Both are fairly uncontroversial: many humans not only benefit from jobs but in fact often depend on jobs for their livelihoods, and (2) should be self-evident.
This can change if the socioeconomic system is quickly enough and quite substantially restructured to make humans not depend on being compensated for work that is now being done by robots (not only financially but also psychologically—feeling fulfilled—socially, etc.), but I don’t see that happening.
But a lot of jobs aren't like that. I doubt many people who work in, say, public relations, really think their job has value other than paying their bills. They can't take solace in the fact that the AI can write press releases deflecting the blame for the massive oil spill that their former employer caused.
I’ll note that I didn’t mention “AI”, I was addressing robots vs. jobs, but sure.
Let me straw man myself and say up front that it would be simplistic to say that if something hurts one person today then it is bad, even if it benefits a million tomorrow. However, does that mean if death of N people can cause N+1 people to be saved at some indefinite point in the future, we should jump on the opportunity?
Utilitarian math is not the answer. We don’t have to go far for examples of tragic loss of life and atrocities that were caused by people following utilitarian objectives, so I am much more wary of this logic than its inverse. We probably should neither let everybody starve while we are fighting cancer nor stop studying cancer, even if we could feed millions of people in dire need with that money.
With that in mind: feeling fulfilled and needed is important, being able to pay bills is important, etc., no matter who you are. It is probably unacceptable to reduce human life to “be the most efficient cog in the system or GTFO”.
> I doubt many people who work in, say, public relations, really think their job has value other than paying their bills.
Does your cancer research institution have no public relations department? Should there be no public relations departments in any of them? Would it help cancer research?
--
Tangentially, the Wikipedia article on inflammation makes two claims: 1) inflammation can be caused by stress—I imagine via lack of sleep, bad habits, eating disorders, etc.—and 2) cancer is one of the non-immune diseases with causal origins in inflammatory processes. Now, there’s many things that could cause a person to stress, but I imagine losing your job and struggling to make ends meet, with a promise that it helps humanity at some point, is definitely high up there (especially if you have a family). I jest, but only in part.
There's no law of nature saying that a human must work 40 hours per week or starve.
The current dependence on work is a consequence, not a goal.
Working on replacing human jobs with robots has two concrete outcomes, 1) impacting people’s ability to have jobs that pay bills and often create a meaning their lives and 2) concentrating wealth in technological elites (who run those robots), and a theoretical outcome of 3) helping humanity in some way.
If we are acting in good will, we should dedicate effort to addressing the concrete impact (1) at least as much as to working on (3). Most of us are or are adjacent to tech elites and benefit from (2), which means we are individually incentivized to not care about (1), so it requires reiterating every now and then. If we are purely thinking of (3), we are not much better than dictators and their henchmen that caused famines and other catastrophes justifying it with some sort of long-term utilitarian calculus.
This is a man-made reality though, and we have as much power to change it as we did to create it.
> Deriving satisfaction from being a useful member of society and social ties is part of human psychological nature.
I can't get behind this idea that "work" is the only way that a person can feel like a useful member of society. This is just the result of our (man-made) programming that makes it seem like the only way. We've essentially been brainwashed into accepting the backwards idea that we need work even if work doesn't need us.
> If we are acting in good will, we should dedicate effort to addressing the concrete impact
I agree, but i don't think the right answer is to stop the tech and keep digging holes and filling them in just to get a paycheck. The solution is to fix the humans. Unfortunately our government is trash so yeah we're probably screwed unless we first figure out how to get govt to actually represent the people. Andrew Yang is the only politician-adjacent I've seen take this conversation seriously.
