
The abolition of work - arcadeparade
http://deoxy.org/endwork.htm
======
Eliezer
Voted up for being accurate about the evils of work. Pity the author has
absolutely no clue what to do about it, and so little knowledge of economics
as to not even be aware of his own ignorance.

It's all about incentive structures, professional specialization, and
comparative advantage. If you want to replace work, you have to find something
better. The author shows no sign of understanding why they are important.

If you could come up with a better incentive structure that gives people a
reason to try, while still exploiting professional specialization and
comparative advantage, _without_ creating bosses and managers to regiment
life, you could systematize it and start companies that used it which would
outcompete existing companies.

~~~
JulianMorrison
Comparative advantage is the biggie. Everyone wants to be the astronaut.

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Dove
I could not disagree more with the article. Work is not evil. Oppression is
evil, sometimes the way people treat each other in the context of work is
evil. But work itself, especially hard work, is good for the soul.

It's not the drudgery or labor that's so satisfying. It's the sense of working
on something necessary. No one would drive rail spikes or write in machine
code for fun--at least, not on the scale necessary to actually achieve
something. But once upon a time, the tasks were necessary, and those who
undertook them rightly took joy in what they were achieving. That's work.
Doing something necessary and useful is satisfying, even if it isn't fun.

Automate all you want; I'm all for it. It's one of the ways we make ourselves
rich. I'd never argue that writing in machine code or taking out the garbage
are inherently good for the soul, and eliminating the need for such things is
good. But while they remain necessary, they are a source of satisfaction.
There will always be tasks like that, because there will always be great
things we can achieve that aren't possible without a lot of work.

I'm constantly pursuing projects, some for pay and some for play. But the
funny thing about projects for play: most of them I never finish. The ones
that do become great have a lot of the characteristics of work: I can see a
need for them, I expect a big payoff for completion, others ask me to get them
done, there's some sort of time constraint, I approach in a disciplined way
and power through the dull bits. Of course, the inverse is also true: those
projects I do for pay which turn out great have a lot of aspects of play: I
make them interesting, I learn things, I experiment and inject humor, I have
time to make them beautiful, to do things right. Great achievement lies in the
intersection of work and play, I think.

I certainly wouldn't advocate unemployment, as this fellow does. I spent a
year or so unemployed, once--and with no real financial pressure to get a job.
It was absolute misery. My creative and passionate impulses slowly dried up. I
always say, "I'll learn this new language when I have time," but in fact I
learn things exactly when I _don't_ have time, but need them to get something
done. When I had all the time in the world, I didn't pursue all those projects
I was so interested in. After a few half-hearted starts, I shriveled into a
TV-watching video-gaming internet-reading ball of goo.

I plan to never pursue that lifestyle. I may retire early from financially
necessary work--in fact, I plan to. But I don't plan to ever actually stop
working. That was hell!

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jlc
I used to have my freshmen composition classes read Bob Black. Was always
interesting, but often hard for some students to see the difference between
work, the stuff that gets done, and work, the social construct. I think it's
good for everyone to think about the ways in which the latter is alienating
(in the Marxist sense) and exploitive, even (maybe esp.) if you're not an
anarchist.

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chrismear
Standard counter-argument: someone's still got to take away the trash.

~~~
JulianMorrison
Now imagine trash bins that trundle themselves, Roomba style, to the loading
lift of a DARPA-challenge AI-drone garbage truck.

The problem nowadays is not really eliminating dull work. We're pretty close
to the tech level even where we haven't already reached it. The problem is
figuring out an economic system that still feeds, houses and entertains people
despite near 100% structural unemployment.

~~~
yummyfajitas
In such a post-scarcity Asimovian future, limited socialism (perhaps 1-5% of
GDP) would be a viable option. Socialism misallocates resources. But if you
have nearly unlimited resources, why worry about misallocating a small
fraction of them?

~~~
jerf
"But if you have nearly unlimited resources, why worry about misallocating a
small fraction of them?"

Because there is no society so rich that it can't misallocate even worse. Yes,
I include full post-Singularity societies in that statement.

I think rather than saying "socialism can work then" or even "X can work then"
for X in (socialism, anarchy, capitalism, etc.), it is rather worth saying
that in that case, the foundation will have changed so radically that it is,
correspondingly, time to completely reconsider society's economics from
scratch.

The laws of economics will still be in play, and for a _very_ long time there
will still be the challenge of deciding _which_ projects we wish to engage in,
large and small ("which star do we colonize?"). That is not the problem that
goes away. The problem that goes away is the lack of resources for basic
happiness for some entity, a world we still live in.

 _Edit_ : Actually, for proof I point to modern society. We are _already_ ,
not to put too fine a point on it, "fucking rich". We have massively more
resources than we did even twenty years ago. Yet many of us feel poorer today,
because an awful lot of that excess is getting tied up in various things that
I will put under the umbrella of "economically unproductive". For instance, in
the context of recent state government funding troubles, many people have
observed that almost across the board state governments are spending radically
more than they did in 2003, yet it hardly seems like they're performing that
many more _services_ than they did in 2003. A lot of that is because we are
being terribly economically inefficient.

Health care has some of the same problems. We have radically more resources
than we used to, but thanks to some systematic failures in the system (pick
your choice of excessive centralization or insufficient centralization, for
this point I don't care), we are spending way more than we need to. This is
proved by people's ability to fly to, say, Argentina, and get virtually
identical surgeries (even in a clean and safe environment) for one-tenth the
price, give or take a bit. (The exact ratio doesn't matter, what matters is
that it is _large_.)

We should be either getting massively more from our government, or paying
massively less, than we did ten years ago, but we aren't. Health care
expenditures may still be going up (it is a potential economic sinkhole just
by its nature), but it still should be costing less _per procedure_ than it
did ten years ago, but it doesn't. (On average. There are exceptions where
medicine has advanced so far that it is cheaper for some procedures.)

Unfortunately, it's just not possible to "wealth" your way out of needing to
put at least _some_ thought into economic efficiency.

(Also, I _personally_ do not feel poorer and believe that we are still better
off than twenty years ago. I am merely observing that A: I appear to be in a
minority there, at least among people motivated to post in online discussions
and B: we should be even _better_ off than we actually are.)

~~~
yummyfajitas
The point I made was somewhat more limited than what I think you are arguing
against. Obviously, wealth needs to be properly allocated or it is useless.
However, my argument was merely that the solution to one particular problem
("how to care for people replaced by robots") would be cheap in the particular
future envisioned.

Consider how this might work in modern terms. If you can't survive in the
modern economy, you are provided with food and a bed to sleep in. We actually
have such a system (homeless shelters + soup kitchens) and the cost of
providing it is a negligible fraction of our GDP.

The problem comes when you try to add too much to this basic package, or when
corruption eats up big chunks of wealth. I don't disagree with any of that.

And you are probably right about jealousy: people will feel poor when they get
free health care but immortality pills are only for the rich. But that's a
separate issue.

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arram
I'm worried about the full scale psychological break down that's likely to
come from not requiring anything from anybody. pg mentions 'Manhattan house
wives' somewhere in his writing. It's that psychological affliction writ
large. Some people can auto-impose the structure necessary to not sink into an
orgy of escapism, but I'm guessing it's less than 3%.

Imagine the popular culture in a world where it's trivial for people to
endlessly indulge their most idiosyncratic whims and vices - where hard knocks
no longer cull delusional and generally ineffective behaviors.

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gojomo
This reminds me of another manifesto arguing to expand our ideas of what's
possible, 'The Hedonistic Imperative', that takes a mostly pharmacological
approach:

<http://www.hedweb.com/>

For that matter, this piece has strong similarities to the Unabomber
manifesto, aka "Industrial Society and its Future".

[http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Industrial_Society_and_Its_Fut...](http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Industrial_Society_and_Its_Future)

All such romantic manifestos are interesting in how they make you think, but
the devil is in the details. Humans compete for power, for status, for
reproduction; if you somehow remove economic competition you might get
something worse, corrupt and oppressive and murderous in another direction.

And the hunter-gatherer past was a bit nastier than this piece lets on. Some
alternate views:

[http://www.troynovant.com/Franson/Keeley/War-Before-
Civiliza...](http://www.troynovant.com/Franson/Keeley/War-Before-
Civilization.html)

<http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html>

Pinker summarizes the knowledge of prehistoric combat death rates: "If the
wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population
that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two
billion deaths, not 100 million."

~~~
sethg
There is a long-standing anarchist critique of industrial society, and both
the Unabomber and Bob Black are part of that tradition. The Unabomber just
never got the memo that "we tried bombing our way into anarchy back in the
nineteenth century and it didn't work out so well".

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wallflower
Marshall Brain's 'Robotic Nation' explores what would happen in a highly
automated society (e.g. robots would take over all sectors)

<http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm>

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Luff
From the text: _As Smith observed: "The understandings of the greater part of
men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life
is spent in performing a few simple operations . . . has no occasion to exert
his understanding . . . He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is
possible for a human creature to become." Here, in a few blunt words, is my
critique of work._

Then what would the outcome be if man don't have to work at all? Better for
some, but worse for many others is my guess.

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jdowdell
I always liked "Theses on Groucho Marxism" better:
[http://www.collectivereinventions.org/Archives/pages/theses_...](http://www.collectivereinventions.org/Archives/pages/theses_on_groucho_marxism.htm)

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known
<http://www.whywork.org/>

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jbrun
I posted a similar idea a couple years back:

[http://www.jonathanbrun.com/2006/07/guns-germs-and-
happiness...](http://www.jonathanbrun.com/2006/07/guns-germs-and-
happiness.html)

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wizardofoz
I believe work is the source of happiness. Happiness comes to you when you see
the fruits of your work.

I remember feeling really happy after finishing up a program that I had been
working on for a long time. Just seeing it work so perfectly gave me an
incredible sense of satisfaction. It was far better from the
satisfaction/pleasure I got from doing things like watching TV/movies, going
on dates, eating at nice restaurants, etc.

Developing the program was definitely not play either. It involved things
(like fixing bugs, coming up with algorithms) for which I had to expend a
considerable amount of intellectual energy. It was work, but it was work worth
working on.

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stuffthatmatter
it's easy to not be stuck to a job; just don't get into debts and marriage.
then you can always pick and choose your schedule.

