LogFAQs > #927988951

Squall28 posted...

I think we're still a good ways off from that. There's a lot of stuff that needs to be automated before humans can get to the point of do whatever you want.

Imo we could accomplish all of those things starting right now, getting to the point where food and energy production are clean, sustainable, plentiful, and ubiquitous. We just need the will to think big and act.

The Admiral posted...

pls posted...

If we decentralized energy production, agriculture, medicine, by making them universally accessible...then the point of work would be to become better versions of ourselves as humans, not to "earn a living"

This will never happen. If people didn't have to work and were afforded infinite leisure time to "work on themselves," they'd end up wasting life away and sniping at each other like the users on this board. Or they'd just spend their days indulging and engaging in self destructive behaviors like rich socialites already do. It'd be the end of society.

Humans evolved with the mentality of constant labor being required to support ourselves, and most of us don't do particularly well in the long run when that's no longer required.

You're missing the mark here. We have more leisure time now than we did 100 years ago, thanks to innovations like the washing machine and other kinds of automation, and yet we see that society has improved in life expectancy, happiness, and decreased rates of violence across the board. So it seems that a lot more leisure time is not necessary going to lead to wasting life away or indulging in destructive behaviors. But rather more time spent with family and friends and artistic pursuits, which are all noble things.

I also didn't say that there wouldn't be work that needed to be done. Imo if we solve energy and food production, we're still going to need scientists, engineers, and doctors to research and investigate ways to do everything better. We'll always have work that needs to be done, a lot of it meaningful work.

I wager that millions of people would gladly leave behind their shitty cubicle jobs to work planting trees and cleaning up the environment if they didn't need to worry about subsisting.

I don't think people are wasting away in retirement because they stopped being a paper pusher for 40-60 hours a week. I think it's more because of a loss of purpose and meaning, where they've been conditioned to think that slaving away for the Man for a lifetime was giving them meaning. There's a lot richer meaning and purpose that we could pursue as a species than that.

I also think you're confusing your subjective opinion on what it means to "waste life away" with objective truth. It's entirely possible that Person A thinks playing videogames is worth it and Person B thinks exploring nature is worth it and Person C thinks something else entirely. The point is to divorce the concept of work from the concept of needing to work.

We are at the point technologically where we shouldn't need to conflate work with making a living. Isn't it time we started thinking bigger as a species?
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