Freedom is not “doing anything you want”. It’s “not having to do the things you don’t want to do”.<p>AI may automate a white colar subset of those, but modern day society has for the longest time used wives, young people, immigrants from countries with bad currency devaluation, etc, to fill the gap above. The article talks about status and attention as the ultimate goal, but that may be a male-only perspective. Or even a him-like-perspective. The reality is humans chase many ladders since brains have may proclivities. For more than half of the population (wives and the poor) the goal may be freedom or time to do more.
women are just as status driven as men, and the poor men and women are even more so. when need is taken away the status race will be intense<p>living in the third world i have seen absurd stuff: early 20s women living in slums that own the latest iphone pro max on a 5 year term loan is a common theme<p>in london the children of the UHNW (net worth >EUR100m) compete for scholarships and academic achievements, or to create unicorn startups, because the only way they can differentiate themselves from UHNW peers is the academic arena where money doesnt matter. they also tend to make shitty films or own vineyards, or try to become authors, or try to make scientific discoveries, and get sucked in to Mystical Gurus like Mr Epstein and Elizabeth Holmes/Thanos
I don’t think my concern is that AI is going to make everything too awesome for people to cope. The fact that I can now DoorDash lunch doesn’t really matter when I can’t afford a place to live or healthcare.
Beautiful piece, with a great closer (not reproduced here, you should go with it).<p>I do wonder if our society would be better if we had more honourifics and formality. China has instituted social media rules based on qualifications. Many indigenous societies have forms of secret and sacred knowledge.<p>I think too many people are concerned with the abuse of these sorts of social systems when we already live in a system of value that is rife with abuse.
I wish I had access to free, unlimited childcare so that I was free to pursue my dream of raising children.
What would actually happen if you quit your job and spent all of your time raising your children?<p>What would happen if you just had children?
If your dream is <i>raising</i> children, you might want to consider being the party providing the childcare. I hear there's quite a lot of money involved!
> There is a running joke in the U.S. version of The Office where Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson), who is “Assistant to the Regional Manager” keeps insisting that he is “Assistant Regional Manager”, which sounds a bit better. When he is officially promoted to the title he prefers, he is delighted<p>As with so many of them, the joke is more subtly, brilliantly, and originally from <i>The Office</i>; not <i>The Office (US)</i>.
I'll be the uncultured swine who points out that "The Office (US)" was a better show. Ricky Gervais agrees.*<p>*In that the US show made him rich.
Ha, I get it, great Angela impression.
It started off really interesting, but I had to stop once the "AI could lead to post-scarcity" bit came.<p>Sorry, no offence, but I <i>wish</i> that this was the <i>"problem"</i> with AI.<p>The "Problem" is actually that it turns known tractable problems into non-reproducible problems.<p>Giving the illusion of giving the right answer is significantly more dangerous than giving an obvious wrong answer. So we're not going to AI ourselves into post-scarcity, whitecollar work will just sleepwalk into even further absurdity. (because, the fact is, humans also suffer from this issue; the worst among us give the appearance of competence and fuck it up massively).<p>AI consumes resources like a motherfucker, to <i>maybe</i> replace white-collar work, but the bluecollar stuff isn't going anywhere. It's a harder problem so people (companies) avoid it the same way that they avoid writing native GUIs. Much more convenient to just focus on pretty things and in the digital realm, but farming? agriculture? textiles and everything that society actually relies upon?<p>AI isn't coming for those jobs, because it's harder and has more definite outcomes. You can't trick people into believing that a pig has been slaughtered, carved and cooked properly.<p>It's comparatively easy to trick people into thinking that the man behind the curtain is a wizard, however.
He never says "AI could lead to post-scarcity" in the entire piece. In fact, he says:<p>> Before making this argument, I want to defend the topic. Utopia is not around the corner; these issues don't have any practical urgency. But I agree with Bostrom that thinking about utopia “can serve as kind of philosophical particle accelerator, in which extreme conditions are created that allow us to study the elementary constituents of our values.” Reflecting on utopia might tell us something interesting about human nature more generally.
>bluecollar stuff isn't going anywhere.<p>The 1700s called, regular mechinization already came for that.<p>And non-LLM AI has been moving into more blue collar stuff for years already, now with LLM logic they are becoming far more capable too.<p>You must be thinking of the more blue collar service industry, which may not go anywhere, but the time it takes to train, and the number of people that will go into it will ensure earning a living is difficult.
The entire idea of post-scarcity doesn't withstand the slightest scrutiny. Even if unlimited energy and matter could be summoned by magic, one would be limited by space and the speed of light, and by the threat of black hole formation if too much matter and energy is crammed into too small a region of space. In addition, one's time would be limited by the impending heat death.
> Giving the illusion of giving the right answer is significantly more dangerous than giving an obvious wrong answer.<p>Oh man sometimes I'm like "actually what I just said is wrong"... I have to remind myself to slow down/think over everything before saying something is done.
Peoples' takes on life can be so weird. The problems arent AI or any other tech, its human. This book seems like a waste of paper.
I think the author shares your view exactly:<p>> <i>But I think this won’t be a problem with a post-scarcity world. So many of the difficulties we face in life stem from our interactions with other people, and these won’t go away even with infinite material resources. So long as we remain human, we can never be fully satisfied. On the bright side, our lives will continue to have meaning in a post-scarcity world. We might be miserable, but we won’t be bored. </i>
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