this whole blog post is basically "people need jobs to be happy, so we should design our society such that they need jobs"
not only is the premise wrong, but forcing people to work is not a good or ethical way to address this problem
most people like the social aspect of work, but not being beholden to their boss
we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money
we can do better than this
This isn't what the piece argues. It doesn't claim people need jobs to be happy, and the word "happy" doesn't appear in it. The argument is structural: when capital depends on labor, labor has political, economic, and democratic leverage. When that dependency ends, the leverage ends with it.
Whether people find meaning in work or outside of it is a separate question the piece doesn't take a position on, because it's not relevant to the point being made. The question isn't whether we can give people meaning without employment (I would argue that most of us find most of our meaning outside of work), but who has bargaining power in a system where human economic participation is unnecessary.
> Whether people find meaning in work or outside of it is a separate question the piece doesn't take a position on
There’s an entire section in the middle about this exact position. Search for “opioid” to find the part where he says people fall into suicide, drug use, and despair when they lose their jobs.
I unironically love arguing on the internet, because you're replying to the author of the essay, but I think the text supports your comment and not his hahah.
"We lose any sense of economic purpose, and with that, social status and a perceived future." Sure sounds like someone weighing-in on the meaning of work and life outside of it...
> I unironically love arguing on the internet, because you're replying to the author of the essay,
I didn’t even notice! Thanks for pointing that out.
> but I think the text supports your comment and not his hahah.
I re-read the section to make sure I wasn’t missing something and I agree with you.
Here’s the section:
> We don’t have to speculate about what happens when economic function disappears from communities. Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s research on “deaths of despair” tracks the rising tide of suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholic liver disease mortality concentrated in less-educated, formerly manufacturing-dependent populations. The mechanism isn’t just poverty. We lose any sense of economic purpose, and with that, social status and a perceived future. Communities organized around industries that left, where what replaced the jobs was opioids, domestic violence, and a life expectancy that dropped year over year in the richest country on earth.
If the piece was not trying to argue that loss of jobs leads to loss of meaning, I picked up on the opposite.
I read the section over again, and could almost convince myself that it's not about jobs-as-life-purpose. I was thinking that it could be suggesting that people get depressed and die when they lose their jobs because of financial fears and insecurity, instead. But the "We lose any sense of economic purpose" bit is what suggests it really is about life's meaning.
"Economic purpose" is a very specific kind of purpose, and I do not think that it's the same as life's purpose or meaning. I think the confusion here (and I suspect it's the result of the way I wrote it as much as anything, so I don't want to look like I'm sloughing off responsibility here), is that the section in question can be read too easily to conflate economic purpose (which protects oneself and one's family from precarity, among other things) and eudaimonia, which is what I would point to when thinking of meaning or "flourishing."
Appreciate the give and take here.
The leverage doesn't end unless the AI-owning capital class Terminates the rest of the population.
Or visa-versa. Somehow I feel like this gets missed when discussing this topic. And consider which direction do you think this is likely going to go? Betting on the "AI-owning capital class" seems a bit delusional to me. Does money or gold have much value in Zombie apocalypse shows? How much are bullets worth in those shows? Please, for the love of god, think this through.
Well it depends on the style of societal breakdown. In the zombie apocalypse shows, the human population is less than halved, and the sorts of daily things we take for granted (electricity, clean water, gasoline, etc.) become hard to come by, along with police, fire, and medical services becoming lost or completely disorganized, with governments completely falling apart at every level.
But I could imagine a scenario where the AI-owning capital class becomes indistinguishable from the government, and the government retains control of the military. Regular disenfranchised folks usually don't stand much of a chance against their own country's military. It would be super super bloody, but it's a toss-up as to who would win. In reality, though, in the end, everyone would lose.
How big is the government/supporters compared to the population in any dictatorship? Tiny.
> "people need jobs to be happy, so we should design our society such that they need jobs"
No, this is not what the article said. It's more "people need jobs to have any kind of leverage in society" which is something different.
I don't think that "people need jobs to have any kind of leverage in society" is actually true, though. Retired people without jobs are (in-)famously known to be politically powerful, both regarding elections and regarding local political questions apart from elections (like city planning commission decisions).
Their leverage is a result of having the time to be involved in politics, which is itself a result of working for decades to build up to the point that they could retire. They're an end result of the system, not an exception to it.
Not just the time, but also probably having been built up the expertise, social connections, reputation and wealth to be able to be elected on the council in the first place.
The jobs they worked turned into capital which is where their leverage comes from. So it's still applies.
To be fair they argued both. Jobs suck but we need to feel useful to other human beings. Jobs (either paid or volunteer jobs) are the only ways we consistently contribute.
Like maybe instead of making requirements docs you could pivot to counselling at risk youth... but AI is rapidly improving at that, too.
Star Trek isn't real life, when human labor stops being valuable the humans who's labor was previously vital will be at best left to rot in squalor.
The Expanse would be an apt sci-fi example where almost no labor is needed and everyone survives on a bare minimum UBI unless they want to risk it all and go into space.
A generation of people left behind. The birthrates will continue falling.
The bitrates, on the other hand...
Couldn't have said it better myself. The only reason we are worth keeping around is because what we do is necessary to keep the machine running. The idea that the AI singularity would lead to infinite free stuff for everyone is ridiculous.
For some reason programmers start thinking that we'll transition away from a whole world of societies built around the concept of individual ownership, i.e. your landlord charging you rent, company owners owning the company and the resulting product and paying you what they deem the work you own is worth, and move towards something like communism, all because people working in IT or marketing departments are having a hard time.
I'm sorry but us programmers didn't invent capitalism, and it wasn't our consent under the condition of having a good run under it what kept it in place.
If AI only blows away programming, sure you are probably right. If AI blows away white collar labor, which is at least half of jobs, then yeah something would give way.
And if AI blows away all white collar labor, those former white color workers will be unable to afford much blue collar labor, which will hurt the blue collar labor market too.
>we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money
I think people get hung up on "job bad" and forget what the job is actually doing, functionally.
We are animals, on earth, attempting to survive. We have evolved where we actually really suck at doing it alone, but we do really well if we delegate the various needs of survival. Now, how do we make it so if you chopped wood in the forest you get a piece of the fishermans take? You can do it in kind, although that would quickly become logistically complicated due to the size of the logs and fish catches. Instead, we use money out of sheer convenience and its amazing properties of being a store of labor both past, present, and future.
So give everyone no jobs. Who fishes? Who chops wood? Someone or some thing has to do it right? And it needs to be delegated in some way. We can't all go happy go lucky and rave all day and fuck all night and have dozens of kids. Resources on the earth are finite. Forests will be depleted, fisheries crushed. There needs to be some counter to what would otherwise be runaway hedonism and resource depletion.
Pregnancy and childbirth are physically taxing for women. Most people of reproductive age want sexual relationships. Many people want children. Very few women want to give birth to 12+ kids. Even the wives of billionaires don't have that many children, despite having more than enough material resources to support them. (Elon Musk's 12+ children required several women.)
Replace dozens of kids with any piece of wanton consumption then. How is it checked? Hoping we get bored of orgies and parties and feasting and this is enough to ensure we can reproduce indefinitely and continue to orgy and party and feast? I don't think so. At the end of the day, the world cannot sustain everyone living with the carbon footprint of a wealthy person living life to excess. It can't even sustain the carbon footprint of everyone living how they currently live.
Our bodies do that naturally. I can only eat 5 or 6 before I'm too full to continue
The amount of projection in this post is truly staggering. You do realize there are parts of the Earth that aren't the Bay area right. Also, those feasts require a shockingly large staff you normally don't see to make them happen. Finally, most of your complaints aren't even true. The amount of farmland has shrunk over the last 100 years by a large amount. The amount of forests has expanded, by several times. The fisheries are the one thing you are actually right about and that's because a couple of countries (mostly in Asia) are speedrunning fishing. Seriously??? this is your take???
I am not sure most do.
> not only is the premise wrong
The blog post offers several studies as evidence, where's yours?
the studies are set in a society in which the main way of existing in society and contributing to it is via employment.
Some generations ago females in this society were regularly without jobs but were "homemakers", in that time if one were not a homemaker and a female how was the person's feeling of well-being?
Reports conflict about that, but in that time of course females were often kept from employment by being homemakers and thus relegated to secondary status.
Perhaps the studies you look for would be related to feelings of social well-being among hunter-gatherer societies, however maybe those studies are not actually needed? Because probably now that the possibility has come up you will realize hunter-gather societies do not have traditional jobs or employment and that people were evidently able to feel happy in those societies.
Now you may respond with examples of how maintaining hunter-gatherer societies would mean death of much of population etc. because the best kind of goalpost moving is the kind that is true. Nonetheless the point should be clear that people can be happy without typical modern jobs and employment.
Whether or not a modern lifestyle and world can be constructed that does not need jobs and still keep people happy is a different question. And there we are back with something for which there are no relevant studies.
> the studies are set in a society in which the main way of existing in society and contributing to it is via employment.
That's the one we live in though, so I guess that seems fair
the statement is that there are studies showing that one needs a job to be happy, and asks for studies showing the opposite, implying that the lack of such studies demonstrates that one cannot be happy without jobs. That is to say arguing the need for jobs is universal.
This was in reply to a statement that argued one did not absolutely need jobs to be happy and that this seeming need in our society was in fact an argument for a problem in the society.
In such a case it seems the use of the studies set in the society is less fair than considering if there may be easily considered conditions in other societies that show the need for a job is not a universal need but actually only a local, currently defined need in our society.
My comment merely showed that if one were to try to think of any examples showing happiness requires employment some should easily spring to mind and counter studies were not needed to prove it was not a universal requirement.
A study obviously can’t prove that people need jobs to be happy.
If you can so much as imagine a society organized around some other source of happiness, there’s your evidence by counterexample.
I have no opinion either way but this doesn’t follow. I can imagine a world where people don’t need oxygen to breathe but they still do. If we say people need oxygen, the argument is obviously about the world such as it is rather than the world as it could hypothetically be.
This is untrue. You cannot imagine a world where people, without changing the definition of people, don't need oxygen to breathe.
"they still do" is just begging the question. Plenty of people live without working. We're ruled by people who don't work.
Humans are socialized to want purpose and meaning in life. Modern humans are socialized to put a lot of that meaning into their employment. Many humans have a lot of trouble with unemployment and even retirement, because they feel a lack of purpose.
I think imagining a world where people are universally able to find purpose outside their employment counts as "changing the definition of people". Perhaps less difficult of a change than making us not dependent on oxygen, but still a big enough change not to clear the bar.
> Plenty of people live without working.
A minority of people live without working. And many people who do not work are profoundly unhappy with that state of affairs.
> We're ruled by people who don't work.
That's a cute thing to say, but isn't a serious rebuttal of anything.
You’re right that my reasoning was off. I don’t think it helps the point OP was trying to make. The argument being made in favor of labor isn’t “The only way for someone to be happy is to have a job” but instead “The majority of people will be unhappy without an occupation,” which is testable. The existence of people who are happy without any sort of structured, purposeful activity would not invalidate that the majority of people may well need structured, purposeful activity in order to feel fulfilled.
If you tested the claim it wouldn’t tell you about human nature, because it’s possible (and I think likely) that most people are simply conditioned to believe they need purposeful work to be fulfilled, so you could just as well argue that if society were to be radically re-engineered, it would be worthwhile to re-engineer it at the psychological level (such that no one felt the need to work), rather than the economic level (such that work was made available to everyone).
> We're ruled by people who don't work.
I don’t have any data to support this but I suspect the majority of those people that we would characterize as happy are still engaged in an occupation (not a “job” as such, but purposeful work that goes beyond mere leisure). I’ve seen dozens of well-to-do retired boomers who waste away on Twitter or YouTube and don’t seem to do much of anything anymore, which is what I’m guessing is the behavior you’re imagining when you talk about oligarchs not working, but I don’t see much evidence that the oligarchs are like that; most that I can think of have made no indication that they will ever retire. Now, granted, work looks a lot different if you’re Warren Buffett, but what we’re looking at is not the social benefit of work as such but the impact of structured, purposeful activity on an individual’s psychological sense of wellbeing. In that sense, I think it’s unlikely that these people would disprove the premise.
It depends what kind of culture you come from.
People I know who grew up in working class families consistently believe that they have to work to have meaning.
People I know who grew up upper middle class or professors' kids seem to split down the middle. Some of them are very high achievers, the other half don't do anything. The latter often have a blackpill or Marxish explanation of why "work is for suckers" or a label that they can have a meaningful (to them) struggle with indefinitely and often a bit of paranoid ideation to boot.
Children of the working class would resist a workless future and the older ones would probably just... die. Some of my wastrel friends might be happy in that word with endless bread and circuses, others will find meaning in explaining their experiences in terms of the conflict theories of the last century.
See https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/feb/12/joan-williams-... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b46LtbbZ5JE
When you talk about the "work is for suckers" class, I think you're talking about (at most) 15% of the population. So sure, people like this exist, but not enough to matter when it comes to the overall argument.
I am actually one of those people who thinks traditional employment is mostly a raw deal (I wouldn't go so far as to say "for suckers"), but the need for a purpose in life is a very real one. A friend of mine recently said that having kids is like easy mode for finding purpose. Pursuing a career feels pretty similar in that regard. It's not impossible to find purpose without those things, of course, but it can take a lot more effort, and many people will tire of that effort.
getting close to bisecting it but no cigar
(Not have I found the missing link..but. your comment looks like it should be helpful in the future)
Plus I know some working class who made life-changing money (whether they felt like they earned it or not) _and then_ struggle to "self-actualize"
These tend to usually either.. admire/emulate professors becoming somewhat crackpottish in the process (if they felt like they earned it) or just dissipate in costly vices (if they don't). Note the strategy is kind of flipped if they come from upper-middle. Then there are the Wolframs,geohots,Carmacks etc that we can't put in a box but you "conveniently" left out the lower middle
Which means... _You_ better make life changing money soon. Just kidding. These paths can't be the only options can they ? If we don't assume men are islands the options improve?
Me glad you are friends with wastrels, which for some reason I conflate with skunks the animals :)
There's a comic (not Furballs) about dumpster diving skunks and foxes which I can't get out of Gemini . Korean-American artist iirc
I don't think that's how "evidence" works. I can imagine a lot of things in a lot of domains, but that doesn't make it real.
I absolutely can imagine a society organized around some other source(s) of happiness, but the fact is we don't have that society, and humans are not acclimated to that society. Humans are acclimated to the society we have, and there's plenty of research out there showing that many, many humans derive a significant chunk of their self-worth and life's purpose from their jobs.
And when they lose their job and can't find satisfying work, their quality of life is meaningfully impacted, in ways that cannot be fully explained by the financial impact of losing a job.
Another fine example is retirement. Many older people end up finding work again in retirement, not because they need the money, but because it helps them find purpose. Others don't retire until the day they die because they can't imagine a life without work. Yes, some people love retirement and are happy and thrive, but there are also many who aren't and don't.
> many, many humans derive a significant chunk of their self-worth and life's purpose from their jobs.
Men, or women?
Not trying to raise gender role controversies. It's just been my observation, throughout my life experience, that men, as the primary public-sphere producers and providers, are much more tethered to public-sphere occupational identity than women. This seems validated in the experience of the structurally unemployed, e.g. in the former industrial regions.
As women are 50% of the population, give or take, I expect the politics of this might flow differently for them than for men, as a bloc.
We have a word for imagining a society with different sources of happiness: utopian. We generally don’t regard utopian musings as evidence of anything.
Who is "we?" A utopian society is what we should ideally be aiming for at all times, not some dirty word like you seem to think it is.
Who is "we"?
I am. Who's the rest of y'all?
the parent poster is trying to say "well where's your evidence that a society not based around human labor is possible?" which is sort of a silly question
you can't claim an invention is invalid because there are no "studies" that show such an invention has already existed and succeeded, you'd by definition never invent anything!
No, your quote is a much too strong version of what anyone in this subthread is trying to say.
The issue isn't that there isn't any evidence that a society based around human labor is possible. I expect it is!
The issue is that our current society is based around human labor, and that there is plenty of evidence that changing that even over the time period of a lifetime or two would cause huge societal upheaval (likely including war, possibly of the civil variety) and massive existential problems for lots of people.
And here we're talking about a massively disruptive technology that could change all this in the span of a decade or two? We're screwed, if AI actually bears fruit.
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There's a massive spike in mortality for those who retire from work versus those who keep working. In fact, working just a single year after you're 65 is associated with 11% lower risk of death for healthy people and 9% for unhealthy.
Working is objectively good for your health. Stopping work is associated with an extremely large increase in mortality risk, for both healthy and unhealthy people.
Any alternatives must weigh the resulting death it will cause.
How are we sure about the direction of cause and effect here? I'd expect more healthier people to self-select the working cohort, all else being equal.
In practice it doesn't really work that way. It isn't like "I am ill bodied, I ought to retire." It is more like "I am ill bodied, but I can't afford to retire, so I must work in some capacity." People who retire early are probably far more likely to be wealthier, and that is correlated with healthspan.
It's hard to prove or falsify this statement.
> Early retirement is increasingly a preserve of the wealthy. Back in 2002–03, the fraction of those who were retired aged 55–64 was fairly similar across the wealth distribution: 20% in the poorest fifth compared to 28% for the wealthiest fifth. In contrast, by 2018–19, only 7% of the poorest fifth were retired, while for the wealthiest fifth it was still 24%.
https://ifs.org.uk/news/early-retirement-increasingly-concen...
Right, but the original post was about working past retirement age, not retiring early. It's unlikely the last two US presidents have been working in their 70s and 80s because they can't afford retirement. I'm not aware of anyone working past 80 that haven't been a professor, CEO, politician, etc.
Regardless it's a confounder, statement otherwise now being that affluence predicts mortality.
Yeah this seems like an obvious confounder.
Yeah no shit people who are forced to retire because of health reasons are going to die earlier than the ones who aren't.
Did any of that signal come from people who hadn't spent the last 40 or 50 years working, in a society constructed around working?
If I had a study that showed increased mortality in people who had owned a parrot for 50 years in the year after that parrot died, you wouldn't cite it as evidence of the basic human need for a parrot.
The problem with the studies is that they're cases in which specific groups within the broader economy lost jobs. Those aren't really comparable to the (theoretical) path of job displacement of AI for a couple of reasons:
1. Those people didn't get substantial, ongoing financial assistance. If we end up in a UBI world, particular one where the UBI people get is high enough to get more or less anything that's not very scarce (e.g. land in coastal cities), the negative economic component of job loss is removed. 2. Everyone else still had jobs. When you lose your job and everyone else continues to work and be successful (or at least you perceive that to be the case), there's a big hit to the status and meaning in your life. If everyone is affected in the same way, then your relative status to others remains unchanged, and everyone collective needs to reorient society to find their meaning.
I'm not saying it will go well, but I do think there's a theoretically possible path where there is large scale unemployment but because we have nigh infinite productivity, everyone has access to unlimited non-scarce resources (including luxury cars and fine foods and whatever medical treatment they need), and we end up with an enormous number of competitive leagues of everything, events centered around music and arts, dinner parties and all manner of other social activities that are what give people meaning.
Your counterargument is basically just... vibes? It'd be a lot stronger if you could also back it up with studies, like the author has.
Let's grant the premise. UBI, significant enough to live well on, luxury cars and dinner parties for all.
Who sets the amount? Who controls the infrastructure producing the unlimited resources? What happens when you vote the wrong way, or protest the wrong policy, or simply become inconvenient?
A population with no economic function has no leverage with which to resist a reduction, a condition, or a withdrawal. You're describing a world where 99% of the people are entirely dependent on the goodwill of whoever owns the machines, and you're treating that goodwill as an unchanging variable. The history of every human institution suggests that power without accountability eventually behaves like...power without accountability. Even assuming the benevolence of the people holding all the cards isn't naive optimism, it's the same mistake that makes people say real communism just hasn't been tried yet.
Oh yeah, to be clear I fully agree with everything you've said. My core argument is that there will be sufficient economic productivity for everyone to live incredibly well. Whether or not that happens depends entirely on the people who control both economic and political power. That keeps me up at night, and things could go horribly wrong.
I guess the optimistic side of me thinks that benevolence wins out because there's no cost to it. There is plenty of competition among the wealth for scarce resources, but food, medicine, and mass-produceable luxury goods are effectively free. Given that, it's probably just easier to give those away to everyone than to crush most of humanity by force. But that is absolutely naive optimism, because I really have no control in this situation and prefer feeling naive optimism to pessimism.
And on the communism front, I will just say that I find it some combination of deeply amusing/ironic/depressing that the people on the far left protesting AI because it'll take jobs are protesting the very technology that could, in fact, lead to the first successful incarnation of communism!
> Whether or not that happens depends entirely on the people who control both economic and political power.
Then we're doomed. The kinds of people who seek and amass that power are not the kinds of people who will treat the teeming unemployed masses with respect and largess.
> protesting the very technology that could, in fact, lead to the first successful incarnation of communism
Communism's failures are due to human social factors, not technological. You can't fix social problems with technology.
> Communism's failures are due to human social factors, not technological. You can't fix social problems with technology.
Yeah, that's fair. The argument would be that the core reason communism failed is because people inherently want to have greater status than those around them, so the ones who were in charge used their power to grant themselves a greater share of resources in order to demonstrate their greater status. If we have infinite non-scarce goods, whoever's in charge can still let everyone have as they need of those while demonstrating their greater status through non-scarce goods.
To be clear this isn't a prediction (I have no idea what's going to happen!), just the case I could see for this being the first version of communism that works. Though also it's not really communism, because everyone is not in fact equal; it's something like a pseudo-communist giant welfare state.
If you know happy rich people that don't have a job, you got your counter example, and one is enough.
I do.
People usually need to have a purpose, but it doesn't need to be a job.
I agree "people need a purpose to be happy" is much more digestible than "people need a job to be happy". However, it has to be qualified with "some people need a purpose to be happy". Defining, or worse dictating, happiness for everyone is a fool's errand and, ironically, usually leads to large scale mass murder or starvation.
You may not need to have a job to be happy, it varies person to person. However, the idea that the billionaires will save us and our leverage is not needed is ridiculous. It is much more likely we would see poverty like is seen in much of the rest of the world.
> people need jobs to be happy
The happiness of the aristocracy depends on the spectacle of miserable workers performing humiliating tasks.
Solution: take turns every other year.
> we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money
In a world where all of the necessities of life were free--not as in "not having to pay any money for because of some social policy" but as in "not costing any resources to produce"--i.e., the way air is free now--then this would be the case, yes.
But we're not there yet. And I think a big part of why we're not there is that tech giants who could be spending their entrepreneurial efforts on making the necessities of life cheaper, are instead spending them on things like AI and getting people to click on ads and monetizing users' data.
What do tech giants have to do with food production, clothing, medicine, housing?
Nothing. That's the problem. The people running these companies say they're among the smartest, most driven people on the planet, the movers and shakers, the ones who are determining the future course of society. So why aren't they figuring out how to make things like food, clothing, medicine, and housing cheap, so cheap that everyone on the planet can have them easily? Why is it more important to figure out how to get people to click on more ads, or ask more questions to AIs that hallucinate wrong answers?
I've worked for giant tech companies for the past 20 years and have literally never heard anyone refer to themselves or their coworkers as the smartest, most driven people on the planet, or movers or shakers. The biggest talk I've heard is developers thinking they're some of the better developers, like 95th+ percentile.
I said the people running the companies, not the people working in them.
I also never heard that. Maybe I'm not paying attention though
Maybe people don't need jobs to be happy.
But it's a big change, and a better way to go about it, instead of huge layoffs is:reduce the hours of work gradually and equally. And possibly create some social infrastructure in the background, to fullfil the social roles of work.
You are ignoring the part where human labor is the leverage required for democracy to work.
This same point was also made clumsily in the OP; I’m very unconvinced.
The obvious question marks in that theory:
Lots of human labor happens in nondemocratic polities; slave-owning/repressive societies create lots of labor.
Democracy historically doesn’t advance in lockstep with labor; it’s arisen with many contingencies. The model (English Parliament) seems founded on concerns with right of some wealthy barons v. Kings.
Traditional common sense alternative is that military victory goes to people with largest army, so voting saves time. That’s been debatably less relevant with deadlier weapons, so democracy could be cooked.
I don't think it is required, democracies aren't designed that way
not everyone in charge is a cartoon villain
Most are...it's pretty much required to be a psychopath to climb the ladder to the top
> we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money
I agree, but those people will still need to eat and pay rent so I guess they're stuck either working or dying. People will always find something to do with themselves. You don't need to encourage people to explore their own passions much when they're able to do it. The need for jobs isn't really an issue as much as the need for money is.
I agree in theory, but this is so extremely far from the US political and social system that I think no nation has ever changed so much without being overthrown. So unless you’re talking about plans for a post-US world, this idea will always be theoretical and not how “the world” works.
I'm not sure it's that far out of the Overton window. US already managed to do some small-scale UBI trials, after all. Maybe one day it can do a countrywide trial.
No it hasn't. To actually try it requires giving to a large enough population that it can impact prices and inflation.
Also, every time this has ever been tried it ended in atrocity. Lookup "War communism" to see what happened. Money literally predates civilization. The first writing we have are sales invoices.
"a post-US world"
I see, so you like large scale warfare then. Did you run out of WWII docs and want some more history for content?
Parent didn't say they liked it; I'm reading it as an expression of concern (that I share).
The problem is that he relies on a dubious Acemoglu estimate, without realizing that at best it's temporary. AI will be better than humans in doing tasks (the qualifiers don't matter in the aggregate). Any jobs then would be bullshit jobs, and everyone will know it.
LMs are literally trained on Reddit. The idea they are "super-intelligent" is anthropomorphism and marketing. So far no independent research has seen AI be better at anything than humans. And that's unlikely to change with larger NNs.
If they're good enough at useful tasks and cheaper than any human, the economic and political effect is the same regardless of whether they are 'intelligent' or 'pretend-to-be-intelligent'. The philosophical debate does not change the practical effect.
> we can do better than this
In theory we can do better than this, in practice we can't.
40% of the people in the US would rather starve to death themselves than live in a world where people they hate for their skin color get anything without toiling for it.
I appreciate that there is a significant chunk of people that are like this, but I think if you really believe the 40% number or anything like it, you're giving yourself a false worldview.
The majority of people aren't racist nor do they have a problem with government helping them out. What was happening (are you referencing 2024?) in 2024 and today was a government saying the economy was fine when it is not. When that happens, people are going to pick the person that isn't in power, who says they are going to fix it, even if they aren't. "It's the economy stupid". People care about their own well-being above pretty much everything else most of the time.
I don't think putting this on racism or anything else (though it is a smaller factor) helps, it's just rhetoric. 40% of the people in the US aren't dedicateed racists, they are, however, in working groups that the government has ignored for decades.
So do you expect Republicans to be thrown out of office en masse in the upcoming election?
I personally expect plenty of them to get reelected even if they claim that everything is just fine.
I think we're gonna see some def Democratic gains because the economy is shit and that's how voting always happens.
The only argument I was making is it's no where near 40% of people that are voting for somebody cause they're racist. If you believe that then you're not going to see the world accurately. It's not how people work.
But it goes back to my main point, Dem gains won't be what they should be because politics are a very vague and murky thing and people make all kinds of justifications for why they vote for their person. See the stat where most people rate Congress poorly but their Congressperson highly. It's not racism, it's that politics are inherently pretty stupid.
> if you really believe the 40% number or anything like it, you're giving yourself a false worldview.
> The majority of people aren't racist nor do they have a problem with government helping them out.
40% is ....not a majority
the current POTUS has a 37% approval rating and this is considered to be historically low, due to wars, corruption, etc.
but even with all of that corruption and failure, 37% of surveyed adults, *still approve*. This includes his frequent, deeply racist tirades on Twitter. They approve!
Let's state this again because the Dems still haven't learned. Trump didn't win, the Dems lost. And until you stop using this type of rhetoric, you will keep losing. This is completely a skill issue because there are plenty of things to talk about that would help getting Dems elected. This isn't one of them.
3 million more people voted Trump in 2024 than in 2020
Thai wasn’t people not voting for the black woman, this was people actively voting for the demented rapist.
sorry what ? I'm personally responsible for getting Democrats elected? Can you show me a Democratic campaign that is calling half the country racist ?
But it's not even approaching 40%, nor did I tie the two together. If you think the 33% of people who voted from Trump did it because they are racist you are wrong. Some did, a lot that wasn't their primary concern. It's viewing pepole wrong to think that.
What's the point of being that pedantic, Mike?
have you talked to Trump voters? I have talked to many, many, in my family, in my neighborhood, everywhere.
If there is one view that ties them all together, it's racism (and misogyny). Loud and clear.
If any president of any party posted a tweet like [1] or [2], I would never ever answer "I approve of the job theyre doing" in a poll.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/23/us/politics/trump-china-i...
[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/news-wrap-trumps-racist-so...
Yes, I've talked to Trump voters and I know people who aren't especially strong Trump supporters that voted for him because the economy was shit. Their reasoning wasn't racism. There is a huge chunk where that is their reasoning, sure.
Once again, if you think it's 40% of 33%, you're wrong. Not everybody who voted for Trump is a racist, it's just not how people work.
If you vote/support someone who runs on a racist platform - you are getting that as part of the "package deal":
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2016/11/10/the-cinemax-theory-of...
Voters don't pay attention to or they justify their votes. That doesn't mean they are inherently racist, it means they don't care enough about politics or they care about other issues to the point where they either aren't aware of it or they excuse it away. People pay attention to or remember a lot less about politics than that blog posts suggests.
The majority of people are seeing a variety of headlines from news sources they may not trust (for good reason and bad) and remember a few events over the year, some have such a strong attachment to party that that's the defining thing above all that they're voting for. They're being propagandized and lied to as part of a political campiagn. That they are making the I'd argue wrong choice does not mean they are racist or even intend to be. That racism isn't the defining thing for the majority of them.
It goes back to the original claim, I still think it's obvious that most people aren't voting for a guy because racism. That's inverting how people operate, which is seeing their own needs as the center of the world. If you're unemployed and hurting for money and you are racist, what is your primary motivation for voting? It's probably to get you a job because that's the fastest path to improving your life. But that's presupposing a lot of people are racist, and living around Trump voters, or knowing Trump voters that are minorities, something else is happening other than racism.
I don't think individuals care more about other people than they do themselves. Some people are that spiteful but the majority of people are not because they cannot afford to be.
I don't mean to over argue this but I think it's important that we understand people as they understand themselves.
Well - the fact that they don't pay attention (or lack critical thinking skills and a baseline reasonable education) is a large part of the problem.
But - with a person like POTUS - and those he surrounds himself with, they will throw every possible promise to get the votes - but, each of those issues are only part of their overall agenda and platform. When they got called-out on controversial issues, they outright lied about knowing about things like "Project 2025" during the last election cycle.
Choosing to live in ignorance - or abstaining from voting is accepting that agenda and platform, regardless.
Yes, but I'd argue those people are victims as much as anybody else. To truly be ignorant is to not know, and if you are in a situation where you've never been trained to need to know or you simply don't know there's another world out there, that's not a choice, that's a situation you've been placed in.
You have to win these people to fix the system. Casting them as hateful rubes only voting because they are racist is wrong, not on a moral level but on an intellectual one. We've got large chunks of of the country that haven't been effectively educated for decades, no wonder they are ignorant.
For the record, I choose not to vote not because I accept Trump's racism but I think a valid way of signaling you are not happy with either party (but especially Trumpsim) is to not engage in the system. If the system isn't offering better it isn't the people at fault, it is the system. Non-votes are as valid as any other. If I vote for a process that I believe is fraudulent, that politician will see that as an indicator they have some kind of mandate (see Bush in 2004). I'm not giving it to them, it's the job of either party to be better not to just not be worse.
The Dems must be better and the biggest part of that to me is to engage and understand working class people and not do what they did in 2024 and say everything is fine because it wasn't and it certainly isn't today (and that's Trump's fault). I was never especially leftist but as I've grown older I think the economy is the biggst driver of artificial divides. When people hurt, they look for others to blame. If both parties (or either) were genuinely focused on helping the poor to get a foot up, a lot of this discourse wouldn't be happening. I hate Trumpism but I don't think the corporatism that has captured the Democratic party is much better.
It's really a problem of the system, being forced into an artificial duopoly. If you want to lose me further by saying I'm choosing that platform by not voting, then you're just further disengaging people and I argue you're choosing not to understand my posittion. You need the "racists" and the non-voters to win.
I don't follow American politics very closely, but in the last election it was not Trump who came out with a racist platform, but his opponent.
tribalism is totally how people work when they lack culture, education and critical thinking skills!
here's some basic reading on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_favoritism
Sure, but the original claim was this:
> 40% of the people in the US would rather starve to death themselves than live in a world where people they hate for their skin color get anything without toiling for it.
Do we truly believe that's 40% of people in the US? 33% of US voters even voted for him, so you're saying it's pretty much all of them and another 7%. I just don't see it, it's rhetoric and it's not helpful because if your goal is to win over the people that need to be won over, you can't call them racists when they really aren't.
It's a misshaped worldview formed in bubbles. People don't work that way because you're literally assuming that their hate for somebody else overrides their own well-being. Their actions might end up with that result, but I've interacted with enough people from all over the spectrum to know that imagining that many people have that much hate is just wrong. People care about themselves first and foremost, it's a necessity.
If people had jobs, a lot of of this division would disappear but the govt for years has treated low income workers as people that don't matter and can just be displaced without any answers. It's whey the Democratic party which was traditionally the working class party has struggled against Trumpism, because he pretends to care.
(back from my two hour Hacker News ban - "make sure all the tempban knobs are turned to the max for that zzzeek guy"
look this is the thing with racism - racism to the degree "races" are fit (randomly, or forcibly) into different ethnic / cultural / etc categories (e.g. "in-groups" and "out groups") is largely, due to the in-group/out-group differential, a natural tendency in humans that has to be actively worked against (hence the term "anti-racism"). Nobody who has grown up in modern society with extreme separation of "races" / cultures into disparate groups can really say "oh I'm not a racist" amongst people who study this at an anthropoligical, sociological, or evolutionary level, biases towards those in societally placed in "out groups" have to be critically challenged on a regular basis.
This is why it's not enough to be some MAGA who says, "oh Im not a racist! i just agree with trump's policy", they of course have no idea how their words and actions are linked to racism because they've never looked at it (and by my experience with Trump voters, they angrily, adamantly refuse to even look at contrarian evidence to their belief systems if you try to show them, much less have the critical thinking skills to actually understand them). They are marinating in distrust and contempt of "the other" (if you know me in RL I'll introduce you to people who wont listen to a single fact you give them if it was not on FOX news).
> People care about themselves first and foremost, it's a necessity.
they care about their in-group. Countries like those in Scandanavia have developed very deep social welfare systems largely because of their history (now being challenged by immigration) of being culturally homogeneous meant that everyone trusted each other implicitly and had no issue with their government dollars being used to help their neighbors [1] (this is a really interesting article btw). A diverse society has a steeper hill to climb in establishing social trust between different cultural / ethnic groups.
[1] https://trendsresearch.org/insight/the-paradox-of-right-wing...
A president could literally shout Korean slurs all day long (I'm Korean) and get a Nazi symbol tattooed on his forehead, and if he continued to do a good job of policymaking I would approve in that poll, though hate the guy. This is what you are not understanding about Trump voters. We really don't care if Trump is racist at all. But that's not because we are racist ourselves. That's just not relevant to the political platform. If he starts passing racist policies, that's bad, but otherwise we don't give a shit.
Leftists, on the other hand, are very highly concerned with the moral purity of their candidates, even above their political efficacy. I don't understand it myself.
> If he starts passing racist policies, that's bad, but otherwise we don't give a shit.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/03/pentagon-pet...
> Since Trump returned to office in January last year, Pete Hegseth, the rumbustious defense secretary who has made it his mission to remake a military ethos he denounced as “woke”, has fired or forcibly retired 24 generals and senior commanders, with no performance-related reason given.
> About 60% have been Black or female, an approach seemingly driven by the administration’s proclaimed onslaught against “DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] hires”.
so..it's not "racist" when it's "oh all those Black men and women are obviously DEI hires", is that the logic?
60% of any cohort being "black or female" sounds like the population average or below. 50% of people are female, and more than 10% in the USA are black. A random selection of citizens would likely turn up as 60%+ black or female.
I'm not saying this firing wasn't statistically suspect, since I don't know the demographics of that cohort, but I'm guessing based on this misleading phrasing and the lack of information about the cohort that it wasn't.
> I don't know the demographics of that cohort
here it is:
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/demographics-us-military
this is upper military leadership. Black individuals account for 6.5%-9% of general officers/admirals, senior female leaders (colonels, generals, and admirals) represent less than 5% of all senior military leadership.
> 60% of any cohort being "black or female" sounds like the population average or below.
doing the math this means a Black or female senior military leader has 8.5-11 times higher chance of being fired by Pete Hegseth compared to a white male counterpart
That seems bad! But at the end of the day it is not bad enough to warrant voting for the other side's policies. I choose conservative policy with some likely *ist firings thrown in over the alternative, for now. Fwiw I voted Obama; the Democrats can win me back, they just haven't.
This is a very strong exaggeration of the reality. It's similar to saying "almost all Democratic Party voters want to turn the US into Soviet communism", and is about equally inaccurate.
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https://aeon.co/essays/what-if-jobs-are-not-the-solution-but...
this essay is asking the right questions
Assuming that’s true and AI is part of the solution, are you implying we should expect the AI overlords to create such a system? That will never happen. They have literally no incentives to decommodify the economy it’s what gives them power
The solution is The Matrix.
The "real world" is just computers/AIs running everything in a pointless loop.
Humans aren't "batteries" (that never even made sense to begin with) but instead are living their happy lives in the simulation to provide something to simulate investment and shareholder value.
It's dumb, but it still seems more plausible than people accepting an overnight switch into the "space communism" of nobody needing to work. Everyone is too invested in their own spot in the hierarchy.
The original idea I think was they were biological components in a digital/biological computer complex. The Matrix sets up scenarios, and the human brains interact with them in human ways which are sometimes of use to the machines. Meanwhile, the machines see all of it and can monitor for problem humans. ISTR this was tossed as too intellectual for an action movie.
Another option to either The Matrix or Star Trek is Idiocracy, only there’s an elite group of humans and AI in charge over the deteriorating masses. Let’s not count out The Hunger Games or Elysium.
Isn't there an entire r/antiwork thread dedicated to not working?
I'm sorry... you didn't understand the article.
The goal of having a job isn't happiness. At least not immediately. The goal is to have something to bargain with: employees offer labor, employers buy it. If employees don't deliver, they get fired, if employers don't deliver, employees leave / strike. This is what keeps system in a semblance of balance. But once would-be employees can be employees no more, they have no way of influencing any aspect of their governance. Not economical, not political, not military, not ethical.
In other words, people need jobs to try to secure their place in the world on multiple levels. It's not about socializing at work, at least, that factor is absolutely not a priority.
Nice thought, but who controls the production (AI Compute) that enables this lifestyle? Those who control the production will control the non-workers.
So there’s one reference to happy, investor happiness. There’s 4 to meaning though.
I don’t disagree with you but you’re also missing the scarier point that economic collapse will come before the meaning even is missed.
This article ideally should have been two. One about how a consumer economy without consumers cannot be an economy. Another about what comes next.
Reminds me of this story.
Milton Friedman was once visiting China when he was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors, thousands of workers were toiling away building a canal with shovels. He asked his host, a government bureaucrat, why more machines weren’t being used. The bureaucrat replied, “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton responded, “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, you should give these workers spoons, not shovels!”
> most people like the social aspect of work, but not being beholden to their boss
From what I see out there "being beholden to the boss" is the social aspect people like most. It is what gives the work purpose; knowing that you are pleasing someone else.
Some are quite capable of being their own boss, but the people who can actually sustain that long term seem few and far between. It seems that it becomes easy to spiral into a pit of depression when there is no clear feedback in the value being created. Having to regularly deal with another person is not always desirable but having to regularly deal with another person also forces the feedback loop to occur.
A utopian dream. The world has heard this story before. It completely ignores the jungle we find ourselves in.
Yeah, people need a creative output, not just for creativity sake but something that feels productive/constructive and beneficial to them and their society/community.
Open source is an example of such work, and amazing things have been achieved - arguably far more impressive and useful than any private tech company has achieved ( and arguably more than all for-profit tech companies combined).
We should focus on expanding the open source cooperative model to all other areas of society/productivity. With modern technology, knowledge availability, and AI, I don't see why people couldn't organize at the grassroots level and build/solve real problems their local (or global) communities may be facing.
I really don't see why we need all of the VCs, marketers and MBAs... No offense to anyone but the typical SV tech company structure and operations just don't even seem efficient... much of the focus is on marketing/manipulation, enshitification, dark patterns and other dishonest and ultimately counter-productive bullshit.
We should be able to organize and build open/cooperative alternatives to SV shitware (and not just software) and we should be able to outcompete the tech shittocracy.. simply because it's actually terribly shitty and inneficient.
> I don't see why people couldn't organize at the grassroots level and build/solve real problems their local (or global) communities may be facing.
Usually it's because when they do, their de facto owner - "the state" - goes after them with guns and trained sadists.
>I really don't see why we need all of the VCs, marketers and MBAs... No offense to anyone but the typical SV tech company structure and operations just don't even seem efficient... much of the focus is on marketing/manipulation, enshitification, dark patterns and other dishonest and ultimately counter-productive bullshit.
That's called value creation: manipulating human populations to perceive certain arrangements of matter (or of notions) as "valuable", i.e. that those forms have some inherent quality which legitimately causes individual volition to subject itself to outside command for the sake of the given arrangement.
> we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money
What's your proposal if not traditional work? The realistic outcome I see is shifting labor to unautomatable sectors like hospitality. That will keep people employed, but unhappy as they increasingly find themselves unable to find jobs they enjoy, or at comparable levels of income.
edit: I realize many people are unhappy with their jobs now, but by dint of labor, they can improve their lot. I am lamenting the closing of this window.
A couple of options off the top of my head: art, research, athletics, the humanities
AI is already coming for "art" and "research" - by "slop metrics" it's already there for "art".
It's coming for the type of industrialised, commoditized art.
Then there's art where human touch is the crucial ingredients. The problem is that it doesn't sell as well, but that has never stopped any starving artist from creating.
Or maybe the problem is that exchanging labor for scarce necessities only makes sense when labor itself is scarce.
We all see the incipient decoupling of labor from capital, while still having bills to pay. We are at the stage where we need to trial solutions, like a Pigouvian tax.
Milking unicorns.
The vast majority of people do not work jobs that they enjoy, that is a middle-class indulgence and ideal that they don't even live up to; almost all their literature is about why they should be enjoying things that they don't or how to discover the things that they might enjoy, and they stuff themselves with drugs to make themselves pay attention and not want to die.
And that's the top 15% of the population. The rest are not romanticizing digging ditches, scraping the dead skin off people's feet, or putting catheters up senior citizens.
Your "realistic" scenario is how 95% of the world lives already.
Getting meaning, community, culture, and "growth" from your job is middle-class religion, and they're constantly having crises of faith. The default state is to find these things in something other than serving people in order to eat.
We would all love to move to a society where we don't have to work for others to survive, but our current system is fundamentally not set up to handle this situation. Capitalism is a useful system for employing scarce resources productively (most of the time) but it doesn't really have an answer for a post-scarcity world. If technology is developed to allow us to end scarcity, instead of everyone having enough, we will end up in a situation where the owners of that technology end up with far, far more than enough while the large majority of people who do not have anything to offer those owners will starve. That sounds dystopian (and it is) but I don't see how we avoid that fate with our current economic system.
no? this isn't what it argues at all. did you read it?
You're absolutely right, and people will cite this while pointing to The Culture and saying "see, this is what we mean, everything will be fine."
Except nobody wants to get into the guts of how those systems came about. Nobody wants to discuss policy changes needed to ensure these sorts of outcomes, opportunities. Nobody wants to discuss regulations, tax schemes, land use requirements, accountability, ownership, shared prosperity.
Citing a potentiality as a certainty without any discussion as to how to get there is about as productive as daydreaming you're a billionaire and how you'd spend all that money. You have to do the fucking work, first, before any sliver of that outcome even becomes possible.
And if there's one thing the AIBros are adverse to, it's doing fucking work.
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