Agree with the first part of the comment, but at the end, when you say:
>> "what might help society is if [...] we paid people to learn valuable skills"
We actually have plenty of very qualified people, both with academic titles and without them, but many of them are still doing jobs that don't "make society better". The problem is that we used tech to cut the time and labor required to do most things, but we haven't freed that time for people, we only keep distributing the benefits of those "improvements" unevenly.
And the real problem is that even if you were to redistribute them evenly, when there's low pressure, abundance of resources and an environment that provides more than what you are consuming, any species will start having more offspring, until the pressure increases and you are in trouble again (kinda like a malthusian trap). We could only escape that limit if we were able to create unlimited space habitats or our population growth rates were slower than the time it took us to find and travel to new planets. Some might argue that the systems will self-regulate, but self-regulation only happens in high pressure states, and that means that a lot of people is suffering under them.
The fact is that we don't need much, and we already have it. The problem to solve is not to become better or faster or more efficient at producing and creating more. The problem to solve is to collectively find a compromise on how much we want to have and design mechanisms to keep us in that sustainable lane. Not sure that's possible, but it's the only approach to "help society" that I really believe in.
>> "what might help society is if [...] we paid people to learn valuable skills"
We actually have plenty of very qualified people, both with academic titles and without them, but many of them are still doing jobs that don't "make society better". The problem is that we used tech to cut the time and labor required to do most things, but we haven't freed that time for people, we only keep distributing the benefits of those "improvements" unevenly.
And the real problem is that even if you were to redistribute them evenly, when there's low pressure, abundance of resources and an environment that provides more than what you are consuming, any species will start having more offspring, until the pressure increases and you are in trouble again (kinda like a malthusian trap). We could only escape that limit if we were able to create unlimited space habitats or our population growth rates were slower than the time it took us to find and travel to new planets. Some might argue that the systems will self-regulate, but self-regulation only happens in high pressure states, and that means that a lot of people is suffering under them.
The fact is that we don't need much, and we already have it. The problem to solve is not to become better or faster or more efficient at producing and creating more. The problem to solve is to collectively find a compromise on how much we want to have and design mechanisms to keep us in that sustainable lane. Not sure that's possible, but it's the only approach to "help society" that I really believe in.