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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

Personal opinion: I think scarcity is mostly a solved problem, in that most of us are working on projects that only exist to make someone else more money, not to fulfill any actual needs of those 8 billion humans.

There are exceptions of course.

But most of us could stop working tomorrow, and aside from the lack of income, the scarcity of resources available to us would not change.

The real problems that causes hunger/poverty in our world has more to do with logistics and politics, not a deficit of resources.

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I cannot understand why you would think so, even in a first world nation.

Who would grow your food? Who would make the tools and fertilizer that enable the farmers to grow your food? The robotics and software that enables those tools and fertilizer to be produce? Who would organize, transport, package, preserve and process the produce so that you can access it?

Apply the same questions to healthcare, education, transport, construction, entertainment, etc.

Some jobs are superfluous and arise out of coordination failure, that's true. Lawyers, administrators, salespeople and parts of finance and the government comes to mind. But "most people could stop working" is an unreasonable assertion.

> Who would grow your food?

>> There are exceptions of course.

There are about 2M farmers and ranchers in the US. 22M health care professionals. 4M teachers. 2M truckers, 135k rail workers, 40k miners, etc.

Even at our highest employment levels, under half of those in the US are employed. They're just not counted as unemployed because they're either children, in school, retired, or simply not seeking employment.

Yes, I do believe that most jobs are superfluous - that many more people could not have to work without a material impact to the availability of goods.

You forgot to count plumbers, and everyone in the construction industry.

Also the guy that fills the milk bottles. My brother used to work in a milk bottling plant, but he was not filing the bottles by hand. A machine filled the bottles, someone overlook the machine, my brother was making the chemistry and biological test to ensure the milk was safe to drink. And there was some additional people they call in case the machine gets broken (or to build a new machine.)

You are forgetting to count a lot of people.

Even if every single position in the US held today were considered essential, there would still be more people in the US who are unemployed than employed.

And every job currently held today is absolutely not essential.

That doesn’t support your point though that we’re anywhere near post scarcity and can support people quitting. Many jobs that were classified as essential during the pandemic are things people don’t have oodles of joy doing (garbage pickup, power plant coal loader, etc).

You can cut out the entire “entertainment” or whatever industry you think isn’t essential, but we still need to convince the people working the essential jobs to do it while everyone else free-rides.

That farmer count is only as small as it is because of the massive society they are built on that allows that to scale. You briefly scratched at with miners, but you forgot all of the machinery and auto manufacturers, the massive energy industry that powers all of it, etc.

> Yes, I do believe that most jobs are superfluous

I think you just don’t understand the purpose of many jobs. If the accountant for the local grocery store didn’t exist, what do you think would happen?

If your society focuses primarily on money, bad things.

If your society focuses on supporting a population's needs, not much.

Parent has a point from my experience - most products I worked on never really caught on in terms of being reasonably widely used. I don't think I've ever worked on anything I'd call truly essential.

From what I've seen, most programmers are indeed spending their time building experiments that have the primary goal of making money for the person that pays them - if they create true value that's more of a lucky side effect. And lots of those experiments fail.

Even if we somehow "solved scarcity" and robots could automatically produce all the goods and services everyone needs for free, if we don't get past the primitive "value must be provided through work" mentality, there would be no benefit.

Stuck with this "work virtue" mindset, society would find a way to make it so half the people were paid to dig holes and the other half paid to fill them in, just so we could go on with this fixation on the need to work for a living.

If most of us “humans” not “hn subset” stopped working we’d be in deep trouble.

Who will maintain buildings, infrastructure, essential services, government etc.

I think we could work towards long term fewer hours and more people who don’t need to work though.

My thinking is this - less than half of the population in the US holds a traditional job. 150M or so. And a vast majority of those are not jobs related to "essential" work. They're largely part of the retail and administrative workforce.

And so, if a majority of less than half of the US population is working unnecessary jobs (i.e. only valuable to our economy)... how much of what we do is really valuable to us as a species?

Which is a roundabout way to say that scarcity is a mostly if not completely solved problem; working to survive is largely no longer necessary, just customary.

There's a big leap there though from "non-traditional" to "not necessary". A colleague of mine is working on a project involving ensuring that farmers can track their feed and illness statistics correctly to improve their yields. It's not a traditional job, but it's absolutely necessary to ensure that (for example) the dairy industry can provide enough milk. (And moreover, to reduce the number of people who need to be working on calculating those statistics by hand.)

Likewise, you're also assuming that jobs that meet needs are more essential than jobs that meet wants, but the point of post-scarcity is that not only our needs are met, but our wants are as well. Picard can make himself a cup of earl grey whenever he wants, as opposed to sustaining himself with the recommended nutri-pack. One of my most fulfilling jobs was working for a t-shirt printing company - in theory, nothing we did was at all essential, but it was clearly very important to a lot of people's lives. Some of the most fascinating orders were memorial t-shirts being printed for people's funerals. Not essential at all, but I would argue very valuable to us as a species.

> A colleague of mine is working on a project involving ensuring that farmers can track their feed and illness statistics correctly to improve their yields.

I doubt that's an example of a job/project that isn't just pure administrative burden. Even your example of a t-shirt printing company is more than just pure administrative burden - people need t-shirts, and people like their t-shirts to have art of some form. While art may be a luxury, it is also pleasant and required to some extent.

However, there are some roles that are pure administrative burden, and I tend to think the GP is correct that these roles are a lot more prevalent than we want to admit. I think the 80/20 rule could be applicable here - only 20% of the population produces 80% of the wealth (read: essential or luxury items) while the other 80% of the world are stumbling on themselves in bureaucracy to maybe make the rest of the remaining 20%.

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