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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

I'm more concerned about the economic fallout from AI than even that. I'm having trouble seeing a future (assuming that AI pans out as proponents expect) that doesn't include an awful lot of people falling hard into poverty.

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We went from an agrarian society into this white collar service oriented society in the western world in a generation. The ability for bullshit jobs to squander productivity gains for steady 40 hours of butt in seat time can’t be underestimated.

> The ability for bullshit jobs to squander productivity gains for steady 40 hours of butt in seat time can’t be underestimated.

I'm not quite sure what this means. How do "bullshit jobs" squander productivity gains?

Correspondent contends that we’ve failed to spend society’s surplus productivity on an increase of leisure. We’ve rather created makework for vast segments of society who are no longer needed in a productive capacity but can hardly be left to starve.

This is arguably a result of the perverse incentives of growth capitalism. No profit may be made from leisure. Though indeed human psychology - the need to work - seems likely to play a role as well.

I don't even think these jobs are fullfilling. Do you really feel fulfilled by needing to work? Not really. Monkey brain doesn't work like that. You feel the need to survive, yes, but once shelter and food is acquired there is no biological drive to get you to be motivated to stock the shelves at Target. The only thing keeping people in those jobs today is the threat of abject poverty, and perhaps a lack of knowledge or opportunity to do something better to pay for food and shelter. Tellingly, no one who is independently wealthy is finding fulfillment stocking shelves at Target. You have to do that in this society as its more or less illegal to hunt and gather and homestead freely, thanks to property rights being distributed to every square inch of land on earth, and most current world governments have vilified the concept of an altruistic government and society, since that means the elites would have to cede material wealth and power.

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