
A Conversation: Yuval Noah Harari, Daniel Kahneman (2015) - goodJobWalrus
https://www.edge.org/conversation/yuval_noah_harari-daniel_kahneman-death-is-optional
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xherberta
On people becoming superfluous to the market and the state as machine
intelligence progresses:

 _"... [in the future, work no longer exists for] most of humanity... That
mass of people cannot work, but they can still kill people..."

"and how will they find some sense of meaning in life when they are basically
meaningless, worthless?

My best guess at present is a combination of drugs and computer games as a
solution for most"_

On "one of the big problems with technology":

 _" It develops much faster than human society and human morality, and this
creates a lot of tension. But, again, we can try and learn something from our
previous experience with the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, that
actually, you saw very rapid changes in society, not as fast as the changes in
technology, but still, amazingly fast.

The most obvious example is the collapse of the family and of the intimate
community, and their replacement by the state and the market."_

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FullMtlAlcoholc
I really do hope tthat we can make that massive cultural shift ttowards
finding meaning outside of laboring for the capitalist class. For most of
human history, people had no boss and worked for themselves or werr
tradesmen(essentially contractors)

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xherberta
I agree.

Kahneman and Harari also discussed how the shift to agriculture, while a great
step forward for humanity as a collective group, was a major bummer for the
individual. (Much more interesting and healthier to be a hunter-gatherer than
a serf.)

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FullMtlAlcoholc
Have you ever farmed before? I spent one summer doing it and it is the
definition of toil. I couldn't imagine how much more it sucked without modern
tools, yet people built irrigation ditches and terraformed the land.

People often miss the meaning behind the Biblical story of the fall of man.
The garden of eden can be seen as a metaphor for the hunter gatherer
lifestyle. Knowledge, (a metaphor for agriculture) led to the fall. It is
further highlighted when God curses cain for killing abel, that when he tills
the soil, it will resist him as an enemy. Farmers have to work day and night
doing back-breaking work while a sinlge pig can feed nearly 100 people.

Also, interestingly, hunter-gatherer remains had larger skulls as well as a
more developed physique. While they had a more nutritious diet, the mental
demands required to be a hunter gatherer in those times required relatively
extraordinary cognitive ability...a near encyclopedic knowledge of the safety
of foods, its various uses as medicines, the ability to accurately map your
entire stomping grounds and the memory necessary to store and recall all this
information

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whoami_nr
To anyone interested about the history of human evolution, I highly recommend
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari. It's the best book I
have read about human history and how we have evolved until now. The book is
also listed on the Gates Summer reading list.

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Ar-Curunir
I did not find it particularly good. Sure, I learnt some things I did not
know, but for the large part I was turned off by Harari's self-assurance about
a time for which little archaeological evidence exists. It seemed very
unscientific to me.

~~~
whoami_nr
I read the book around a year ago and I remember him pointing out the
uncertainty to his claims. It was simply his personal research and views which
I think should be taken at his face value. Sure, there might be a few things
wrong here and there but that book left a lasting impact on me with regards to
how I perceive day to day generic things.

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spinchange
_"...the power of the masses, that we are so used to, is rooted in particular
historical conditions, economic, military, political, which characterized the
19th and 20th centuries. These conditions are now changing, and there is no
reason to be certain that the masses will retain their power."_

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petra
When he says humans will become useless in the economic sense, i wonder:

When looking at the value created by the average human job, you see a constant
decline in that - most of history human though wars, produced basic food,
shelter, health. But today, many humans produce stuff that is far from
necessary, we could live well with far less of those products and services.
Heck, we even semi-deliberatly construct out economy in that way, for example,
by creating/allowing tools like advertising and planned-obsolescence, tools
that enable the rise of the consumption economy.

So maybe that's a trend, an we need to look where humans+machines are
preferred over machines, just barely, and construct our economy around that ?

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phreeza
I guess it kind of depends on what you mean by value when you say "value
created by the average human job", but I think for most definitions the
opposite is the case. Average productivity per worker has been rising pretty
steadily since the industrial revolution, even if you correct for inflation.

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hammerandtongs
This is a 2015 conversation but was interesting as I recall.

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dang
Thanks! Added.

