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Comment by tlocke | Hacker News Reader

We've created a society where there are such things as 'jobs' and unless you're rich, you need a job to support yourself and maybe a family. I think this model of society worked reasonably well for a while, but with AI we're coming to the end of that era.

In the next era we'll probably live like aristocrats, but instead of the work being done by servants, it'll be done by AI.

Back to the case of the 3D artist, in this new era she won't need to have a job to support herself, and she will have the freedom to create her art as she wishes.

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We've needed "jobs" to support ourselves since we descended from the trees. Actually before that too. "Society" came about because we invented tools and techniques to make our jobs easier so people could spend more time on different things. "AI" is some more steps down that same path.

> In the next era we'll probably live like aristocrats, but instead of the work being done by servants, it'll be done by AI.

Not in the way you imagine. We live like aristocrats today. We live in vast mansions that have hot running water, electricity, refrigeration, heating and cooling, lighting, we have servants bring us gluttonous feasts whenever we like, we careen around in our horseless carriages and flying machines. We laze around many hours of the day wasting time on frivolities like watching TV, playing computer games, reading books, drinking and taking drugs, etc. We have armies of doctors and security at our disposal if we should break a leg or even get a sniffle.

So we live better than kings did 200 years ago.

Life might get better for the average commoner in another 200 years. There will still be the haves and have nots though. People with a lot of wealth won't want to share it with others, and people with less will be envious of those with more, that's the constant in the human condition.

Nobody with the robots is going to give money to a bunch of hippies to laze around. If they want a piece of it they'll have to either work to create it themselves or to take it by force. Either way it won't come for free.

I agree with a lot of what you write, but in my experience in the UK there can be instances where money from the the wealthy has been used for the common good. For example, until 1945 only the rich could afford to educate their children, but the government decided to use taxpayers' money to provide free education for every child up to the age of 16. It was a utopian idea, and when it was first suggested most people said, 'yeah right, nice idea but of course it'll never happen'.

Are you aware that is not the rich people who sustain the state and thus 99% of its income, but the middle class right?

That's why politicians who campaign with ideas like "taxing the rich to fix X problem" are pure populist bullshit. You are the one who is gonna end up paying more.

First there are not enough rich people compared to commoners, and second, they can and will hide their money if possible and worth it.

So in the UK as in any other state, what did and is providing "free" education is your money and the money of the ones like you in the middle and upper-middle class.

Surely it's true to say that in the UK some people simply couldn't afford to send their children to school, but now every child can attend school regardless of their parents' wealth?

> I agree with a lot of what you write, but in my experience in the UK there can be instances where money from the the wealthy has been used for the common good. For example, until 1945 only the rich could afford to educate their children, but the government decided to use taxpayers' money to provide free education for every child up to the age of 16. It was a utopian idea, and when it was first suggested most people said, 'yeah right, nice idea but of course it'll never happen'.

And yet you ask people today and they'll moan about never having had it worse, boomers this and billionaires that (or tories I guess, I don't know what the equivalent go-to brainless insult is over there).

Not that there aren't valid reasons for complaint, but as I said envy (and greed) is a fundamental part of the human condition. I don't know why people think some utopia is just around the corner -- we've had thousand-fold multipliers in production. Fossil fuels, internal combustion, farming and construction machinery, factories, chemicals, computers, industrial robots, electricity. From pre-historic farmers and hunter gatherers to now production has increased unimaginably. The utopia never comes because that was never what was preventing it.

People who want there to be a utopia where nobody works and everybody is happy sharing everything fundamentally want to extinguish humanity. Because that's not what humanity is.

So I think there's a distinction between wealth and happiness. Amongst the aristocracy I'm sure there is a lot of misery. I think we've got a good chance of ensuring material abundance for everyone on the planet. Whether those people will be happy is a different question.

There is a distinction, but we already live like aristocracy. And aristocracing a bit more isn't going to change much in the social dynamic. "AI" isn't likely to be any more transformative than the the Haber process or the steam engine or the computer, as far as I can see. Some peoples' jobs will become redundant, same as always.

Government exists to solve the collective action problem (i.e. prisoner's dilemma). In an unregulated market, at times the winning move has lots of unaccounted externalities, so government steps in to realign incentives.

In this case, free education was possible if everyone collectively decided on it, but the market was unable to coordinate those people effectively. Government stepped in and tada - you have free education.

> We've needed "jobs" to support ourselves since we descended from the trees

Do you think the lion's job is to hunt? And the zebra's job is to eat grass?

A job is something you do in exchange for something else as payment. If you go as far back as to when our ancestors descended from trees, you will need to explain what kind of jobs were around then, who worked them and who paid.

> Do you think the lion's job is to hunt? And the zebra's job is to eat grass?

Yes. Difficult, cruel, and brutal jobs. Few people would choose to change places with them.

> A job is something you do in exchange for something else as payment.

Broader term is something you do to get your bread. Working for yourself, cooperating and exchanging with others, are all jobs.

You can go out on your own and start a business, it's not insurmountable, everyone from a street vendor to a corner shop to a farmer to Apple has done it. It's something that many can choose to do if they wish, but many choose not to. Can't avoid that by nitpicking semantics.

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted for this. Surely most people would think it's a bit of a stretch to say that lions have jobs in the same way that 21st century humans have jobs?

I can't imagine walking up to a lion in the savannah and asking what their job was :-)

It was a pretty weak comment that didn't address the point. The first humans certainly spent a lot of time working to get food and shelter, and stayed awake worrying about not getting enough to eat.

"Society" didn't enslave us with jobs, we already had them.

This next era may take 100s of years though, AI taking up physical labor is still science fiction (and I'm not fully sold on the utopia angle). She'll need to support herself much sooner than that, let's be realistic

I don't think so. I think in the future we will be living pretty similarly but instead of just doing the work manually we'll be using AI to be more efficient. Just like what the original post on reddit was referring to.

He was not fired or anything, his bosses just told him "now you need to do 10 times the work you were doing before because you got the AI". Although in the past it was okay for him to do 1/10th of the work, now with the AI, that has become unacceptable.

Why would the socio-economic system change? We've been automating work for a while now and people don't really get fired over it; they are just tasked with producing more. Remember that the computer itself was a huge productivity enhancer. When excel came out suddenly one accountant could do the work of 10 but most people weren't liberated from their tedious manual algebraic works, instead, we simply started to produce significantly more than before.

Of course, I would love to live in the world that you dream of, I'm pretty sure that's what post-scarcity communism looks like. I just don't really see any indicators in terms of public policy or business attitude that indicates that will be the case. Seems to me like our societies are more geared towards growth rather than improving quality of life.

The one word answer for why you are wrong to not be concerned is entropy.

Can you elaborate on that?

> Of course, I would love to live in the world that you dream of, I'm pretty sure that's what post-scarcity communism looks like. I just don't really see any indicators in terms of public policy or business attitude that indicates that will be the case.

That's true, but let me give an example of something I've experienced in my own lifetime. In about 1996 I heard about Open Source software and after wrestling with the idea for a bit I became a convert and threw out Windows and installed a Linux distribution on my home machine. At the time, when I talked to people about Open Source software, there was a near universal reaction of, 'nice idea, but it'll never catch on' and they would go on to give me many reasons why this utopian idea would fail. Now, 25 years later, Open Source is a great success.

As a postscript, I got into making contributions to Open Source and I still do. Maybe one day my mind will be too addled to code, or perhaps an AI will do it better than me, but until that day I fully intend to carry on with Open Source contributions.

But as an utopia it failed. There was a time when you could „live“ inside the open source idea or community like in a house. That was around 2002 plus minus 4 years. Open Source later succeeded but it doesn‘t feel like that anymore.

I'm all for Open Source. And Linux is a great example.

But look at what Open Source is turning into, it's being swallowed by corporations anyway. I guess I'm just not so positive, it's really hard to go against the grain and I think a world where corporations do open source is better than one where they don't. But Open Source has not changed the underlying structures of the world in any significant manner.

I mean, I think this is ultimately a political question, you don't really solve political questions with this kind of technology. We need better social and political technologies, much like when we went from having kings and feuds to having liberal democracies. I see that as a social technological advancement, what's next?

I recommend you read the book "Open Democracy" by Helene Landemore to get an idea of what I think maybe could be a good way of changing the political structures that are basically constraining us right now. And I do think Open Source plays a part in that.

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