There are a huge number of things people can do to meaningfully make the world a better place outside of traditional jobs. And a non-trivial number of people work at jobs that aren't aligned with producing value or helping people in the first place.
Value on the market in specific is not the be-all end-all measure of whether work can be personally fulfilling and validating. A market job can be meaningful, yes. But it's not the entire category. If I never had to work for income I would still "work", but what I worked on would be very different and would probably focus a lot more on non-scalable non-commercial smaller projects and volunteering.
There are things that are valuable and meaningful to do that don't involve working specifically for a company and don't involve looking at that work primarily through the lens of "how can I make money off of this?"
What if nobody actually wants your “help”? What if your labor is not only worthless in the job market, but also in general, where people prefer assistance from AI instead of from a live human person? What if no matter what you do, some AI does it better? How will humanity find our own value and meaning when that happens?
But regardless, people throughout history have found happiness and meaning in their life completely separately from what they did to put food on the table.
If the incentive is "here is basic income, you can afford flat on outskirts of the town or in some small town and basic necessities", there is still plenty motivation to do better and get better stuff (whether just for living, or for your hoobbies or interest), just not a pressure of taking first job you can find just to afford being alive.
So average person have option of just going on 6 month hiatus to learn some life skill, or artist have time to develop their skill enough to make art or music that gets enough interest to make it into income.
But what I would question if you want to get a little existential -- do people value being helpful or do they value feeling helpful, because those are two different things. And I think that if the idea of "people need help and what if an AI can help them better than I can" is actually terrifying to people, that should maybe prompt a small amount of reflection about our motivations for helping others.
But the shorter answer is that there is just so much stuff to do in the world right now.
> Don't worry about it, there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done
> pretty far off
> chess grandmasters are ok
We are on an exponential curve of being able to create agents on demand that can essentially act in human ways, at least digitally/online. If you're working on a computer (aka all white collar jobs or anything that can be done remotely), it will soon enough be trivial to create an agent and task it with "Unqueue tasks from the backlog and implement fixes in the codebase. Ask questions if you need help." and it will do it. And you can create as many of these agents as you like.
As many as you like! On demand! How the hell are humans supposed to compete with that?
That's bleak af, how old are you ? where do you live ? what do you do ? do you have a family ? do you have friends ? hobbies ?
I can guarantee you the vast majority of min wage workers would absolutely find a meaning in things other than flipping burgers or triaging the shit people buy on Amazon
#1 There will always be jobs requiring humans - jobs that require human interaction. The supply will be much smaller, but so will be the demand.
#2 By the time AI replaces all jobs, we will most likely have a very realistic VR with multiplayer capabilities. I think that many people will live adventures in such world and spend most of their waking hours in it. Metaverse sucks but it's only because it's so artificial. If you could have tech that could integrate with your senses directly, giving experiences on par with the sharpest lucid dream... that's going to be much different and for better or worse, a lot of people will get sucked into it. Of course, it's going suck - life is about yin-yang, endless pleasure is not good. People who will end up spending the majority of their time in such VR will not be unlike drug addicts, unless they will also be doing activities that require mental & "physical" engagement (I think one of the coolest thing that could arise out of it are new sports that would not be possible in the real world), however, that yin-yang balance would be hard to achieve when there's no evolutionary pressure combined with overabundance of simple pleasure that's just available all the time.
#3 Walking the path to mastery in some pursuit - i.e. artistic, athletic, a craft. There's pure joy in just getting better at something and enjoying every day of practice and most importantly - feeling challenged which is a primal need. It may be competitive as heck to get some recognition or play in the big leagues (which would be more like #1), but that would be just a bonus from that perspective.
If AI leaves us nothing to do, then #3 will always be available. AI will not take away our own engagement but engagement requires effort and so, I would bet that a significant majority will overindulge in #2 to their unconscious doom - I guess it will still be a pretty cool experience though and it's not like those people will not have a choice to get out.
I think this is plain wrong. There are plenty of pursuits that are “work” on the mental or physical side, but do not produce economic value. Developing artistry by mastering a medium or an instrument, climbing mountains, running ultra marathons, tending to a garden or bonsai, modifying a vehicle… These are things could produce economic or social credit, but are largely solo “work” which can be (and often is) self satisfying without external motivation.
People are very attached to the idea that humans don't want to master things unless they're the best at them, and I feel like that philosophy was pretty solidly disproved right about the time that video games were invented. People master skills in non-competitive, solo settings.
Learning a skill can be inherently satisfying on its own. Personal development is satisfying regardless of where the people around you are. Or at least, it should be.
And it's also kind of a bad approach to value as well -- what I've found is that you can actually be pretty average at things and still provide a lot of value to the people around you, because of ignoring economies of scale and because of how much stuff there is to do in the world to begin with.
There are software niches that are underserved where genuinely earnest programmers who look to help could do tremendous good even if they're kind of average/bad programmers. In fact, as one example that's close to HN, that's how the majority of Open Source programming happens. Open Source is not a meritocracy, it's a Do-ocracy, and a ton of the most valuable stuff is built by average programmers who look at underserved niches and say, "but what if there was a non-predatory solution for them?"
A lot of what makes a good Open Source solution is just that it was built by someone who cares and who isn't trying to maneuver you into a predatory relationship. And sometimes it turns out that there are only a few people available in a niche that have both the resources to do that and the inclination. So they're not competing with anyone, they're just the people who happened to be available and willing to do the work.
But that doesn't mean it'll be monetizable in the traditional sense, and it doesn't mean that traditional employment is the only place to get that value. Many of the things you're talking about aren't representable in dollar form, and it's not clear to me how decoupling income from traditional jobs would mean that those activities would stop being meaningful. Certainly, a lot of those activities are already activities that you can't really make money off of (or at least the vast majority of people engaged in those activities can't).
I disagree with this entirely. If this was true, the main question we would ask in a business is whether or not the output was useful. We don't ask that, we ask if it's "sustainable", "profitable", etc... We ask what the moat is around it.
There are many useful things you can do that you won't be able to make money off of. I don't think it's uncommon either. Business is a great way of extracting value, I like business as a value extractor. But it's a specific way of extracting value. There are lots of things that are valuable that don't happen because it's not clear how they would be profitable.
I mean, the simplest example here is you can build things for people who don't have money. It's not the only example, but it's a pretty obvious one. And you are not going to make a lot of money doing that unless you build a predatory or exploitative business.
> or somebody else will "make money off of this" using what you have created
I will also point out that if other people making money off of the things you do is a turn-off, it's not clear to me what value you think you're creating. I would argue that "meaningful work" very often benefits other people, that's... that's the point. If you're not giving people more value than you're taking from them, you probably aren't doing useful work. Are you arguing that it's less valuable if people are extracting extra value from the things we do?
That being said:
> In a balanced system you are never "taking more than giving" or vice versa, because, as you know, price is a result of supply/demand.
Literally all of economic development and growth is predicated on the idea that this is not true. If work was actually zero-sum and all of the transactions gave you the exact value that you sold, there would be no point in forming a society around this.
Society works because combined labor produces more value than is put into the process. That has always been the case. You get more food out of farming than you put into it, otherwise it wouldn't be worthwhile to farm.
> That means those who make food will give it to you for free, which means they won't get tools, which in turn means they won't be able to make that food.
Also, the only reason we're having this conversation is because the "tools" that are being made will (very theoretically) be made for practically free by AI.
We're not talking about a world where the tools stop existing. This entire conversation started with someone asking "but what if there's no more need for humans to make the tools?"
People on top of the company don't make anything but earn more than anyone that does, Not like 2x more or 5x more but 10-1000x more. There is no person on earth that produces million of value a month in actual improvement of society, aside maybe a world leader that stops a wary from happening. Not a man in widget company making beepy boxes that spends time on meetings about barely related to that. And then neither them or corporation gets taxes nowhere close to what the normal employee is, so the corporate wealth doesn't even benefit the country it is in.
The whole problem is that any improvement in production is only tangentially passed to society and mostly exploited to make few wealthy
To be fair, we do ask that: if you have no revenue, then you don't have a business, because the output is not useful. An output can be both useful and not sustainable. Giving away $100 to everyone that high fives you is not sustainable, for example, even though it's very useful to the recipient. It's certainly not profitable.
I'm having some trouble reconciling this with the rest of your comment. You go on to describe an output (giving money away) that is useful but provides no revenue.
I would agree that a useless product will very often have a hard time generating revenue, but I would not say that a lack of revenue is a strong signal that an organization is not producing useful output. I mean, the software industry is filled with examples of projects that are wildly useful to everyone but are perpetually underfunded and produce very little money for the people working on them.
I would definitely agree with the truism that "if you have no revenue then you don't have a business", but it's just not clear to me where the "because the output is not useful" addition to that truism is coming from.
People who simply have enough wealth to not have to work are on a hedonistic treadmill most of the time
I don't understand what you're referring to. Where was your money going? I understand you still have expenses when you aren't working, but the expenses don't scale up on their own.
The comment I was replying to argued that we were talking about abolishing all meaningful human activity, and I pointed out that "meaningful human activity" and "gainful economic employment" are not the exact same category.
I don't really think that warrants having an extended debate about whether or not decoupling income from "work" is fair or not. And it's kind of a weird sequitur anyway, because all of the jobs you're talking about are paid noticeably less than white-collar jobs even though they are arguably way more essential than any of the programming work that we do. So for this to suddenly be a conversation about fairness... I mean, what conversation do you want to have, do you want to have a conversation about AI or about the entire history of wages and about how human beings value blue-collar jobs?
It's not a problem, it's just... people read way too much into comments like this. I'm just pointing out that "meaningful work" can happen outside of an economy, something that I think is a pretty obvious, uncontroversial point to state.
