I don't think it's going to be in any way easy to convince people that it's okay not to be useful. No matter how times we care to repeat it, people will still feel dejected and hollow. "What is the meaning of my life?" is a difficult enough question to answer when you're a philosopher who has studied the problem academically and you're surrounded by other people going about their productive lives and overcoming various challenges in order to survive.
Now we're supposed to have millions of people face the question and at the same time tell them "no, there's nothing useful for you to do, robots can already do it faster, cheaper, and more efficiently than you will ever manage." So, what? Do we tell everyone "just go smoke weed and play video games"? Or "go kayaking and hiking and rockclimbing and find yourself in nature"? The latter will not scale. Many natural places are already overcrowded and we don't even have a post-work economic system in place.
Instead of telling people to play video games or go kayaking, I hope we can ask them to go play checkers with the elderly, read to children, hold hands with dying people in hospice, and mentor the formerly-incarcerated. These are "jobs" that I would argue robots cannot meaningfully fill, but which society would benefit from a lot more of.
"I hope we can ask them to go play checkers with the elderly, read to children, hold hands with dying people in hospice, and mentor the formerly-incarcerated."
I think a large portion would choose video games over this...
What about "video games with the elderly, video games with children, video games with dying people in hospice, and mentor the formerly-incarcerated in speedrunning"?
How bout play video games with elderly hospice patients while holding hands with a convicted pedophile who is holding hands with a racist who is holding hands with a child who is playing video games with their other hand all on one big sofa while on a rocketship to the moon. But wait ... that's no moon!
Those who "play checkers with the elderly, read to children, hold hands with dying people in hospice" will likely have more successful encounters with the opposite sex than those who choose video games.
If they don't want to, that's fine with me. Just offering some options for people (like me) who still want a meaningful way to contribute to society, in a world where robots do most of our current jobs.
Yes, a large portion of the elderly, children, and formerly incarcerated (maybe less the dying in hospice) would choose video games as the shared activity. That’s okay, too.
Maybe they would, and its their own prerogative as to how they wish to spend their time.
For myself I both enjoy video games, and enjoyed/felt fulfilled by my time volunteering with an elementary school program to assist children who were having trouble learning to read at the same pace as their peers.
Definitely! I’ve spent a good amount of time volunteering with kids, teaching them to read and helping them with homework.
But demographics are against us on this one. Children and elderly people are very much in the minority on any population distribution plot. I have personally been in situations where the number of adult volunteers greatly outnumbered the kids they were there to work with. It’s funny and a bit awkward but you get through it, usually by shifting over to board games and other large group activities.
It would be a totally different story if everyone was looking to do this stuff. A hundred volunteers with half a dozen kids or elderly folks is just not going to work. Most will be sent home.
I think it’s the same story with any group who might benefit from this. It could work if we doubled or tripled the number of people available to help out, but 10x or 20x (or more) would be unworkable.
You might say that a large number of people already volunteer for this work, but a handful of hours per week. There’s no way we could absorb millions of new volunteers for 40 hours per week each, that would be excessive.
The last thing I would add is that there are tons of people who are simply unsuitable for this kind of care work. They’re naturally disagreeable people. They may also be restless and easily bored. They would much rather be outside working or messing around.
I don't anticipate everyone wanting to do this, and I definitely don't picture anyone wanting to do "work" for 40 hours a week in a world where work is optional. I would think some people will want to do a few hours a week of something in the category I'm describing, and many people will elect other forms of meaning in their life (maybe they love whittling driftwood or golfing or just want to watch AI-generated movies all day. That's fine.) The whole point is we'll have options, so there will be some supply/demand curve for meaningful human interaction that will find equilibrium.
Right, or plant trees, clean up trash from the creeks rivers or oceans, take on foster kids and really invest time in giving them the best start possible, help refugees integrate into society, work on creating a sense of community with your neighbours, fix or repurpose trash to help reduce landfill, prioritise your health, start walking or cycling places rather than driving even if it takes longer (since time is now something you have lots of), create art, basically deal with some of the negative externalities and/or undervalued services that modern capitalism addresses so poorly.. and hopefully in the process create a life that is fulfilling and enjoyable for yourself and others.
My conviction is that there are literally infinite ways to be useful, and always will be, even if the robot overlords work perfectly, which they won't.
My other conviction is that people find their own meaning with absurd ease when they're children. Then that becomes non-viable. If it ever were to become viable again -- if they didn't have to work at the gas station to cling to existence that keeps them from sleeping under a bridge -- then their ability to find meaning will come back.
Have a look at the FIRE community and see how difficult it can be to create meaning and a fulfilling life.
Also, the COVID lockdowns gave us a glimpse at "nothing to do". Finding meaning is pretty hard for many people, especially if you can drown any form of boredom in endless consumption of shows, video games and social media.
FIRE is a good cautionary example, but I think it makes the point I wanted to get at: people start out as little meaning-making machines. They connect deeply with each other, interact easily, enjoy their lives. Then we ruin that.
The FIRE community have won the ruined game -- they're what you get when you remove the financial need, but keep the same psychological objective function, keep the same screwed-up sociality. They might be lounging by the pool but they're still stuck in the old mode of being. The ones who transcend the old workday-grind-mode are doing great. But that's non-trivial.
There was a really good article on this that I found recently ... Ah yes, here it is [1]. This is a thought-provoking take on a similar topic.
Haha, yeah, that's not a bad comparison. Adults intoxicated to a helpful degree behave kind of like children before the modern world grinds away their joy.
Not necessarily, but every bullshit job pays the bills and most of them give at least a social context and a form of identification.
Finding meaning is simply less important than having food on the table and a social circle, even if it’s just the watercooler talk with colleagues.
Not saying it’s impossible to find meaning outside of employment, but my observation and experience is that it’s not as easy as "stop working bullshit jobs and you will find meaning easily".
This completely discards the premise. We're talking about a hypothetical world where we don't need work from people, and where it would make very little sense to require meaningless work in exchange for having your needs met.
(We're also talking about the actual present world, where we don't need nearly as much work as we're forcing people to do, so the above should still be partially true, but it really isn't.)
I think you raise a valid point, but it was ever thus. Every time we level up in technology, we essentially give everybody some of the life possibilities - and problems - of aristocrats, 100 years ago.
Everybody today lives more like the aristocrats of old, we just don't notice it because it's common. If you got a special dress for your wedding, you're imitating what used to be a preposterous display of wealth for the elites. Your great-grandmother probably just got married in her nicest dress.
Meaning-making is harder when you've conquered the problem of mere survival, but not impossible.
Some aristocrats just played cards all day, or engaged in elaborate parties, or invested enormous effort into climbing the social hierarchy, or dicked around incompetently ordering the common people into stupid wars.
And some did philosophy, art, science, engineering, and exploration.
We have an absolutely enormous task ahead of us: the climate crisis. I think we could occupy ourselves with that for the next few centuries at minimum.
> I don't think it's going to be in any way easy to convince people that it's okay not to be useful.
Well, it certainly won't be possible as long as we tie people's housing, food, and health care to their ability to convince others they are useful.
Society currently sends the message: "If you aren't useful, you don't deserve housing, food, and health care". I think the existential angst is something we have to address as we transition into that post-work economic system, but I don't think it's actually possible to address until we make that transition.
And that message is actually pretty recent. Before the 20th century you could just go off into the wilderness, build your own house, catch or grow your own food, and then just do whatever you wanted without ever needing money once all of that was taken care of. The work of survival itself was the mental stimulation, and when that work was over you went in search of other stimulation. Nowadays there's a chain of reliance and ownership where you can't settle without purchasing the land, can't build your own house without purchasing the licensing and permits, can't catch your own food without a license or outside of season (and even then you're limited to a certain amount of catch), and need to buy or invest in things deemed necessary to participate in society like cellphones and bank accounts. You can grow your own garden to feed yourself, provided you own the land, but that's limited by seeds you have to buy and whatever regulations apply where you live. Essentially the only stimulation you get is by the excessive amounts of entertainment we have now, because most modern jobs aren't providing anything.
There really needs to be some return to commons where ownership of certain things is just discarded so that everyone has the opportunity for self-reliance and self-actualization without needing to provide something of value for others. Community gardens, city parks, and city pools are like the fuzzy, myopic, "My memory's not as good as it used to be" view of that commons fitting into the modern world. The problem is that kind of participation doesn't provide a verifiable exploitable value the way that working under someone towards a set goal does, and our modern economic systems BSOD at even the thought.
In short, it's okay to not be useful just so long as you have something you want to do. Intellectual stimulation will always be a core need, but working for sustenance doesn't have to be.
> I don't think it's going to be in any way easy to convince people that it's okay not to be useful. No matter how times we care to repeat it, people will still feel dejected and hollow. "What is the meaning of my life?"
Nonsense. As this very article shows, many people find no meaning in their job. They feel dejected by working bullshit jobs every day and receiving shit pay in return. They do find meaning in things like raising a family, which ironically is something that is less and less attainable for the working man/woman, as the working class gets a lower share of wealth and things like housing skyrocket.
> I don't think it's going to be in any way easy to convince people that it's okay not to be useful.
That's one problem but not the most crucial one. There will be a bunch of people complaining that they do all the work while the freeloaders have it easy.
We can see that today as people don't want universal health care or social safety nets because these people feel the freeloaders are taking advantage of them.
Even smoking weed and playing video games doesn’t scale. Someone needs to grow the weed and make the video games. Someone has to feed and minimally clothe the weed-smoker. Someone must build and maintain the weed-smoker’s house.
Presumably the weed smoker might occasionally leave home. Someone must pave the road he drives on. Someone must build the weed-smoker’s car.
For all those people doing things for the weed-smoker, someone must manage them. They will work in multiple enterprises. Someone must work to sell things between those different enterprises. This might seem inefficient, but humans have not figured out a better way to do it.
And all that explains exactly why, despite what people prattle on and on about with there being useless jobs, people do in fact remain employed and even as wasteful as that employment sometimes is, there is no better alternative on a social scale. Because when it all comes down to it, people want the benefits that modern society provides. That requires that people work. The alternative is living as a solitary mountain man. Not many people try that—and that, lo and behold, takes even more work.
That is not the point. If you can produce 4x as much with 1/4th the labour, then at the very least those labourers can work much much less than they do now. 15 hour work weeks are feasible TODAY, let alone after further labour-saving tech that the future will bring us.
It suggested that locking people in solitary confinement, even in the relative luxury of their own homes, is a torture to be avoided. It had little to do with, for or against, the idea that maybe making up worthless jobs to keep people busy being a good idea.
> there's nothing useful for you to do, robots can already do it faster, cheaper, and more efficiently than you will ever manage
Your implied solution is to have the person sweep the floor by hand before the sweeping robot makes a second pass in half the time. How will that help the person feel any better? If the machines supass us, forcing people to do busy work will not make them feel better.
We tell them to build. There are planet scale transformations underway and we need another incarnation of the WPA to help mitigate the impacts.
For example, the pine bark beetle is ravaging the forests of the Sierra Nevadas. Millions of dead trees just waiting for the next PGE power line to drop or lightning bolt to strike so why not head out with a few thousand young bodies and start felling that timber and getting it to mills?
What about some sea walls? Forget waiting for giant cranes and pontoons, how about people start dropping cement rubble in the ocean around coastal communities, one dinghy at a time? The coral is on its way out, time to reinvent some of that Roman cement and mitigate the hurricanes' impact.
How many roads could use some form of a retaining wall in the event of a deluge? There's got to be thousands of spots in the US alone. Wire covered rubble? Gabions? Deadman walls? Whatever works!
Find yourself in nature won't scale, and smoke weed and play videogames is hollow.
I love videogames, but the few times of my life where I genuinely did just play games all day for weeks or months, I felt awful. I just couldn't bring myself to do anything else.
The exception to that is highly social games. I did genuinely feel a sense of accomplishment when me and 4 friends would crush another team in league of legends. Or the old World of Warcraft raids involved coordinating 40 people and felt meaningful to execute.
Maybe there is a future where video games optimize around giving life meaning once there is little work to be done.
Designing a game where the goal was to create strong friendships between players would be a pretty interesting task.
It would be nice to have UBI and be able to take a mid week day off and walk around town. Hell maybe go clean up a local park to get my steps in for the day.
Instead if I don't punch in for the day I won't outlive the next paycheck.
A truly ridiculous amount of current work could be automated with today's tech and massive capital investment. And by today's tech, I don't even include current advances in ML. Every single worker at, say, a McDonald's is doing a job that could be automated with some capital investment. Retail stores, likewise. Self-driving vehicles are trivial when you stick 'em on rails, there's a big chunk of the cargo industry gone. Longshoreman-free ports, all that and more.
Then you get into the world of white collar work, where the "let's optimize society to minimize toil" solution, by and large, is to just eliminate the job wholesale. Accounting exists because the tax codes are too complicated, so streamline them and their jobs could be done by some API calls and Excel formulas. The entire finance sector is superfluous if money isn't the driving motivator in society. Entire militaries can be replaced by a "If we are attacked, we glass everyone we have even minor beef with" MAD systems. Trash pickups can be automated by tube systems. Food production is already largely automated outside of the produce aisle, so maybe we just cut back on foods that we can't harvest mechanically.
Frankly, the biggest sector that couldn't be fundamentally altered by a such a societal shift using just yesterday's tech is construction.
> Every single worker at, say, a McDonald's is doing a job that could be automated with some capital investment.
I think you underestimate how difficult something like this would be.
I mean, I agree that as long as you have someone/something supplying the food gloop packets to the store, taking out the waste, and fixing the machines, pretty much everything in a McDonalds could be automated as a closed system.
But we're talking about billions to trillions of dollars of investment.
Just maintaining the frosty machines is outrageously expensive.
If by "we" you mean Washington, DC - I guess I could believe that since it's one of the highest per-capita income cities in the world. But park sweeping robots are nowhere near reality for most cities in the US, let alone the rest of the world.
I'll make a hash of this, sorry... Please amend, correct as needed:
Graeber was an anthropologist. He recognizes that having a purpose is good for humans.
Among the examples he gives are people joining the military. Versus say becoming a corporate wage slave. For many, it's one of the few tracks available which offers "helping people", "serving my country", and other purposeful motivations. And the positive of having a purpose can outweigh all the negatives of serving (low pay, relocation, risks).
Another facet Graeber covers is the "service economy", including "knowledge workers". He challenges the idea that people need results oriented work to feel job satisfaction.
Alternately, Graeber suggests using the category "care work". All the things people and society needs to function well. Nurses, cops, soldiers, councilors, running a soup kitchen, volunteer work, etc.
Sadly, our current economic model devalues "service work". The focus on profits and productivity and efficiency is anathema to the work of people caring for other people.
Just to note the issue, I believe (but cannot prove) "productive work", where labor is part of making something, is orthogonal to "care work", and should be considered separately. Or at least be included thesis which is larger than a drive-by HN comment.
Developing his Bullship Jobs thesis, Graeber tries to take on bureaucracy. Many critics get stuck on his prior criticisms of neoliberal economics. They're missing the point. Bureaucracy is (apparently?) a trait of modernism and (apparently?) central to all systems of government and economics.
I would LOVE continued exploration of the territory scouted by Graeber, Scott's Seeing Like a State, the Ehrenreich's professional middle class (PMC), and I'm sure many others. (Sorry, I still haven't read much about Marxism and its critics.)
It's so sad that Graeber passed.
There's a huge chasm where a leftist criticism of bureaucracy should be. Like the failed promise of the administrative state. Like how "the system" is dehumanizing when it should empower. Like if we understood it better, maybe we can minimize capitalism's dark pull on the state (panopticon, taylorism of all things, cost disease, accelerating credentialism). Etc, ad nauseum.
The closest (adjacent) work that I'm aware of is now being driven by the Inflation Reduction Act. Stuff like permitting reform, better governance, scaling up the administrative state (necessary to roll out renewables at the scale required). All the PvP stuff where opposing concerns and incentives are in tension.
Administrative capacity is one of David Roberts' obsessions. His Volts podcast has terrific episodes tackling this and related concerns. https://volts.wtf
Please share anything you might think is relevant. TIA.
Now we're supposed to have millions of people face the question and at the same time tell them "no, there's nothing useful for you to do, robots can already do it faster, cheaper, and more efficiently than you will ever manage." So, what? Do we tell everyone "just go smoke weed and play video games"? Or "go kayaking and hiking and rockclimbing and find yourself in nature"? The latter will not scale. Many natural places are already overcrowded and we don't even have a post-work economic system in place.