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Comment by Vladimof | Hacker News Reader

Ideally, in 10 years, no-one will have "jobs".

I don't care about "jobs" I care about skills. In 10 years will anyone be spending their time developing actual creative skills or learning how computers work? Or will they just be living on little endorphin hits doled out by an AI?

An analogy might be many of the lost trades, to do with things like horses, steam and agriculture. There are skills from a couple of hundred years ago that have more or less been lost. At the same time we have widespread skills that were unknown back then.

But - to run a modern farm, you have to understand the basics of agriculture as understood 2,000 years ago. To build an engine you have to know everything those engineers knew about steam power in 1850, and everything done since then. The past knowledge was subsumed into the present skill. And up until about 5 minutes ago, to draw a teddy bear skiing on Mars or to write a routine that analyzed another function, you had to have some set of skills. If you remove the need for skills from it, there's no more creative work for people to do is there? Where do we go from here?

Not necessarily. The implementation changes. For example, riveting has largely been replaced by welding. It's unlikely a riveter today would be able to match the skill of a riveter from yesteryear. Given an arc welder a person from the golden age of riveting would be unlikely to match the skill of today's welder.

Even if we don't lose the knowledge of how to do these things, we often lose the ability to put that theory into practice with the same level of skill.

You don't have to learn tons of poor ideas and local maximums the people had. When you learn physics now, you can skip aether theories altogether, or infinitesimals in math.

> Ideally, in 10 years, no-one will have "jobs".

Yes, but if it is to be ideal then also people will learn to share and not attach their identity to the amount of resources they control and power they have over others.

But how do we make sure it resembles Star Trek instead of Philip K. Dick?

You mean "The Penultimate Truth"? I think we're already on our way to that..

You think we'll have a Star Trek economy in 10 years? 100 years, maybe.

People have jobs in Star Trek and there is no abundance of everything. For example not everyone gets its own spaceship and space fleet cadets even have teleporter _credits_ which they can use.

It's really unclear how many people have holodeck girlfriends and free holo-food. Friggin millenials think everything should just materialize, like, you know, payments for their college loans right after everyone older than them spent decades paying off their college loans. Sure, and then we can eliminate "jobs" because everyone's parents are rich, right?

Where does all this money come from? Oh, sure, we can just tax billionaires. It's not as if anyone actually had to work 8am to 6pm, or whatever, those people were just suckers.

What a wakeup call you guys are in for ;)

[edit: Not you, parent, I'm referring to the OP who thinks "jobs" are a thing of the past]

I think in Star Trek the humans back on earth don’t need to work. But yeah there are limits to what you can have. You can’t have it all. Laws of thermodynamics, E=MC^2 etc.

That always bothered me. what the fuck to do they do all day back on earth?

Ride horses in the snow.

The definitely work…

Even then, what percentage of people will do something useful instead of smoking free dope and screwing VR girlfriends? Who's building these damn starships, Jim?

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