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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

The "Bullshit Jobs" phenomenon was identified decades ago by Buckminster Fuller:

"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."

As more and more work becomes automated or done by robots, we have less and less to actually do, but with a growing population. So we make up all this work and have 1/2 the population digging holes so the other 1/2 can fill them in. I fully expect that by the time my [eventual] grandchildren enter the workforce, more than 50% (maybe more than 75%) of jobs will be make-work that just serves to employ people so that society doesn't fall apart.

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I don't think it's going to be in any way easy to convince people that it's okay not to be useful. No matter how times we care to repeat it, people will still feel dejected and hollow. "What is the meaning of my life?" is a difficult enough question to answer when you're a philosopher who has studied the problem academically and you're surrounded by other people going about their productive lives and overcoming various challenges in order to survive.

Now we're supposed to have millions of people face the question and at the same time tell them "no, there's nothing useful for you to do, robots can already do it faster, cheaper, and more efficiently than you will ever manage." So, what? Do we tell everyone "just go smoke weed and play video games"? Or "go kayaking and hiking and rockclimbing and find yourself in nature"? The latter will not scale. Many natural places are already overcrowded and we don't even have a post-work economic system in place.

Instead of telling people to play video games or go kayaking, I hope we can ask them to go play checkers with the elderly, read to children, hold hands with dying people in hospice, and mentor the formerly-incarcerated. These are "jobs" that I would argue robots cannot meaningfully fill, but which society would benefit from a lot more of.

"I hope we can ask them to go play checkers with the elderly, read to children, hold hands with dying people in hospice, and mentor the formerly-incarcerated."

I think a large portion would choose video games over this...

What about "video games with the elderly, video games with children, video games with dying people in hospice, and mentor the formerly-incarcerated in speedrunning"?

How bout play video games with elderly hospice patients while holding hands with a convicted pedophile who is holding hands with a racist who is holding hands with a child who is playing video games with their other hand all on one big sofa while on a rocketship to the moon. But wait ... that's no moon!

Those who "play checkers with the elderly, read to children, hold hands with dying people in hospice" will likely have more successful encounters with the opposite sex than those who choose video games.

If they don't want to, that's fine with me. Just offering some options for people (like me) who still want a meaningful way to contribute to society, in a world where robots do most of our current jobs.

Yes, a large portion of the elderly, children, and formerly incarcerated (maybe less the dying in hospice) would choose video games as the shared activity. That’s okay, too.

Maybe they would, and its their own prerogative as to how they wish to spend their time.

For myself I both enjoy video games, and enjoyed/felt fulfilled by my time volunteering with an elementary school program to assist children who were having trouble learning to read at the same pace as their peers.

Yeah, for awhile. We're all miles beyond burned out, and we need some downtime to recover before we're ready to pour a lot of energy into anything.

which society would benefit from a lot more of

Definitely! I’ve spent a good amount of time volunteering with kids, teaching them to read and helping them with homework.

But demographics are against us on this one. Children and elderly people are very much in the minority on any population distribution plot. I have personally been in situations where the number of adult volunteers greatly outnumbered the kids they were there to work with. It’s funny and a bit awkward but you get through it, usually by shifting over to board games and other large group activities.

It would be a totally different story if everyone was looking to do this stuff. A hundred volunteers with half a dozen kids or elderly folks is just not going to work. Most will be sent home.

I think it’s the same story with any group who might benefit from this. It could work if we doubled or tripled the number of people available to help out, but 10x or 20x (or more) would be unworkable.

You might say that a large number of people already volunteer for this work, but a handful of hours per week. There’s no way we could absorb millions of new volunteers for 40 hours per week each, that would be excessive.

The last thing I would add is that there are tons of people who are simply unsuitable for this kind of care work. They’re naturally disagreeable people. They may also be restless and easily bored. They would much rather be outside working or messing around.

I don't anticipate everyone wanting to do this, and I definitely don't picture anyone wanting to do "work" for 40 hours a week in a world where work is optional. I would think some people will want to do a few hours a week of something in the category I'm describing, and many people will elect other forms of meaning in their life (maybe they love whittling driftwood or golfing or just want to watch AI-generated movies all day. That's fine.) The whole point is we'll have options, so there will be some supply/demand curve for meaningful human interaction that will find equilibrium.

Right, or plant trees, clean up trash from the creeks rivers or oceans, take on foster kids and really invest time in giving them the best start possible, help refugees integrate into society, work on creating a sense of community with your neighbours, fix or repurpose trash to help reduce landfill, prioritise your health, start walking or cycling places rather than driving even if it takes longer (since time is now something you have lots of), create art, basically deal with some of the negative externalities and/or undervalued services that modern capitalism addresses so poorly.. and hopefully in the process create a life that is fulfilling and enjoyable for yourself and others.

My conviction is that there are literally infinite ways to be useful, and always will be, even if the robot overlords work perfectly, which they won't.

My other conviction is that people find their own meaning with absurd ease when they're children. Then that becomes non-viable. If it ever were to become viable again -- if they didn't have to work at the gas station to cling to existence that keeps them from sleeping under a bridge -- then their ability to find meaning will come back.

Have a look at the FIRE community and see how difficult it can be to create meaning and a fulfilling life.

Also, the COVID lockdowns gave us a glimpse at "nothing to do". Finding meaning is pretty hard for many people, especially if you can drown any form of boredom in endless consumption of shows, video games and social media.

FIRE is a good cautionary example, but I think it makes the point I wanted to get at: people start out as little meaning-making machines. They connect deeply with each other, interact easily, enjoy their lives. Then we ruin that.

The FIRE community have won the ruined game -- they're what you get when you remove the financial need, but keep the same psychological objective function, keep the same screwed-up sociality. They might be lounging by the pool but they're still stuck in the old mode of being. The ones who transcend the old workday-grind-mode are doing great. But that's non-trivial.

There was a really good article on this that I found recently ... Ah yes, here it is [1]. This is a thought-provoking take on a similar topic.

[1] https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/notes-on-privilege

>> They connect deeply with each other, interact easily, enjoy their lives.

looks like someone under influence :)

Haha, yeah, that's not a bad comparison. Adults intoxicated to a helpful degree behave kind of like children before the modern world grinds away their joy.

The COVID lockdowns primarily demonstrated the despair found in the lack of meaningful socialization.

So people should just find false meaning in bullshit jobs?

Not necessarily, but every bullshit job pays the bills and most of them give at least a social context and a form of identification.

Finding meaning is simply less important than having food on the table and a social circle, even if it’s just the watercooler talk with colleagues.

Not saying it’s impossible to find meaning outside of employment, but my observation and experience is that it’s not as easy as "stop working bullshit jobs and you will find meaning easily".

> but every bullshit job pays the bills

This completely discards the premise. We're talking about a hypothetical world where we don't need work from people, and where it would make very little sense to require meaningless work in exchange for having your needs met.

(We're also talking about the actual present world, where we don't need nearly as much work as we're forcing people to do, so the above should still be partially true, but it really isn't.)

I think you raise a valid point, but it was ever thus. Every time we level up in technology, we essentially give everybody some of the life possibilities - and problems - of aristocrats, 100 years ago.

Everybody today lives more like the aristocrats of old, we just don't notice it because it's common. If you got a special dress for your wedding, you're imitating what used to be a preposterous display of wealth for the elites. Your great-grandmother probably just got married in her nicest dress.

Meaning-making is harder when you've conquered the problem of mere survival, but not impossible.

Some aristocrats just played cards all day, or engaged in elaborate parties, or invested enormous effort into climbing the social hierarchy, or dicked around incompetently ordering the common people into stupid wars.

And some did philosophy, art, science, engineering, and exploration.

We have an absolutely enormous task ahead of us: the climate crisis. I think we could occupy ourselves with that for the next few centuries at minimum.

> I don't think it's going to be in any way easy to convince people that it's okay not to be useful.

Well, it certainly won't be possible as long as we tie people's housing, food, and health care to their ability to convince others they are useful.

Society currently sends the message: "If you aren't useful, you don't deserve housing, food, and health care". I think the existential angst is something we have to address as we transition into that post-work economic system, but I don't think it's actually possible to address until we make that transition.

And that message is actually pretty recent. Before the 20th century you could just go off into the wilderness, build your own house, catch or grow your own food, and then just do whatever you wanted without ever needing money once all of that was taken care of. The work of survival itself was the mental stimulation, and when that work was over you went in search of other stimulation. Nowadays there's a chain of reliance and ownership where you can't settle without purchasing the land, can't build your own house without purchasing the licensing and permits, can't catch your own food without a license or outside of season (and even then you're limited to a certain amount of catch), and need to buy or invest in things deemed necessary to participate in society like cellphones and bank accounts. You can grow your own garden to feed yourself, provided you own the land, but that's limited by seeds you have to buy and whatever regulations apply where you live. Essentially the only stimulation you get is by the excessive amounts of entertainment we have now, because most modern jobs aren't providing anything.

There really needs to be some return to commons where ownership of certain things is just discarded so that everyone has the opportunity for self-reliance and self-actualization without needing to provide something of value for others. Community gardens, city parks, and city pools are like the fuzzy, myopic, "My memory's not as good as it used to be" view of that commons fitting into the modern world. The problem is that kind of participation doesn't provide a verifiable exploitable value the way that working under someone towards a set goal does, and our modern economic systems BSOD at even the thought.

In short, it's okay to not be useful just so long as you have something you want to do. Intellectual stimulation will always be a core need, but working for sustenance doesn't have to be.

> I don't think it's going to be in any way easy to convince people that it's okay not to be useful. No matter how times we care to repeat it, people will still feel dejected and hollow. "What is the meaning of my life?"

Nonsense. As this very article shows, many people find no meaning in their job. They feel dejected by working bullshit jobs every day and receiving shit pay in return. They do find meaning in things like raising a family, which ironically is something that is less and less attainable for the working man/woman, as the working class gets a lower share of wealth and things like housing skyrocket.

> I don't think it's going to be in any way easy to convince people that it's okay not to be useful.

That's one problem but not the most crucial one. There will be a bunch of people complaining that they do all the work while the freeloaders have it easy.

We can see that today as people don't want universal health care or social safety nets because these people feel the freeloaders are taking advantage of them.

Even smoking weed and playing video games doesn’t scale. Someone needs to grow the weed and make the video games. Someone has to feed and minimally clothe the weed-smoker. Someone must build and maintain the weed-smoker’s house.

Presumably the weed smoker might occasionally leave home. Someone must pave the road he drives on. Someone must build the weed-smoker’s car.

For all those people doing things for the weed-smoker, someone must manage them. They will work in multiple enterprises. Someone must work to sell things between those different enterprises. This might seem inefficient, but humans have not figured out a better way to do it.

And all that explains exactly why, despite what people prattle on and on about with there being useless jobs, people do in fact remain employed and even as wasteful as that employment sometimes is, there is no better alternative on a social scale. Because when it all comes down to it, people want the benefits that modern society provides. That requires that people work. The alternative is living as a solitary mountain man. Not many people try that—and that, lo and behold, takes even more work.

That is not the point. If you can produce 4x as much with 1/4th the labour, then at the very least those labourers can work much much less than they do now. 15 hour work weeks are feasible TODAY, let alone after further labour-saving tech that the future will bring us.

We basically just did an experiment at society scale on exactly this with COVID unemployment. What about that experiment suggested it was a success?

It suggested that locking people in solitary confinement, even in the relative luxury of their own homes, is a torture to be avoided. It had little to do with, for or against, the idea that maybe making up worthless jobs to keep people busy being a good idea.

How was COVID unemployment an experiment in 15 hour work weeks?

There is absolutely no connection between UBI and unemployment checks during an unprecedented pandemic. I feel this should be obvious.

Sure, I don’t doubt that if we wound living standards back by 50 years, we all could work a lot less.

> there's nothing useful for you to do, robots can already do it faster, cheaper, and more efficiently than you will ever manage

Your implied solution is to have the person sweep the floor by hand before the sweeping robot makes a second pass in half the time. How will that help the person feel any better? If the machines supass us, forcing people to do busy work will not make them feel better.

We tell them to build. There are planet scale transformations underway and we need another incarnation of the WPA to help mitigate the impacts.

For example, the pine bark beetle is ravaging the forests of the Sierra Nevadas. Millions of dead trees just waiting for the next PGE power line to drop or lightning bolt to strike so why not head out with a few thousand young bodies and start felling that timber and getting it to mills?

What about some sea walls? Forget waiting for giant cranes and pontoons, how about people start dropping cement rubble in the ocean around coastal communities, one dinghy at a time? The coral is on its way out, time to reinvent some of that Roman cement and mitigate the hurricanes' impact.

How many roads could use some form of a retaining wall in the event of a deluge? There's got to be thousands of spots in the US alone. Wire covered rubble? Gabions? Deadman walls? Whatever works!

The list goes on and on.

Find yourself in nature won't scale, and smoke weed and play videogames is hollow.

I love videogames, but the few times of my life where I genuinely did just play games all day for weeks or months, I felt awful. I just couldn't bring myself to do anything else.

The exception to that is highly social games. I did genuinely feel a sense of accomplishment when me and 4 friends would crush another team in league of legends. Or the old World of Warcraft raids involved coordinating 40 people and felt meaningful to execute.

Maybe there is a future where video games optimize around giving life meaning once there is little work to be done.

Designing a game where the goal was to create strong friendships between players would be a pretty interesting task.

It would be nice to have UBI and be able to take a mid week day off and walk around town. Hell maybe go clean up a local park to get my steps in for the day.

Instead if I don't punch in for the day I won't outlive the next paycheck.

Would some sort of UBI that requires you to do some public work, i.e. clean up a local park weekly be a good middle ground?

It would, but it's also a short-term fix, as more jobs get automated.

The public park gets swept by a robot.

The robot gets repaired by a bigger robot.

The robots are designed by AI.

On what timeline do you believe this circular AI/robot reality will come to pass? 10 years? 100? Either way this is a fallacious argument.

A truly ridiculous amount of current work could be automated with today's tech and massive capital investment. And by today's tech, I don't even include current advances in ML. Every single worker at, say, a McDonald's is doing a job that could be automated with some capital investment. Retail stores, likewise. Self-driving vehicles are trivial when you stick 'em on rails, there's a big chunk of the cargo industry gone. Longshoreman-free ports, all that and more.

Then you get into the world of white collar work, where the "let's optimize society to minimize toil" solution, by and large, is to just eliminate the job wholesale. Accounting exists because the tax codes are too complicated, so streamline them and their jobs could be done by some API calls and Excel formulas. The entire finance sector is superfluous if money isn't the driving motivator in society. Entire militaries can be replaced by a "If we are attacked, we glass everyone we have even minor beef with" MAD systems. Trash pickups can be automated by tube systems. Food production is already largely automated outside of the produce aisle, so maybe we just cut back on foods that we can't harvest mechanically.

Frankly, the biggest sector that couldn't be fundamentally altered by a such a societal shift using just yesterday's tech is construction.

> Every single worker at, say, a McDonald's is doing a job that could be automated with some capital investment.

I think you underestimate how difficult something like this would be.

I mean, I agree that as long as you have someone/something supplying the food gloop packets to the store, taking out the waste, and fixing the machines, pretty much everything in a McDonalds could be automated as a closed system.

But we're talking about billions to trillions of dollars of investment.

Just maintaining the frosty machines is outrageously expensive.

OK so 100+ years, then? I think my favorite part of this is the fully automated global doomsday system.

No clue but the “robots sweep the park” part is imminent.

We haven’t done it yet only because we require people to do menial labor for shit wages so they don’t starve.

Heck, several local restraints have done away with most wait staff. You sit down and order via a web site.

If by "we" you mean Washington, DC - I guess I could believe that since it's one of the highest per-capita income cities in the world. But park sweeping robots are nowhere near reality for most cities in the US, let alone the rest of the world.

I'll make a hash of this, sorry... Please amend, correct as needed:

Graeber was an anthropologist. He recognizes that having a purpose is good for humans.

Among the examples he gives are people joining the military. Versus say becoming a corporate wage slave. For many, it's one of the few tracks available which offers "helping people", "serving my country", and other purposeful motivations. And the positive of having a purpose can outweigh all the negatives of serving (low pay, relocation, risks).

Another facet Graeber covers is the "service economy", including "knowledge workers". He challenges the idea that people need results oriented work to feel job satisfaction.

Alternately, Graeber suggests using the category "care work". All the things people and society needs to function well. Nurses, cops, soldiers, councilors, running a soup kitchen, volunteer work, etc.

Sadly, our current economic model devalues "service work". The focus on profits and productivity and efficiency is anathema to the work of people caring for other people.

Just to note the issue, I believe (but cannot prove) "productive work", where labor is part of making something, is orthogonal to "care work", and should be considered separately. Or at least be included thesis which is larger than a drive-by HN comment.

Highest recommendation for

"The Utopia of Rules" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules

Developing his Bullship Jobs thesis, Graeber tries to take on bureaucracy. Many critics get stuck on his prior criticisms of neoliberal economics. They're missing the point. Bureaucracy is (apparently?) a trait of modernism and (apparently?) central to all systems of government and economics.

I would LOVE continued exploration of the territory scouted by Graeber, Scott's Seeing Like a State, the Ehrenreich's professional middle class (PMC), and I'm sure many others. (Sorry, I still haven't read much about Marxism and its critics.)

It's so sad that Graeber passed.

There's a huge chasm where a leftist criticism of bureaucracy should be. Like the failed promise of the administrative state. Like how "the system" is dehumanizing when it should empower. Like if we understood it better, maybe we can minimize capitalism's dark pull on the state (panopticon, taylorism of all things, cost disease, accelerating credentialism). Etc, ad nauseum.

The closest (adjacent) work that I'm aware of is now being driven by the Inflation Reduction Act. Stuff like permitting reform, better governance, scaling up the administrative state (necessary to roll out renewables at the scale required). All the PvP stuff where opposing concerns and incentives are in tension.

Administrative capacity is one of David Roberts' obsessions. His Volts podcast has terrific episodes tackling this and related concerns. https://volts.wtf

Please share anything you might think is relevant. TIA.

Population rate is declining, and in the next couple of decades many first world countries are expected to have a population collapse.

I understand what he’s saying the problem is, I think it’s just part of how complex processes such as companies and governments expand.

However, part of me leans in the efficient market side of, yes there are inefficiencies but once capital is justly expensive, then the wheat is separated from the chaff. If a company could do something more cheaply with equal quality, they will probably try that.

Though the larger a company gets, the easier it is to “hide” these busy-work jobs.

Further, we don’t know the outcome of UBI. We saw a glimpse of it during covid.

A very rough trial, but many people were getting more money via unemployment than by a minimum wage job.

Most these individuals sat around hedonically watching TV, smoking weed, or drinking. Surely part of the pandemic in general, but I think there’s a human-nature aspect of path-of-least-resistance.

I’m not convinced our society has the proper values to take UBI healthily, I think it will exacerbate the existing meaning crisis we’ve been in since religion has started to decline. We have young kids going to nihilism and mainstream outlets justifying this as a good thing. I think the last thing we need is to give people more time to ruminate on these ideas with a slosh fund.

In a perfect world we could have UBI, have a subset of the population be the productive earners that can make more money over the UBI, and those on UBI would use the time and money for creative enhancement of themselves and society.

But I think that’s too optimistic an outlook. We have foundational problems with many aspects of western civilization that need to be addressed before we add fuel to the fire.

If I didn't have to work, I would spend a lot of time building things (whether code things or physical things).

I know people who, if they didn't have to work, would just sit around binging TV all day.

I also know people who, if they didn't have to work, would probably somehow discover faster-than-light travel or solve world hunger or something.

It might not be culture. It might be personality that determines what we do in "idleness." More likely, it's a mix of both.

Yeah. Even when I am taking my mandatory time off work, I spend it coding things.

Lots of people project this “you just want to be lazy”, but honestly, that’s not it at all. Hordes of people cannot just sit around and watch tv, as is demonstrated by the wealth of people who retire and then become extremely bored.

Contributing where you want to contribute is a very much different thing than just wanting to be lazy.

Same, my post-it wall of to-do projects that would reshape CS only grows and yet my time just gets soaked up by meetings and trivia. :(

I think I'd do both, depending on the week.

>A very rough trial, but many people were getting more money via unemployment than by a minimum wage job.

>Most these individuals sat around hedonically watching TV, smoking weed, or drinking. Surely part of the pandemic in general, but I think there’s a human-nature aspect of path-of-least-resistance.

Reminds me of an Onion article that's stuck in my mind: "Man Not Sure Why He Thought Most Psychologically Taxing Situation Of His Life Would Be The Thing To Make Him Productive"

https://www.theonion.com/man-not-sure-why-he-thought-most-ps...

It's very hard if not impossible to extract lessons from the pandemic that aren't about pandemics or basic proofs of possibility. E.g., we learned that the economy doesn't collapse during "shut downs" of certain activities, but we can't get any good numbers of monetary damage for a future shutdown choice. We might estimate the COVID shut-downs caused $X of damage, but good luck removing the influence of COVID's medical specifics and surrounding culture war.

For your example, COVID-related unemployment assistance tells us nothing because (1) a pandemic restricts activity; (2) a pandemic is stressful and people look to mindless activities to cope; and (3) everyone knew the checks would end one day, but some didn't know if they'd find a job by then. It wasn't a good analogue to UBI.

> and (3) everyone knew the checks would end one day, but some didn't know if they'd find a job by then. It wasn't a good analogue to UBI.

This will never, ever not be the case. Working age people today don’t even expect social security to exist when they need it. How could you possibly guarantee a UBI to the level you’re asking?

A huge wave of immigration from people fleeing the effects of climate change or meaningfully extending average lifetimes could change the calculation of population "collapse."

==Most these individuals sat around hedonically watching TV, smoking weed, or drinking.==

Is this from your personal experience or is there a study that shows this outcome?

There's a far more fundamental drive in humanity than the drive to become wealthy -- it's the drive to mate. Those who are successful and productive have a fundamental advantage in the mating game than those who watch TV all day. That's not going to change whether we use money to keep score or not.

There is nuance. There might be a drive to have sex, but not necessarily reproduce. When women are empowered, have agency, and there is robust access to contraceptives, the total fertility rate declines below replacement rate. High status marketplace participants will be advantaged, but not everyone might value that chase or advantage. Some chase wealth, some status, some power, some happiness.

https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-...

> Most these individuals sat around hedonically watching TV, smoking weed, or drinking.

Is there evidence for that statement?

I remember record usage being reported through streaming services earnings reports and or media. Anecdotally I can confirm that is what many in my circle of friends did.

I remember I was very motivated at the start of lockdowns but 3 months in I had basically resorted to binging video games for the rest of the 7 months.

> So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors.

With all due respect to mister Fuller, this sounds like bullshit from someone that hasn't worked in manufacturing.

Quality manufacturing processes are hard, and this complexity only increases with the sophistication of what's being produced. Usually, the measurement systems in place are a tradeoff between cost, efficacy, and regulatory requirements - and I guarantee if an inspection can be removed, some engineer is begging to do it.

I think the idea is to use humans and robots to make progress, not be complacent with existing jobs.

There's always more work to be done. There will always be details discovered that are not automated yet. There will always be new topics unexplored that robots have not been built for yet. A general purpose robot is by definition a "jack of all trades" compromise that cannot do what specialized humans do first.

This need for humans to explore is where all the progress and all the money is, and how you fight off both the bullshit jobs and AI taking our jobs.

If such a scenario were recognized, and we end up with something like UBI, how does one 'get ahead?' It seems some people are always wanting and willing to get ahead, either through multiple jobs, long hours, or study. Is that dream now crushed into just do nothing and exist like everyone else? The robot owners aren't going to just hand out money, so would have to be taxed at some insane rate, I think.

Being able to survive without 'working' sounds like a dream, but I get hung up on the technicalities of it all.

> Being able to survive without 'working' sounds like a dream, but I get hung up on the technicalities of it all.

One technicality that blocks me is something I encountered not that long ago...

How do you compensate those that will come dig in human manure, sometimes for hours, to fix a house's clogged pipe? I had to do that: toilets wouldn't flush anymore, shits floating and all. I didn't know where the pipes were exactly and one them, the last one before the sewers, was clogged. So basically 40 meters of shit blocked inside the pipe, which then started overflowing on the property, for weeks (or months), unnoticed.

The plumber couldn't come immediately (it was a sunday late in the afternoon) but would be there next morning.

So for five hours I dig into human manure to find the damn pipe (which I more or less knew where it was located). It saved the plumber five hours of digging into, literally, shit and piss (saved me five hours of billing and five hours of waiting for things to be fixed too).

In that "without working" society, who digs into human manure? Who comes to pick up the trash? Who comes to fix a broken AC? Who wants to spend 12 years studying medicine to save the lives of those who aren't working?

That's what I don't get.

Easy, if you do nothing the market deems productive, be it playing games all day or tutoring poor kids in maths, you only get the UBI which equals ~minimum survivability income.

If you do 30 hours of plumbing a week for 80$ an hour, you make that UBI + 2400$ a week (or wherever the market seems your work worth).

There is always an incentive to do more, and especially as long as the market incenctivises/rewards more or less useful things (e.g. externalities get properly accounted for), then people which aren't content with bare survivability will at least for part of their time do something deemed "useful" or undesirable.

These are the exact things we should be trying to automate rather than automating away writers, artists, actors etc. Personally I think it all depends on getting a humanoid Boston Dynamics style robot made. Once you've got that done, you hook it up so it can be controlled remotely via VR. Then you get trades people and workers of menial jobs to control these robots and start doing these unpleasant tasks. Once you've done that enough years and collected enough data, then you can build an AI for plumbing, garbage collecting etc. Then you can have robots that can do literally any task, you just have to load the right module into them like Neo in the Matrix.

Society then probably gets restructured so that everyone is expected to get at least a PhD rather than a bachelors. Mathematic literacy matches that of linguistic literacy - it will no longer be socially acceptable to claim you are bad at math the same way it's no longer acceptable to be unable to read or write. Almost everyone will have the engineering knowledge necessary so they know how to fix and program the robots. Everyone learns multiple languages and does part of their studies abroad so there is less destructive nationalism. Society starts to value knowledge and the dissemination of knowledge more than the accumulation of capital and wealth which only leads to the destructive forces of extreme inequality and wealth. We start moving towards a more utopian Star Trek vision of the world, hopefully culminating in the creation of a machine like the replicator and the ability to perform interstellar travel which would truly be the end of the scarcity dynamic and a new era of humanity based on abundance and scientific exploration.

Expecting everyone to get a PhD is ridiculous. Even granting people enough time and enough Universities to manage this, there's a limit to half the world's intelligence. Unless you dumb down the meaning of a PhD, this isn't a realistic goal.

A few hundred years ago expecting everyone to be literate was thought ridiculous. Many people today think that everyone learning to code is ridiculous, yet I would wager that in 100 years, people will look back and wonder how people could get by when only 10% of the country were code literate. The standard of education rises continually throughout time. The PhD will become the new normal, just like the Masters degree is increasingly becoming the new normal today.

Number of People with Bachelors degrees continues to grow:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2021/02/22/new-...

Number of People with Masters and PhD degrees doubled since 2000:

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/02/number-of-peo...

Current completion rates for doctoral program hovers around 56%. And that's with a huge gating process filtering out unqualified candidates. The idea that this will become a norm is just not realistic. A Bachelor's degree is averaging six years now, a Masters another two/three and a PhD ten. Expecting people to spend 18-20 years to achieve a PhD just goes against all trends unless the three degrees become seriously degraded in standards.

> How do you compensate those that will come dig in human manure, sometimes for hours, to fix a house’s clogged pipe?

Same as today, with money.

Unlike today, someone receiving poverty support who does this won’t lose nearly as much in poverty support as they make digging in shit, so the marginal return on digging in shit will be greater.

UBI (under some different names) was initially proposed as a conservative alternative to means-tested poverty support, specifically because it relieves perverse incentives and reduces duplication (with the tax system) of function in means-tested benefit programs.

> In that “without working” society, who digs into human manure? Who comes to pick up the trash? Who comes to fix a broken AC? Who wants to spend 12 years studying medicine to save the lives of those who aren’t working?

Being able to minimally survive without working and not being punished by having the support rapidly, at a high ratio, reduced when you have outside income separate from the basic support does not mean not working is the norm in society.

The false assumption here is that people are naturally inclined to do nothing unless given money.

In the situation you describe, I would have a pretty strong motivation to fix the problem if it was my property (deeply unpleasant living conditions). If it was my neighbor's property, I would also have a strong motivation to fix it (sense of community). Neither of those things is tied to money.

Not everyone is motivated by the same things. Avarice is not the root of all industry.

"Avarice is not the root of all industry." Eminently quotable.

"Who wants to spend 12 years studying medicine to save the lives of those who aren't working?"

I think the argument is that there is inherent value in helping fellow man/woman, self actualization, etc - and that is the reward in itself.

I do not agree with this.

I think the UBI argument is that the cost of those shit-digging jobs will have to significantly rise to the actual price of finding someone willing to do them.

If I have to do work or starve, maybe I'm willing to dig shit for $15/hr.

If nobody has to do work to survive, suddenly you have to shell out $300/hr to motivate someone to do it.

That's a good point. My hope would be that AI/Robotics would automate away the shit jobs and the toil-work.

I don't understand, jobs don't become pro bono if there's UBI lol. Salaries still exist. Actually, if anything, they become more valuable.

And tbh, the kind of person that would study medicine for 10 years is probably not gonna be the kind of person to settle for the survivability-level income of UBI.

That's how robots will take over the world. We know that giving robots intelligence, agency and physical power is a bad idea, but if we don't do that we'll have to dig the shit ourselves.

I think the idea of what it means to "get ahead" would change. For example, with UBI I'd still work part time at a coffeeshop to save up money to turn my long-time hobby into a small business. That's a way to "get ahead" in a way that personally fulfills me. I don't need to become the next 30 under 30, or show up on some list for my success. Just the personal satisfaction of being able to say "I did this, and I'm proud of it. I hope you can enjoy it too".

Of course, those who do want to show up on that 30 under 30 list can make different choices to get ahead in the way they interpret that meaning.

UBI brings more options for people to dedicate to new ideas, new inventions, new ways of thinking. It doesn't restrict the choices of any citizen, it opens up more choices. Getting ahead still exists, and those who want it can go for it, that option wouldn't be taken away from them.

Sure, some people want to get ahead just for the feeling that they're doing better than most people, but a lot of people try to get ahead out of fear of not having enough. In a system where everyone has enough wouldn't that fear be at least greatly diminished?

I think there is a pretty strong case that "having enough" is very much a moving target and now matter how much many people have it's not "enough". I see a lot of evidence that it's impossible to have a system where everyone has enough and I haven't seen a lot of evidence that it is possible to build such a system.

It's not like UBI prohibits working hard.

All it does is give everyone access to enough resources for basic survival, not Ferraris, which will still exist and continue to motivate some to be Vikings.

Why does getting ahead have to mean money? In a Star Trek utopia where money is meaningless, everybody can become one of the best in the world in some small niche.

Star Trek utopia always smelled unworkable... It really leaves way too many open questions of how does that economy really work. Most media is about the absolute elite of that society. Or their relatives.

It never truly answered where the non replicable resources come from.

Whuffie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_King...

And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riders_of_the_Purple_Wage

> how does one 'get ahead?'

By learning things? By knowing and liking many things? By knowing and liking many people? By being very good at a unique permutation of skills, and using them to improve your life and that of your friends, having great adventures and whatnot?

> The robot owners aren't going to just hand out money, so would have to be taxed at some insane rate, I think.

Which would not be a problem, since all other super rich people would be taxed at the same "insane" rate, leaving the "getting ahead" relative to your peers completely untouched -- if that was really the issue, if people really couldn't think of ways to stand out amongst others other than the amount of money they "make" (it's just shifted around after all).

The problem is exploitation I'd say, and even that is not an end in and of itself, it's just a necessary nuisance that is optimized away wherever possible, leaving pure ownership of pure [0] means of production in very, very few hands. The rest gets nothing, and since humans cannot persist on that, cease to exist shortly after.

Compared the trajectory we're on -- the scenario we're in -- the technicalities of how to make the world somewhat human and livable instead of just an insane runaway train seem rather minor to me.

[0] As in, basically no workers, no more than you can personally oversee or even be yourself. I know that will never be "fully achieved" but I think that's splitting hairs. It's the trend, we keep accelerating and making previously thought impossible tools of dystopia real, who cares if there will ever be just one dude in a toga living forever commanding a blob of energy that can do and create anything, except make him sane.

Whenever I consider the UBI and "bullshit jobs" arguments, I end up thinking about jobs that we might need but don't inherently create economic value. In a society where we reward jobs that "create value" and have everyone else on UBI, who manages the country, who fights the wars, who modernizes the military? Perhaps these roles are also relics of the past which should fade away. Is being a lawyer a job that creates value or one that exists solely due to the necessities of a flawed system?

As tech enthusiasts, we often envision a Star Trek future where all value originates from science and technology, and everyone else has to justify their existence. To some extent, I understand this view, but it will never fully materialize.

Any practical system will be shaped by its current participants: politicians, governments, etc. So, by definition, "bullshit jobs" will be recognized as respectable in any system designed by humanity. In fact, they will be enshrined as the elite class, and then the entire utopia morphs into a mirror of our existing society. Those at the top remain entrenched indefinitely, while those at the bottom are viewed as providing no value—except now, this perception might be closer to the truth.

> It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest.

More than that are capable of great work and breakthroughs, but they're too busy doing bullshit work.

This is total nonsense.

It takes a huge amount of actual human effort to do all the most important jobs in society: grow food, transport food, make clothing, transport it, build housing, repair housing, build things for growing food and transporting clothing, healthcare, building hospitals... we are not remotely close to replacing the need for vast amounts of human labor for our most basic needs. We have huge trade shortages. We have bridges collapsing. Fuller's assertions are total fucking nonsense, only someone extremely insulated from the real world could believe what you just quoted.

The number of bullshit jobs is always small; first level managers manage a team of people. You have mid level managers managing several managers, etc, but the frontline workers always vastly outnumber management, even in bloated organizations.

And yeah, people should justify their existence by contributing to society. Dismissing that idea off-hand is absurd.

> people should justify their existence by contributing to society.

So what are your intentions regarding those who won't or can't satisfy your criteria for contributing?

Why is your response to "everyone should contribute to society" basically an accusation?

Obviously I mean everyone who is capable of doing so. Those who are capable but unwilling? I wish them luck, but they are owed nothing by the rest of us.

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest

This comment misses the alternative - continue working and produce even more. No, not more production for things like cars or other consumer items - more production to pay for things like social benefits, better healthcare, etc.

> we have less and less to actually do, but with a growing population.

People will point out that the solution would be the opposite: a decreasing population.

But that is not cost-free and basically is swapping a set of problems for another set of problems. Even then "swapping" is a promise at-best. We could end with two sets of problems instead of one.

You really think companies employ people for fun? There may be perverse incentives and inefficiencies but this is rubbish.

The thing is, if you have growing productivity but a stagnant population, either everyone works less hours or some people work and others don't work at all. So economists say we should grow the economy so everyone has enough busy work. Whether that growth is actually necessary or not doesn't matter.

Frankly there is no surer sign that the opponents of "the system" are running out of material than this god-awful "bullshit jobs" argument. We are not going to restructure our economy and raise other people's taxes to spare anyone the first-world problem of having a lame job.

If you don’t maintain your own means of making a living then your mode of living will end up owning you. This seems to happen every single time. I don’t think there’s ever been a single person who is a permanent dependent that didn’t ultimately end up as a subject or slave to the provider.

Everyone will be athlete, entertainers, artists, caregivers, blue-collars while robots are not very high-dexterity, doctors and nurse, scientists, deep space explorers... And what not. The end of white-collars.

>more than 50% (maybe more than 75%) of jobs will be make-work that just serves to employ people so that society doesn't fall apart.

Yes, and then firms like OpenAI come in and automate those BS jobs, and take away all the societal upside of their existence. OpenAI will thrive, at first, by undoing the intricate scaffolding of lies that buttresses BS jobs. The country will either embrace socialism at that point, or perhaps there will be a Butlerian (buttressarian?) jihad of some kind in foolish attempt to put two genies back in the bottle.

And who knows what will work to keep us alive and relatively thriving in the future? It seems clear to me that belief in a fantasy panopticon, if not taken to an extreme, was a useful part of society. It is strictly better than a real panopticon or no panopticon - and who could have guessed that from first principles? Perhaps it really is better to have BS jobs than overt socialism. Maybe people really do feel better believing their work makes a difference rather than just existing and knowing they do nothing. Idealists want to believe that people will thrive with the truth, but I think that's demonstrably false.

The thing about BS jobs is you could eliminate the position entirely and nothing would happen. The point of the BS job is to be filled with bodies so there is no reason to automate it.

The problem we have is that the people who still have to work in order to keep the robots on etc won't want to pay for the scum people to have 15 children

So what does that leave us. Service industries? Good luck getting those youths to work in a kitchen.

Food and bars is one sector I could honestly see to be run as hobbies. Maybe bad customers would be shown door or the opening times would be erratic, but there is plenty of people who could run one as part of self-fulfilment. This scaling to feeding everyone everyday might be harder.

Given the typical compensation and working conditions, hard to blame them.

> So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors.

This is an amazing precursor of the current software equivalent: https://xkcd.com/1629/

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