We’re likely to end up in a society where human labor is unnecessary one way or another, simply because of the advance of automation and ultimately AI. We do not have the choice of preserving the “work paradigm” indefinitely — that is, unless we end up in a Bad Ending where the future of humanity is vastly warped or curtailed.
I sometimes think that futuristic ideals phrased in terms of “getting rid of work” would be better reformulated as “removing low-quality work to make way for high-quality work”.
(But the difference might be more about where you draw the line on the map between what you call “work” and what you call “play” than about where you think people in the territory should do in the future.)
My question is: How shall the extinction of labor be distributed? I see no reason to declare that the people who currently own the robots should get to be the ones to move into a post-labor civilization, and everyone else can go to hell.
Very relevant … and there’s a few particularly amusing points in there, including in the comments. For instance — If a lifestyle without work reliably breaks people, then why aren’t retirees/pensioners reliably broken?
OTOH ISTR that lottery winner are pretty often broken. So I guess a lifestyle without work breaks certain people but not others, and whether it does depends not only on individual personality variance but also on circumstances, in some non-totally-obvious-a-priori way.
Well, EY says
(But the difference might be more about where you draw the line on the map between what you call “work” and what you call “play” than about where you think people in the territory should do in the future.)
See here (and followup here).
Very relevant … and there’s a few particularly amusing points in there, including in the comments. For instance — If a lifestyle without work reliably breaks people, then why aren’t retirees/pensioners reliably broken?
OTOH ISTR that lottery winner are pretty often broken. So I guess a lifestyle without work breaks certain people but not others, and whether it does depends not only on individual personality variance but also on circumstances, in some non-totally-obvious-a-priori way.
I award myself five points for guessing that quote was from Dalrymple.