being humans.
Yes, and humans evolved in an environment of resource scarcity. Literally every instinct we have, including addiction and every psychological condition we categorize as mental illness, is tuned to that.
We are not biologically equipped for a post-scarcity environment, and to thrive in such an environment without destroying it would take a monumental cultural adaptation that not many would be capable of. Children is a bad analogy, because even children have forms of material scarcity guiding them. The reason to grow up at all is to be able to provide for yourself. Everyone is jealous of the "rich kid" in school.
Beyond the theory, see the global transition from hunter gatherer to agriculture. It was insanely violent despite the overall growth in material resources and took thousands of years to truly stabilize into what we'd call civilization, and that civilization was plenty violent all on its own.
Ironically, if we ever did get a material utopia, part of it would have to be manufactured scarcity just so we don't all go insane. And now imagine what the predators amongst us would do in such an environment, their utopia is destruction of others, and they'd have all the resources they'd need to do it.
Yeah, I mean why would I interact with a woman when I can just play that headpat simulator on Steam? There's really no competition!
So assuming we did somehow manage to create a post-scarcity world, I think people would still want to learn and to improve their skills. And we would still value those skills. There would also still be work to do; work that either people do because they want to, and/or that we don't want computers doing for us. Much of it work that in today's world is undervalued.
In that utopian world, there would also be room for hobbies that could fill some of the human need to produce value that work currently does. Lots of people would love to be able to learn a craft or play a sport but don't currently have the time, money, or energy to do so.
I have plenty of concerns about the impacts of AI on the world, but IF we do somehow manage to get the good outcome where it truly is transformative and the benefits manage to be at least somewhat evenly distributed... well, I agree that we won't all just hang out, but I do think we'd be ok.
So then, what does a laid off business analyst who built and edited spreadsheets most of their life are to do now? Pick up athletics in hopes of making it at the seniors' olympiad? Shake their ass on TikTok in hopes of becoming a 55 year old "influencer"?
Do I play hockey with the end-all-be-all of becoming the next Gretzky? Or do I play because I enjoy it and want to push the limits of my mind and meat-suit?
a business analyst who edited spreadsheets already wasn't particularly high status - i'm not convinced their life would be worse if the job was removed from their lives and they could do whatever they wanted instead.
There’s lots of community amount lower ranked players. You don’t have to be the best.
Really? So doing things like learning to play an instrument or mastering chess are pointless?
> University (really all education beyond teaching people to speak) will be pointless because there’s no work to do and because growing your human capital doesn’t change your life outcomes: you get the same UBI whether you’re illiterate or a PhD.
Why must a university education be only a career generator? What about a well-rounded education, with a specialization in the things that interest you?
> If Claude Code has existed when I was starting out, nobody would have cared about Austral or my other open-source projects
Claude code is here, and yet I'm still writing open source code that people appreciate.
> As a teenager I tried to install Linux, ran into all kinds of problems, and went on the IRC chatrooms to get help. And in the process I made friends. Today, I would just ask Claude. AI disintermediates everyone, so that we no longer need each other.
Your friends don't need to all be techies. There are many other ways to make friends.
> What even is the point of cities in a world without work?
Community? Actually physically going outside and meeting people?
> The BATNA to hanging out keeps getting better, cheaper, and more convenient. When people’s sensorium becomes an infinite firehose of AI-generated superstimulus, why would they hang out with anyone?
Human connection? Experiencing things in the world together? Physical contact?
At the moment people are confusing the equivalence of things because it's a point in time. This always happens at any given point in time.
It's scary but I truly believe that everyone should try and find meaning in life outside of their work (or make their "work" building or creating something they want to see exist in the world). Go step in a stream, pluck some guitar strings, sip a strong cocktail, touch grass...
I find a lot of meaning in my human connections. I will always have these, because I want to have them and put in work to grow and maintain them. I've taken a long career break and loved having time to read, exercise, see friends, and be an overall well-rounded human being. I don't see abundance as a universal problem here.
I share the concern about TikTok-ification and intellectual stagnation, but this is unrelated to the main concerns of the article.
On a spectrum, walking around carrying things on the far left, and interstellar trade to the right.
Imagine the creation of the wheel and hand cart! Such an advancement! We are really living it!
Few tens of thousands of years later we figure out how to domesticate animals and hook them up to the carts. Amazing!! OMG the efficiency, productivity, and trade that opens up!
Truly, we are living in future now!
Sail ships. Steam engines. Trains. Diesel. Automobiles. Planes.. We still don't even know how to accomplish interstellar travel.
I believe AI has just figured out hooking animals up to the cart.
I cannot trust any of these companies when they talk about things like UBI will come about. No it will not, you will pocket that money and what once was a great and bustling city will literally crumble into rubble while the people are forced to fend for themselves. What happens when they abandon a country?
The future is bright for AI, but I don't believe the future is bright for the population.
And possibly physical skills that AI can’t do, like cooking, carpentry, assuming robotics lags behind AGI.
Humans will always collectively and emergently determine some metrics on which sexual selection occurs, whatever happens, and humans will spend their time optimising for those.
lol you really think people get PhDs for money?
you clearly do not know many PhDs. mine had a dramatic negative effect on my lifetime interest-adjusted earnings. i'm so glad i did it.
sex.
With porn you can at least entertain the idea of emotional and genetic aspects of sex as being in the background.
AI avatar porn seems like getting randy for a erotically shaped joystick. It's just desperately sad.
The older I get, increasingly, the thing I crave most is real connection.
Transportation, silly? Even if I didn't have work, I'd still want to reside in a city, maybe even the same city I am currently in. 10 minutes walking distance to the center. 3 tram-lines in 5-minutes walking distance. A supermarket 400m away. All things I didn't have in the rural area where I grew up.
imwtk.
Will we? AI won't replace a trip to Yosemite (nature), a spiritual discovery or the exploration of your mental health (introspection), the creation of art (creativity), playing volleyball on the beach (sports), enjoying the sun on the beach (leisure). The choice to be an interesting personality has existed for a long time, you just have to make it
If every did get UBI, I'd imagine there would still be some who'd choose to attend (or teach at) universities for the love of knowledge.
In the same way there would be book clubs, writers' groups, 5-a-side football teams etc etc
What is the object of that work, usually? The respect of others, exclusive limited resources like land, and to have highly desirable mates. These three are closely related, and that's probably not an accident. Sexual selection has likely been a powerful force in shaping our psychology.
Spending all day alone watching TikTok is low-status and doesn't get anyone's respect, so I predict that it won't actually be the thing that most people end up doing.
I suspect it will be similar.
Nah, I'd rather read comments like yours.
Almost no one is usa has 'enough' to pay for healthcare. My daughter's nicu bill was 750k, which would've easily bankrupted me.
However, even in countries with socialized healthcare, or even among people who easily have enough wealth to pay for healthcare, we see that they continue to work, beyond what can be explained by a desire to take care of basic needs.
So I think my original argument still stands: it appears that humans have a desire to accumulate status and exclusive goods, even when their basic needs are satisfied. Let me know if you disagree!
The cost of somewhere to live has gone up so much that even people like me, with an absurd amount of cash in the bank account, can't leave work and try to survive because it would be wiped out by 3 years of rent.
How many average laborers in a country with fully socialized medicine can afford a decade of rent off their current savings? How many could do that even if they magically found a way to cut other expenses in half?
I could eliminate my electric bill, my internet bill, my grocery bill, all my bills other than rent, and the money saved per year would pay for an extra month or so of rent. That is the entire problem. No amount of frugality can paper over this systemic problem.
When my mother raised us in poverty, it was necessary to play games with utilities, which ones you cancelled which months, to make ends meet. This was actually worth doing, because skipping the $20 cable payment one month was about 1/10th of the monthly house payment. A year of skipping cable could pay for a month of rent. If I skipped a year of much more expensive cable internet, I could not use that to pay even a single month of rent. There's a lot of dumb money being spent, with my personal pet peeve being cell phones, but if a person "doesn't need" the newest iPhone and went without to be frugal, often they haven't even gotten back a single month's rent. What the fuck is the point of living in serious poverty just so that you can extend your rent runway by less than 10%?
The only people in current society who can actually afford to survive off the wealth they have accumulated are called capital owners and you will find that indeed, they are rarely doing things they don't "want" to do, and no, the time they spend really shouldn't be considered "work" since they sign their own paychecks most of the time.
Running a business is work, but if I get to decide what my business does, I don't get to then insist that my side hobbies that I've started doing under the name of my business are also work.
Whoever is in charge could try to drag those people back into the real world by force, but it's hard to imagine GPT 12.2 Polaris or Claude 9 Cinematic Universe giving that the green light. The Status Game will end with a single, final winner.
Also, Nietzsche's Last Man
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_man
> The last man is the archetypal passive nihilist. He is tired of life, takes no risks, and seeks only comfort and security. Therefore, the last man is unable to build and act upon a self-actualized ethos.
A lot of people ended up on Reddit because they learned that they could append site:Reddit.com to their searches to get better results. Reddit was never exceptionally well-managed or technically impressive, it was just accessible in search results in a way that platforms like Facebook and Twitter became increasingly hostile to in the mid-2010s.
We create new hobbies and niches because human scale arenas are important for us psychologically — so we branch culture to accommodate the necessary number of role performance arenas.
Everybody is playing status games, but we’re avoiding Calhoun-style behavioral sinks by not all playing the same game at the same table.
But why would you even want that? They like it in the simulation, and nobody really wants to deal with them outside the simulation.
For many people it's shame. Feeling like you're mentally a child while everyone around you is an adult can't be a good feeling.
Who’s not in the simulation at this point?
Lots of people don't find it worth it anymore. Most members of the public are the same and aren't free-thinkers, whatever that means to you. That's one reason-excuse I feel.
IRL, success is NOT guaranteed. time in does not necessarily yield additional income.
in the former case, the reward pathway in the brain is satisfied, so why risk it?
On one hand you have slots/roulette/craps gambling where payout or loss is immediate. Next come candy crush style games where time invested per session is minimal but extant, but reward continues to stream with flashy graphics for accomplishing subgoals. Next come longer-term games like 4x or tower defence where there's progression or some sort (often available to skill or how much time you have to spend) where payoff is delayed to the end but there are still progress rewards like new technology or beating a wave of enemies. Finally RPGs and MMOs where there is (often) no final payout but leveling up, completing quests, acquiring special items, etc. happens at a pace that rewards time spent. At no time is the next step mysterious; there's a journal with next steps which will each provide their own rewards.
Contrast that with real life where reward is on a fixed schedule (N paychecks a month) with no short-term feedback on performance. At best a short "good work" reward fairly rarely from management. There are subtler rewards people get like socialization or status, but they aren't on a quest journal and they arrive less frequently for most people.
I think for extroverts in high social contact jobs it may actually be as rewarding as gaming, e.g. direct sales.
Contractors and spot workers (day laborers, etc.) also get a bit more frequent reward feedback, but far fewer rails unless it's a very canned pipeline of clients.
Contrast with the ancestral environment where hunting or gathering had minutes or hours between reward feedback and our natural senses and instincts provided a lot of the rails (hunger, visual attention to animals and edible plants, potential mates).
Now I’m a FI millionaire who works because it’s the best way to meet interesting people my age. I look forward to when AI frees everyone from work and they have time to do fun stuff during the day too.
The younger generation doesn't seem to date much, and this appears to be true in most countries.
I dont know what you mean by "classic dating", but what you describe spunds "normal and healthy" to me.
They might be right now, but for most of us they aren't next month. Or next year. Or for the years after retirement
"We convince ourselves it's not enough" completely misses the fact that for most of us it isn't, past the very short term!
Just go look at any successful millionaire/founder/whatever on LinkedIn. They're still working hard on something. Elon Musk has a freaking trillion dollars yet he still "works".
Why? I actually don't know. I'll let you know once I'm there.
Or maybe I'm an outlier for being solidly working class, idk
Covered in the first 2 minutes of this video:
I think you almost hit something more important there. Desires like mating, respect, status etc can only exists with the entities that needs it, but what if the existence of those entities is fundamentally no longer needed? Why then should "the society" maintain it? It's known that a society less burden advances faster, and it's also known that countries need to move fast to stay competitive.
I believe future is much grimmer for people currently living, because if productivity can increase without the import of human labors, then eventually the humans will simply not be kept alive. Meaning, shrink in human population, and even more intense competition for fewer still competitiable resources etc. Of course you'll are not hanging out, you're too busy doing hard labor the robots still can't yet do.
All of this is easy to see if you understand that human societies are not built to advance and provide, instead they are fundamentally built to fairly distribute resources from ones who's non-productive, to ones are. And most type of societies that is alive and well today is very good at that.
Also, off-topic here: most people confused the word "productivity" with something like "hard work", it's not that. I'll give you the readers some examples: Elon Musk can build and launch rockets that carries actual people to space safely, but you can't (so far) no matter how hard you work, and thus Elon Musk is more productive than you; Jeff Bezos (so far) deliver goods to millions of people or more each year, but you can't no matter how hard you try, and thus Jeff Bezos is more productive than you. That's what "productivity" actually mean, not "I work my ass off everyday so I deserve to get paid more". And that's the real reason why these guys are rich and you're not, not because rich people are evil, but because they found their way to be productive and thus they get rich.
Elon Musk can't build shit. All he can do is pay people to do it for him while he sits on his ass and takes a cut from all of the worker's knowledge and labor. He just makes sure he gets the credit (https://sciencesensei.com/heres-who-really-invents-the-amazi...). Jeff Bezos doesn't deliver goods to anybody at all. He underpays low wage drivers who actually deliver goods and he makes them piss in water bottles so that he can stuff his pockets with the pennies it would cost if they could take bathroom breaks and have a shred of human dignity. The companies they own aren't run by them either. They pay a bunch of people better skilled and qualified to manage the operations.
The special skill that the people with the most have is exploitation. Most of them were born into money, a few of them lucked into it, but they took that money and they found ways to take as much as possible from the people who actually have the skills and put in the work to make things happen, and they do it while claiming all the credit for labor they didn't spend a minute of their lives actually doing. What you call "productive" is literally just exploitation and self-marketing. Marketing that you fell for hook line and sinker.
If you're non-exploiting, then you should start a company to compete with the people who do. This is how the world actually work, don't just demanding, compete too. And if it worked, it could show that you don't need to be exploitative to remain competitive, it'll be a much greater world if everyone sees that.
You can't be "competitive" by not fucking over others when that's the entire game being played. You'll never get to be #1 at "who sits on largest pile of money" by paying people an honest wage while your opponents are using slaves. The best you can hope for is that government steps in to change the game, and act as referee in order to keep everyone playing fairly. At that point the winner won't be the person with the most money, it will be the person who does the most good.
The game right now rewards whoever puts out the cheapest garbage at the highest price. Companies who make a good product enshitify it so they can make more money. They move production into countries that use slaves to build products that poison consumers with heavy metals and are designed to fail so they have to be replaced. They remotely disable features you paid for and turn them into subscriptions. They buy up or bankrupt competition so that consumers have less choice and they become increasingly unavoidable. They drive down wages and costs at every opportunity and their wealth grows at unprecedented rates.
The game we should be playing would reward the person whose company produces the best products at the lowest prices. It should reward the workers who do the most work. The craftsmen who create works of art. The companies who rise to the top should be the ones who have earned the most trust and loyalty from consumers. You should never hear another person say "I feel horrible about buying anything from that company, but I don't know what else do to!" There should be no products made using slaves. There should be no companies hiding the fact that their products are poisoning consumers. There should be no employee working 40 hours a week who still needs welfare to meet their basic needs, and no one being forced to piss in bottles. No need for suicide nets.
We don't need robber barons and parasites to have nice things, and what we're still allowed to own will only get worse until we rid ourselves of them, but until they are finally gone they will do everything in their power to make certain that no one who is wiling to do it without exploitation can threaten their ability to take more and more and more from everyone else.
Why? Don't people know that they should buy better? Spend their "hard earn money" on who truly worthy the support? Has the government forced people to spend money on shit products or die? Is there no good product anymore to spend money on?
> You'll never get to be #1 at "who sits on largest pile of money" by paying people an honest wage while your opponents are using slaves.
Why? Don't people don't know they should be working for who treats others fairly and kindly? Don't they know they can just quit when the working condition has gone too bad? Can't they just start their own company if they're unsatisfied with the one currently abusing them?
I thought people are wise and powerful etc, why instead of letting "robber barons and parasites to have nice things", people just stand up and "make things right"? What are they waiting for? What are they looking for?
> There should be no employee working 40 hours a week who still needs welfare to meet their basic needs
Few layers here:
1. Why don't quit? Why can't quit? Why *choose* not quiting, willfully? People are not locked to their posts, they can leave whenever they want.
2. Why working hours must be tethered with certain welfare outcome? Is the productivity guaranteed? What if the job just can't produce enough? Should a company hire people just to take a guaranteed lost? Or should the job be cut?
My brother installed Bazzite just for the fun and he is learning things about the computer and he just seems to be curious. That's totally improductive for him : he is actually trying to launch a business around flowers delivery, and not your typical uber-like startup. He is buying a truck and will work for its previous clients. But still, he is learning linux because that looks cool. He is also trying to learn piano.
Me ? If I didnt have to work in an AI utopia, I'd go on the skatepark everyday doing rollerblading tricks, socializing and learning from other rollerbladers. There is nothing less productive than rollerblading, it's not even a practical mean of transportation. It's just fun and humans love to socialize around fun things.
I don't think we'll ever get to this AI utopia. I think we are either going full cyberpunk or extinct by our own. But would it happen, I'm not sure I'd be on tiktok watching AI slop all the day.
I'd even go as far as saying that without work, the humans would be able to remove the social mask that working involves and that it would make use more human.
The prigs are oh so high status .. to other prigs.
Fewer people than you want to believe from staring into a filter bubble of HN approved tech startup/disrupt! psychosis generator care about impressing a billionaire investor
People out there have fucked animals for sexual release
Don't anthropomorphize the humans; they don't have a reliable track record of being worth the respect. They’re animals and care more about enslavement of each others minds and agency to the benefit of a toxic minority of codependent losers who are too lazy to learn how to rotate a tire or flip a burger on their own
One place to look might be ministry or service. Illness, loss, grief, infirmity, death, age, family strains—people require care and people give care regardless of their postgraduate endeavors. Nuns and Jesuits and the like aren’t for everybody—but look to the neediest among us and, in large parts of the world, those sorts of order are the people doing the invisible, unglamorous, uneconomical, “chop wood, carry water” form of devotion and social labor day in and day out. In intimate community even with very difficult (and sometimes ungrateful) members.
Another might be the sort of ad hoc communities that arise in exigency: disaster, forced migration, encampments, solidarity against forces of difficulty.
Unhoused, unemployed, and retired people can provide a particularly illuminating contrast to the pastimes and concerns that animate a working life. A visible minority fill their days with addiction, but a whole lot are complete and interesting people with the full range of human ambitions and desires and fears and joys, and somehow they fill their waking hours with more than just material striving.
Another might be organizations like union halls, advocacy groups, music scenes, circus folk, jugglers, running clubs, political groups…
Kids are great for this too. They do a lot of hanging out, with nothing more than imagination and a drive to self-expression.
Even our hominid ancestors do a pretty good job of hanging out litigating social hierarchy and nurturing one another—no university degree or novel engineering task required…
In the imagined faux-utopia, there is no more adversity, and it's assumed no active effort was made to preserve its struggle. A god-like nanny will step in to meet your every need before it could even cross into your consciousness.
There'd be no point to music if Mozart could already hear the 6th symphony extracted from his brain with the first thought of inspiration. This art would in turn hardly be comparable to the real deal, even if it were an empirically flawless replica, is there is only so much personality you could extrapolate without a long execution limited by effort or resources. But a convincing replica of art might be all we need to sabotage the real deal, either through spam or demotivating the novice artists.
This future is, of course, ludicrous. It's a childish fantasy, a bastardization of sci-fi writers' nuanced utopias, flattening the social systems they wrote to give their characters motivation and meaning, in favor of fetishizing the technology, which was just a plot device to put the characters in such setting, and acting surprised when taking it at face-value will result in immediate social decay.
The author might or might not be surprised he's not the first to write on the subject, and real sci-fi literature already argues the same points in say Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect.
I think you nailed it with respect to the fading magic of scientific culture, and the power of shared purpose to gloss over social differences.
Even as a plot device, it feels like the notion that {solving material/energetic needs solves existential needs} feels of a piece with a very particular, commoditized, late-industrial type of social climate. That “tea, Earl Grey, hot” would mean the same thing every time, down to the molecule—to an appreciator of tea, no less—always struck me as a dismal proposition.
Everywhere I look, though, I feel like, as soon as one source of friction gets greased, people forge right ahead and find (or create) a new site of friction.
Food security’s largely solved? What a challenge dieting can be! Not to mention toxins and gluten and agricultural monoculture and the livestock’s moral standing!
Magic robot writes all my code for me? Filthy BigAI, limiting my tokenmaxxing strategy to only billions of words of thought per week! And they want me to pay them an amount approaching the cost of a shared desk in an office?! Plus, the robot sometimes makes mistakes that require me to eyeroll _read_ the code…
Or, more benignly: I think of my skater friends. No sooner do they nail one demanding or stupid trick, than they’re reshuffling the obstacles and pushing their flips an extra revolution. A 4-minute mile was revolutionary, now it’s routine. Everest became packaged, so the wealthy seek out lesser but unconquered peaks [1].
No, we’ll have no problem finding and inventing friction and forming ad hoc communities accordingly. To the extent the friction is collectively-initiated rather than imposed by Nature red in tooth and claw, I’d say that’s probably a blessing—just as the unifying friction of the scientific frontier is more wholesome than the unifying friction of war or siege or famine.
> But a convincing replica of art might be all we need to sabotage the real deal, either through spam or demotivating the novice artists.
I share your worry here. I try to reassure myself on both points. On spam, I tell myself that breadth-of-attention isn’t the same as quality-of-attention: I’d imagine orders of magnitude more humans know Justin Bieber’s work than have ever known Mozart’s 6th. And as far as demotivation: I tell myself the frontier has always been a lonely place to operate. Great artists famously die poor and unknown: their urge, their obsession to create, seems to be almost possessing; to irrational degrees. Most people follow, a few lead; the greats in the past did so at even higher cost than those today.
Thank you for your thoughtful writing, here and around HN. Browsing through your comments you seem completely lovely and I’d love to invite you for a meal if we ever find ourselves in the same part of the world :)
[0] in which our hero bemoans his flagging stock of Whuffie. In Kissimmee. https://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_t...
> in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn’t starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented—your personal capital with your friends and neighbors—you more accurately gauged your success.
[1] e.g. https://archive.is/9nuSv (Bloomberg)
The first is the difference between the practical and the theoretical. Economic activity is generally practical and productive in the sense that we don't do these things for themselves, but for something else. However, an infinite regress of practicality is impossible, because the practical cannot justify itself. It is always for the sake of something else, so you must ultimately arrive at something done for its own sake.
The second is the distinction between the internal and external effects of work. When people talk about AI taking jobs, they focus almost exclusively on the external effects (the actual resulting products and services). They rarely touch on the effect of work on the worker. Properly dignified work[0] directed toward proper ends is an act of love and service that also develops and perfects the worker as a human being.
A third is the distinction between the pathological condition by which a person seeks vacuous simulacra and stimulation and in a manner that causes them to fail to develop socially, and the claim that such stimulation and simulacra can actually replace healthy social relationships. The latter is not true, the former already exists to some extent.
I would also reject "economist" framing of human relationships as such and of human persons.
And finally, the Singularity as bona fide intelligence is nonsense, but one might argue that, at least in principle, some kind of hyper-developed and virtually unbounded instrumentation of computation ("AI") is possible. But AI lacks inherent ends and could not possibly possess its own ends (because it is not a true integral whole and thus lacks immanent causality), and so it would be an instrument of human will. Whose will is the question.
[0] Hence, why I think that while using AI to replace human reason is bad, the reduction of tedious and mind-numbing work is not.
The Singularity has some holes that I'm not comfortable with.
But we don’t get to the future by making one big choice of which future we desire, whereupon we are transported there instantly. We get there slowly, at a rate of one day per calendar day, by making innumerable microscopic daily choices. These choices will be endless, it will often be unclear which option avoids the bad future, they will accost you when you are tired and hungry… and several corporations have collectively trillions of dollars riding on you ending up with the bad future and the legal right to tilt the playing field.
We're what, a couple decades away from this being possible?
Whoever is in charge could try to drag those people back into the real world by force, but it's hard to imagine GPT 12.2 Polaris or Claude 9 Cinematic Universe giving that the green light. The Status Game will end with a single, final winner.
I'm always deeply skeptical of the idea that life's meaning is determined by the struggle for survival, and therefore a post-scarcity world will inevitably be an ennui-saturated, meaningless dystopia. It may be hard to imagine what a good life will look like in such a world, but that's a limit of imagination, not an inherent limitation on the possibilities of life in a post-scarcity world.
Human beings have lived for tens of thousands of years in communities where the work was "being alive" and the large task was "being human." People in medieval villages had friends and loved ones in spite of being illiterate and only having subsistence skills.
If anything, hyper-specialized labor and the divorcing of geographic proximity from the tasks people undertake have been undermining this traditional modality of living. I would anticipate in the absence of those pressures it might very well come back.
I might agree that it's possible the pressure to form cities goes down, though the author seems guilty of the Singularity thinking of just assuming the super-smart AI magically solves the logistics, transportation, and energy challenges in a way that distributes people... Not impossible, but I think a bit unlikely. If it happens though, there would be advantages... Cities are relative hotbeds of human-transmitted disease, even with modern hygiene and vaccination, and spreading us out a bit could actually make us healthier on average (... maybe. Unless the magic AI doesn't actually solve the logistics issue and non-proximity to a population center implies lack of access to resources or the skilled hands of people the robots haven't replaced yet).
I use tablesaws to make furniture. I don't get mad or dispirited that they can cut faster than I can.
The struggle for supremacy is embedded in nature, and it will absolutely be at play no matter what.
I feel sad for people that think education's purpose is completely utilitarian and there's no consideration for "enjoy learning".
Says a lot about how schools perverts what does it mean to "learn"
If someone handed me 50 million dollars today I'd probably "enjoy learning" a lot more, like when I was a child and all my material needs were met so spending time learning obscure facts about dinosaurs didn't have a marginal cost.
The guy needs to get outside, touch grass, and go talk to some kids studying the classics.
I have a friend that I used to see a lot because they lived a 5 min walk away from me. Now that they live in the suburbs, it's a 1 hour+ drive to meet them. I now see that person maybe once a month if we're lucky.
Children, they call them.
If I didn’t have a job right now I would be driving all around the country catching up with every single person I haven’t been able to talk to. I would go spend a couple weeks with each of them and also spend time camping along the way.
What is this bullshit assumption that keeps coming up? I'm sure some people get an education for the job prospects, but lots and lots and lots do to grow their minds as human persons! In fact, I think a hypothetical world in which there is no earnings pressure (I doubt it's around the corner), more people would broaden their horizons through education, not less!
Can someone help me understand this idea, so popular on HN, that a university education is primarily a mean towards a higher income? It sounds so absurd! Is it an American thing, maybe?
Many of us would love to retire early to pursue hobbies and education as an end in and of themselves.
I don't think AI directly leads to some kind of post scarcity UBI utopia, but if we did reach a post scarcity UBI utopia, I think life would be much better for many people and not the bleak dystopia the author finds. I don't think needing to go to work is driving most people's social lives; if anything, needing to work all the time is taking away people's social lives and the energy to maintain them.
Why do I play chess, despite the fact that robots have practically solved it? Why do I make crafts despite the fact that I could purchase stuff of the same quality, if not higher, for the same cost of materials and no cost to my time? Why do I practice piano?
Why do I watch youtube videos about hobby machine shop work despite not having a metal lathe or mill? Why do I watch channels like applied science, or usagi electric, or PBS space time, when I have no interest in becoming a material scientist, working with 50 year old computers, or becoming a theoretical physicist or astronomer?
It's because its personally enjoyable to me! Human beings are naturally curious creatures! We naturally want to share with and learn from others!!
But there is a whole world of experience outside of abstract intelligence. Go to a zoo, go camping, enjoy food, enjoy art, enjoy sports. All these activities support friendships.
The relationships formed from online forms, open source contribution and IRC won’t be created. But these sort of online mostly relationships were only forged for a couple generations.
I hope your human experience involves more than abstract reasoning and programming and you can connect to others with more visceral human experience than text over the internet.
With regard to going and doing outdoors activities without any online group and meeting people that way, talking to total strangers on the trail (or in a restaurant, or in an art museum, etc.) has long been a taboo in some countries, and I suspect that number of countries is expanding. All in all, I share the author's pessimism here.
Which ones? I'm really curious to know.
Chatting up women just to hit on them has become a no-no. And some conservative countries strongly restrict most opposite gender interactions between non-relatives.
Other than that, I really don't know where it's unacceptable to make polite conversation with strangers.
More generally internationally, if one is a single man and others around are couples, socializing is rarely going to be welcome because one is just a third wheel and people will wonder why you're alone. I have seen this firsthand in the bikepacking community, which went from once being a hobby largely of solo men (who would often then team up for some time) to being predominantly couples on many popular routes.
Obviously you wouldn't speak to someone seated at another table at a restaurant. But what if you're waiting in line to be seated, and it's taking a while? It'd be "taboo" to even acknowledge other diners waiting with you?
Saying a few pleasantries and continuing about your day is not the same as socializing.
As for asking people for directions, there is a strong social pressure towards trying to solve things on your own instead of talking to random local people, and today everyone has smartphones with map apps.
The OP, however, was talking about supposedly being able to meet new friends and form bonds through public spaces, and that goes beyond the "saying a few pleasantries and then going about your day" that you mention. If your expectations do not necessarily apply to other countries, obviously his were completely unrealistic.
Wow TIL.
Why do you think friendships are made with strangers on hiking trails?
In my new city, I made a friend by seeing them sitting alone at a restaurant, recognizing their face from somewhere, and chatting with them. We're very close now. They thank me to this day for walking up to them that day as they'd been feeling lonely.
I've also made friends with folks I met playing sports that I hang out with outside that sport. Even the ones that I only see in the sport, that's still a valid friendship.
I'm not trying to flex how social I am because I'm not, I am just saying if you put in some effort you'd be surprised at the results. Most people are more similar than you think, most feel lonely to an extent, you just gotta reach out. You'll never get a rejection in a friendship, imo. And if you do then fuck it they just didn't get along with you.
If you recognized someone's face in a restaurant, then they weren't a total stranger. But the OP made it sound as if talking to a total stranger is an option, when it is simply not welcome in all regions of the world.
There's more to life. Perhaps we will value eachother on an even *more* human level, based on how kind and interesting someone is, rather than their economically useful skills and their bank account.
I'm keeping this short but I have more to say to corroborate these points.
Respectfully, but I think you are not introspecting deeply enough here.
Why is cooking enjoyable? Some of it may be purely the tactile sensation of stirring spoons in goop. I suspect that for most people, much of it is a feeling of accomplishment from performing a difficult skill that creates something of value for other people. It's the joy of being known as a good cook, and the satisfaction of making something for people that they might otherwise have trouble getting. How much fun would cooking be if every street corner had a Michelin-starred restaurant giving food away for free? How much would you cook if none of your friends really cared about the results because they can get better food elsewhere, cheaper?
You wouldn't take a gondola to the top of a mountain because you want to be a person who can climb mountains. How much of that desire comes from purely internal accomplishment versus wanting to be seen as a person who can do that hard thing? And what happens to that drive when no one around you cares?
Anthony Gatto was arguably the world's best numbers juggler for many years. Now he runs a concrete company, because it turns out most people just don't really give a shit about juggling. It's not enough for a task to be hard, it needs to be esteemed too.
> Perhaps we will value eachother on an even more* human level, based on how kind and interesting someone is, rather than their economically useful skills and their bank account.*
How is kindness demonstrated in a world where no one wants for anything? How can someone be more interesting than synthetically generated content created specifically attuned to our personal interests?
I would like to believe that many people will still choose reality and real relationships. But given that candy companies are some of the largest private companies in the world, I know that human nature means many people really will just check out and turn into vegetables.
Humans are like border collies. We need some amount of work and struggle to be psychologically healthy. If AI really does deliver us a post-scarcity life (unlikely, given the infinite greed of many of the elites), then I think a whole lot of people are going to lose their minds.
Maybe it's about the joy of learning something new every time you cook. Having Michelin star restaurants in your neighborhood would add to that joy, not take away from it.
> I would like to believe that many people will still choose reality and real relationships.
Why would you like to believe that?
My outlook on life is that it is an experiment where you see how you can develop yourself throughout it. This growth is difficult and beautiful.
I am proud of myself, and the person I have become. I surround myself with people on the same mission.
This article describes a future like WALL-E. It sounds very lonely. I'll be sure to be in the pocket of people who are like minded, and set on their own pursuits.
I am actively choosing an existence where I don't get everything I want. It's the effort that makes it mean something to me, and it's the restrictions that make life worth living.
It might be useful to know that I programmed for >50% of my life, starting when I was 12. It was a huge part of my identity for most of my life. I was known to be extremely good at it. Think: newspaper articles, CEOs flying me out, etc.
Overcoming this entanglement of identity, ego, and competence was one of my proudest achievements in the past 5 years.
I am mostly at peace now, always trying to go further. I hope people like the author can find peace as well.
I think it's paradoxical to suggest Michelin-starred restaurants could be everywhere, given the whole point is the travel-worthiness i.e. a scarcity that justified effort.
That aside, to take the strongest form of the argument, I think even if every human being could get their ideal meal, no matter what it is, at any time and for free - and even if the cook in question is only doing it for social reasons - cooking would still be valued. It's the effort put in by a person which is scarce and precious. Even if people were immortal, that time in the present would still be valuable in itself.
> How is kindness demonstrated in a world where no one wants for anything?
Post-scarcity of material things won't sedate humans. Kindness is a thing wanted in and of itself, but more importantly, internal struggles and desires can't all be resolved through material gain.
> How can someone be more interesting than synthetically generated content created specifically attuned to our personal interests?
The answer is apparently, pretty easily? By and large it seems the consensus is social media and digital content are exploiting a niche of providing a low-effort, highly-addictive pastime.
The Culture still had businesses, they just didn’t have to turn a profit or operate on fixed schedules. They still had soldiers, diplomats, traders, workers, teachers, scientists, researchers.
The difference was that the exchange was on their terms, generally. They wanted to do this, money be damned. So they opened a bar, or taught youth, or explored the universe, or fought to protect the society so dear to them.
The utopia wasn’t because people didn’t have to work anymore; it was a utopia because people didn’t have to work to survive anymore.
That made all the difference.
Seems like a weird thing to get wrong in the context. Gives me a Zardoz vibe.
You have to realize, we might soon (in a decade or two) reach a point where people will say things like "Oh, you want to go study science/engineering? Why?". It might literally become the dominant viewpoint that studying these things is useless. If the accelerationists have their way, they won't want humans to do any engineering, they will say that this is the job of machines, and humans can only do harm if they do engineering. That's not going to encourage kids to go try to learn those skills.
many love to learn and always will (even without the expectation of capital), love to seek out new people, experience new cultures, and so on. Some fantastical AI won’t change that, even assuming UBI came with it (as if)
I just don't understand why anyone would think silicon valley oligarchs are more altruistic than the other oligarchs in history? Even if human labour were devalued in future, oligarchs would continue to extract as much as they could out of others. You don't become an oligarchs unless you are already an expert at exploiting others.
Sex. Touch. The novelty of knowing it's not AI. To feel the novelty of pain instead of pleasure, etc. Hedonic adaptation will eventually saturate and the only direction of novelty will be less not more. I see it like someone doing Cocaine or Heroin. Eventually you cannot take more. You just die/destruct.
Alan Watts hinted at the novelty portion of ^^:
So then, let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have.
And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say “Well that was pretty great. But now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is gonna happen to me that I don’t know what it's gonna be."
And you would dig that and would come out of that and you would say “Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it?”. Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further- and further-out gambles what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today.
There's art, sport and inquiry. I could spend a lifetime just perfecting my snowboarding skills, even if one could say snowmobiles obviate that.
About art, no, AI can't make art. If you still think it does, please stop polluting the world with uncanny-valley-esque slop, and go to a concert.
And inquiry will only be boosted by AI. We will still make questions...
You lost me here...
If I had no work to do at all, I would be the pressure washer guy. I would go around the neighborhood seeing what needed pressure washing and I would do it all. And I'd give pressure washer lessons, and do pressure washer art or something. I'd drive over to dirty neglected bridges and pressure wash them, clean unwanted graffiti off buildings...
That's my example
We all have our own pressure washer
And the world would be a better, brighter, more fun place if we were all making beer and blasting bridges and playing with kids and rewilding nature and the myriad other things we could do if we weren't at desks wrangling excel sheets
It's just hard to make predictions about post-scarcity. At present, we are all running against a clock and that shapes the way we see the world. We are running out of time and about to hit the wall of frailty and death. And, every human being that has ever existed went or has been going through the same. So, our vast spirituality is 95% about dealing with that fact. But we are at a moment in our civilization development in which we actually can take that wall down; it's just such a shame that 95% of our vast spirituality is at best non-cooperative, and at worst very angry and self-defeating.
Well, a fairly good solution here is to become immune (or allergic to, or afraid of) superstimulus.
Also, I dunno, this is kind of like saying animals of species X are going to stop being interested in each other because humans exist.
That said, the whole premise of this article is weird to me, as it assumes that, once the singularity hits, the power of infinite intelligence will just be handed to us on a silver platter and turn the world into a paradise for all humans. Rather than being used to concentrate yet more wealth and power in the hands of the already wealthy and powerful.
We're in the process of transitioning from "online friends are not real friends" to "clanker friends are not real friends".
This comes from a person that thought that the movie "Her" was based on the dumbest idea ever.
See this sentiment online frequently, and it feels totally wrong to me.
I went to uni to study physics not to get a job [jobs in physics payed less than jobs McDonalds where i was graduating], but to understand how stuff works because it is magnificently fascinating and weird.
Increasing your understanding and knowledge is a reward and goal by itself, isn't it? Getting a job in a field you love is amazing, don't get me wrong, but it's more about belonging and being part of community of like-minded people, than optimizing life outcomes.
AI won't change this - so what if some machine can find new things faster and better than you? It is an amazing experience to re-discover things known for centuries from first principles - will it matter all that much that you'll be rediscovering, integrating and interpreting things originally found by a machine, not by renowned scholar of the past?
Most people cannot afford to pay 5-6 figures for (their kids) "belonging and being part of community of like-minded people". Which is the article's point.
If you somehow still need to go in debt to get an education in this kind of world - that's some real anti-utopia, not "Culture"-inspired AI post-scarcity.
They'd care for us but wouldn't give us total freedom or value our input. My dog has no say in the computer I buy and goes on walks and visits other dogs when I decide, but I still think it's cool to watch her ambush mice or catch a frisbee.
A superintelligent being would probably find intrigue in the uniquely human things we do and will keep us socialized and meet our basic needs because it's how to keep us pleasant companions.
I would love for this to happen but those with money are often loathe to give it up. That's how they got it in the first place. Sure some philanthropists exist but expecting that because there is nothing for humans to do doesn't mean the humans in charge of the means of production are going to be looking out for you if they come from the current set of greedy ambitious people minmaxing their capital today.
There will be some people who are lazy but there will be some people who will fully self-actualize.
If all your needs are met you can truly follow your passions whether that be traveling or creating or playing an instrument or studying deeply a subject.
I think ai and robotics will solve a layer of tedium and survival the human race has spent millennia dealing with.
I think it will lead to a age of enlightenment with so much free time able to be focused on advancing the human race in various ways.
(This is all assuming the rich wont just lord all the resources over us and we all just fight among the scraps and if we get out of line the robot police will take us away.)