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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

> And you think these kinds of maxims formed out of vacuums?

No, they formed in societies where it WAS necessary for most people to work in order to support the community. We needed a lot of labor to survive, so it was important to incentivize people to work hard, so our cultures developed values around work ethics.

As we move more and more towards a world where we actually don’t need everyone to work, those moral values become more and more outdated.

This is just like old religious rules around eating certain foods; in the past, we were at risk from a lot of diseases and avoiding certain foods was important for our health. Now, we don’t face those same risks so many people have moved on from those rules.

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>those moral values become more and more outdated.

Do you think there was ever a time in human societies where the vast majority of people didn't have to "work" in some capacity, at least since the rise of psychologically modern humans? If not, why think humanity as a whole can thrive in such an environment?

Our environment today is completely different that it was even 100 years ago. Yes, you have to ask this question for every part of modern society (fast travel, photographs, video, computers, antibiotics, vaccines, etc), so I am not sure why work is different.

Part of the problem is that we don't ask these questions when we should be. Social media, for example, represents a unique assault on our psychological makeup that we just uncritically unleashed on the world. We're about to do it again, likely with even worse consequences.

What would "asking these questions" entail? Would you have a committee that decides what new things we would allow? Popular vote? I get the idea, I just know see how you could ever actually do anything about this issue unless you completely outlawed anything new.

I don't think its plausible to have a committee to approve all new technology. But it is plausible to have a committee empowered to place limits on technology that we can predict will cause a social upheaval the likes of which we've never seen in modern times. It's not like we haven't done the equivalent of this before with e.g. nuclear and bioengineering technology. The difficulty is that the speed in which AI is being developed makes it so government bureaucracies are necessarily playing catchup. But it can be done. We just need to accept that we're not powerless to shape our collective futures. We are not at the mercy of technology and the few accelerationists who stand to be the new aristocracy in the new world.

I find this comment to be completely shortsighted.

We now have western societies with a growing population of homeless people, that despite having access to tons of resources at their disposal, still can't get their shit together. A great majority are doing drugs and smoking/abusing alcohol.

And it's enough to have 20 crackheads to destroy a neighborhood of 10000 hard-working, peaceful people.

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