I generally agree with you in principle, but it’s not a given that you can find meaning outside of the job market if the market doesn’t find your labor valuable.

What if nobody actually wants your “help”? What if your labor is not only worthless in the job market, but also in general, where people prefer assistance from AI instead of from a live human person? What if no matter what you do, some AI does it better? How will humanity find our own value and meaning when that happens?

I think the point where that is the case is pretty far off, since it requires endless fully-autonomous robots and no demand for human-created media or connection.

But regardless, people throughout history have found happiness and meaning in their life completely separately from what they did to put food on the table.

That would really only be a problem if majority decided to not do anything and we had actual shortage, not just "corporations don't want to pay decent wage so they can't find people"

If the incentive is "here is basic income, you can afford flat on outskirts of the town or in some small town and basic necessities", there is still plenty motivation to do better and get better stuff (whether just for living, or for your hoobbies or interest), just not a pressure of taking first job you can find just to afford being alive.

So average person have option of just going on 6 month hiatus to learn some life skill, or artist have time to develop their skill enough to make art or music that gets enough interest to make it into income.

I don't think this is something people should be worried about. There is so much stuff to do in the world, and quite frankly, there are not enough people to do all of it. And a lot of that stuff is not particularly suited to AI.

But what I would question if you want to get a little existential -- do people value being helpful or do they value feeling helpful, because those are two different things. And I think that if the idea of "people need help and what if an AI can help them better than I can" is actually terrifying to people, that should maybe prompt a small amount of reflection about our motivations for helping others.

But the shorter answer is that there is just so much stuff to do in the world right now.

I'm so disappointed in the other replies to this comment.

> Don't worry about it, there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done

> pretty far off

> chess grandmasters are ok

We are on an exponential curve of being able to create agents on demand that can essentially act in human ways, at least digitally/online. If you're working on a computer (aka all white collar jobs or anything that can be done remotely), it will soon enough be trivial to create an agent and task it with "Unqueue tasks from the backlog and implement fixes in the codebase. Ask questions if you need help." and it will do it. And you can create as many of these agents as you like.

As many as you like! On demand! How the hell are humans supposed to compete with that?

I mean, that isn't a "what ever will happen to my job?" level of concern, that's more "will society handle transitioning to a post-job reality once everyone is useless without revolving into a war" or "maybe humanity will cease to be relevant and we'll all get killed by the computer we design", which is a fundamentally different level of problem, right? Like, the last thing I am going to be concerned about is my silly job in the future you are positing where all white collar jobs are replaced, as to be quite frank about it: my job as a low-level software developer is harder to replace than the jobs of the people who hired me or the people who hired them or the people who invested in their company to begin with... once the computer flips from the regime of being worse than a human and yet helpful to them into a theoretical one where it is better than a human, I think the answer is going to very rapidly change from "maybe you should just consider it to be helpful!" to "maybe that will be the end of human civilization" with very very little in between.

The professional chess community has been living in this world for a long time. The engines crush us, and their games can be fascinating too but Magnus’s and Hikaru’s make a helluva lot more money. It’s not a winner take all market in general but the human element is actually very important; the creation is more than just the game on the board.

> it’s not a given that you can find meaning outside of the job market

That's bleak af, how old are you ? where do you live ? what do you do ? do you have a family ? do you have friends ? hobbies ?

I can guarantee you the vast majority of min wage workers would absolutely find a meaning in things other than flipping burgers or triaging the shit people buy on Amazon

I think there are 3 factions in a world where AI took out most jobs (with UBI of course):

#1 There will always be jobs requiring humans - jobs that require human interaction. The supply will be much smaller, but so will be the demand.

#2 By the time AI replaces all jobs, we will most likely have a very realistic VR with multiplayer capabilities. I think that many people will live adventures in such world and spend most of their waking hours in it. Metaverse sucks but it's only because it's so artificial. If you could have tech that could integrate with your senses directly, giving experiences on par with the sharpest lucid dream... that's going to be much different and for better or worse, a lot of people will get sucked into it. Of course, it's going suck - life is about yin-yang, endless pleasure is not good. People who will end up spending the majority of their time in such VR will not be unlike drug addicts, unless they will also be doing activities that require mental & "physical" engagement (I think one of the coolest thing that could arise out of it are new sports that would not be possible in the real world), however, that yin-yang balance would be hard to achieve when there's no evolutionary pressure combined with overabundance of simple pleasure that's just available all the time.

#3 Walking the path to mastery in some pursuit - i.e. artistic, athletic, a craft. There's pure joy in just getting better at something and enjoying every day of practice and most importantly - feeling challenged which is a primal need. It may be competitive as heck to get some recognition or play in the big leagues (which would be more like #1), but that would be just a bonus from that perspective.

If AI leaves us nothing to do, then #3 will always be available. AI will not take away our own engagement but engagement requires effort and so, I would bet that a significant majority will overindulge in #2 to their unconscious doom - I guess it will still be a pretty cool experience though and it's not like those people will not have a choice to get out.

I your work is not producing anything valuable for other people it's void and you will get bored pretty fast, it's a human nature. If it does you can always find a way to monetize it as people need it and ready to share their wealth for something they need. No, it doesn't have to be a work "for a company", but if you can't "make money off of this" it probably means your "work" is only relevant to you, or somebody else will "make money off of this" using what you have created. It's how society works, and we are social animals.

> I your work is not producing anything valuable for other people it's void and you will get bored pretty fast, it's a human nature

I think this is plain wrong. There are plenty of pursuits that are “work” on the mental or physical side, but do not produce economic value. Developing artistry by mastering a medium or an instrument, climbing mountains, running ultra marathons, tending to a garden or bonsai, modifying a vehicle… These are things could produce economic or social credit, but are largely solo “work” which can be (and often is) self satisfying without external motivation.

Good to bring up.

People are very attached to the idea that humans don't want to master things unless they're the best at them, and I feel like that philosophy was pretty solidly disproved right about the time that video games were invented. People master skills in non-competitive, solo settings.

Learning a skill can be inherently satisfying on its own. Personal development is satisfying regardless of where the people around you are. Or at least, it should be.

And it's also kind of a bad approach to value as well -- what I've found is that you can actually be pretty average at things and still provide a lot of value to the people around you, because of ignoring economies of scale and because of how much stuff there is to do in the world to begin with.

There are software niches that are underserved where genuinely earnest programmers who look to help could do tremendous good even if they're kind of average/bad programmers. In fact, as one example that's close to HN, that's how the majority of Open Source programming happens. Open Source is not a meritocracy, it's a Do-ocracy, and a ton of the most valuable stuff is built by average programmers who look at underserved niches and say, "but what if there was a non-predatory solution for them?"

A lot of what makes a good Open Source solution is just that it was built by someone who cares and who isn't trying to maneuver you into a predatory relationship. And sometimes it turns out that there are only a few people available in a niche that have both the resources to do that and the inclination. So they're not competing with anyone, they're just the people who happened to be available and willing to do the work.

I didn't say "economic value". Let's take "modifying a vehicle" as an example. Will you keep it in your garage guarding it from anybody's sight? Why are you doing it? What's coming to your mind? It's not always as straightforward as "economic value". You want somebody to look at your vehicle, you want to show it to somebody. What for? Keep it in your garage, you are doing it for your "mental side", aren't you? Money and economic value is not the only way of keeping society together, there are others. If you are showing your vehicle to somebody, you _are_ expecting something in return. Acquaintance? Friendship? Help when you need it? Continue yourself.

This is kind of a circular definition. When you get this broad with your definition of value/payment, basically what you're saying is that work is meaningful if you derive meaning and/or personal value from it. Which, sure, I agree with that.

But that doesn't mean it'll be monetizable in the traditional sense, and it doesn't mean that traditional employment is the only place to get that value. Many of the things you're talking about aren't representable in dollar form, and it's not clear to me how decoupling income from traditional jobs would mean that those activities would stop being meaningful. Certainly, a lot of those activities are already activities that you can't really make money off of (or at least the vast majority of people engaged in those activities can't).

I specifically mentioned that you don't have to work "for a company". Jeff Bezos is not a traditional employee last time I checked. Neither are mom and pop shops or self-employed contractors. Just not everybody wants to deal with a hassle of being the one. But aside from that a lot of "no money" activities bring you friends (AKA connections), position in a society (think about OSS, can it help you to find a good paying and interesting job if you are Linus Torvalds?). Sometimes you get benefits where you don't expect. It's still "monetizable" in my books as opposed to "I'm doing something nobody needs and enjoying it while living on a basic income".

I think that's completely reasonable to have as a definition, I've got no issues with you there. I don't think it contradicts anything in the above thread though.

The "monetizable" activities you're talking about here under your definition will still exist in a theoretical world where AI takes over traditional employment. Separating "making a living" from "having a traditional job" wouldn't get rid of any of the social monetization you describe.

AI won't take over traditional employment either, humans tend to congregate and choose leader(s) as many tasks are not possible to accomplish alone, with AI or not. If there are leaders, there will be an employment of some kind, it's a fundamental thing. Money is only an equivalent of a value in exchange, so "monetizable" in the wide sense of this word is "exchangeable", and it almost always applies to social activities even like running a marathon, otherwise people would run those 26 miles alone in the forest.

> otherwise people would run those 26 miles alone in the forest.

This is kind of a side note, but have you never learned an ability or tried to master a skill in secret? There's nothing wrong with being motivated by social capital, but if you extrapolate out from that to assume everyone is primarily motivated that way, you might be universalizing a personal trait that isn't really universal.

There are a lot of things I practice and do alone that never get exchanged for social capital: drawing, I play single-player games, I cook. These are activities where I either master a skill on my own (sometimes purely for the intrinsic motivation of mastering it even though it produces no value outside of that), or because (in the case of things like food/personal-programming/etc) because it produces "value" for myself that isn't exchanged with anyone else.

I'm not saying community and social capital doesn't exist, but if you are defining value purely in a transactional sense, you are missing out on a lot of human motivation. People do things alone without ever entering into a community around those activities or showing the results to anyone else.

> People do things alone without ever entering into a community around those activities or showing the results to anyone else.

Of course! I'm not saying that "everything is for sale" or we always need to contribute to a society. But if you don't do it you may quickly find that your life is boring and you need to share with somebody. Obviously all people are different, some need (or can bear) more solitude, some hate it, but on average we are social animals and it's inside us. Even when you cook for yourself, aren't you ever discussing it with somebody? Hell, why am I typing all this? It has no transactional value for me, none whatsoever, in fact I wasted half of my Saturday :) I could have just created my theories in secret and enjoyed them, but for some reason I need to post here. Maybe because I want to know what other people think, what if I'm dead wrong with my theories? So there is a transactional value even in these posts as I learn something new which may help me later :) No, "later" is not a conscious reason why I'm doing it, it's a subconscious thing, our internal program.

> Even when you cook for yourself, aren't you ever discussing it with somebody?

Very rarely? I cook so that I can make food that tastes better to me, because I'm eating it. If every other human being on the planet was dead, I would still be doing it.

Humans are absolutely social animals, but we're not only social animals, and I think it's a mistake to try and compress every human motivation into how it benefits social interactions. Even in larger tasks, there is something intrinsically kind of satisfying about doing something for yourself even if it's fully private. Genuinely, I don't know how to explain the inherent pleasure of researching a useless topic or getting lost in an activity/task that's not going to be shared. I don't think that's something that can be reduced to "well, maybe you subconsciously think it will help you in a future transaction."

I'm getting value out of cooking, sure, but that value isn't really something that can be described in a transactional form or even as prep for future transactions or competitions. Cooking doesn't make me better in other social situations. It doesn't really give me transferable skills. I don't really cook for other people (my tastes are very different from them and I usually doubt they'd like what I cook anyway). I'm not trying to make myself more attractive to other people, I'm not prepping myself for a future competition. I don't think that cooking is going to be suddenly useful in the future in a social situation.

I just want the food to taste good because I eat it.

I think with any of these activities you're talking about, ask yourself, "would someone still do this if every other human being on the planet was dead?" And if the answer with any of those meaningful activities is 'yes', then that suggests that for some people there's something deeper or more instinctual going on there beyond just a subconscious adherence to social systems. There's a lot of stuff that I do that I would still do even if I was never going to interact with another human being for the rest of my life.

I can't speak for anyone else, but that may be more common than you realize? You can define value however you want, but I do think that you're going to subtly miss out on intrinsic motivations if you try to fit all of them into an extrinsic lens. You can theorize that people anonymously donate to charities or build useful things always because there is some kind of transaction at play there or preparation for a future transaction (and some people are motivated mostly by that stuff, which is fine), but universalizing that is not going to give you a good predictive model for how everyone is going to act in the future.

> If it does you can always find a way to monetize it as people need it and ready to share their wealth for something they need

I disagree with this entirely. If this was true, the main question we would ask in a business is whether or not the output was useful. We don't ask that, we ask if it's "sustainable", "profitable", etc... We ask what the moat is around it.

There are many useful things you can do that you won't be able to make money off of. I don't think it's uncommon either. Business is a great way of extracting value, I like business as a value extractor. But it's a specific way of extracting value. There are lots of things that are valuable that don't happen because it's not clear how they would be profitable.

I mean, the simplest example here is you can build things for people who don't have money. It's not the only example, but it's a pretty obvious one. And you are not going to make a lot of money doing that unless you build a predatory or exploitative business.

> or somebody else will "make money off of this" using what you have created

I will also point out that if other people making money off of the things you do is a turn-off, it's not clear to me what value you think you're creating. I would argue that "meaningful work" very often benefits other people, that's... that's the point. If you're not giving people more value than you're taking from them, you probably aren't doing useful work. Are you arguing that it's less valuable if people are extracting extra value from the things we do?

Let's start from basics. People need to eat, so somebody needs to make food. Those people need tools. Somebody needs to make tools. Now for this to work they need to make extra food and exchange it for tools. This exchange has been in development since before human existed (look at wolves pack) -- never perfect, but kind of worked. So you want to make something you like and nobody needs? No problem, go for it. Where are you supposed to get food? Do you want a government to pay you the basic income? That means those who make food will give it to you for free, which means they won't get tools, which in turn means they won't be able to make that food. Oops. In a balanced system you are never "taking more than giving" or vice versa, because, as you know, price is a result of supply/demand. How do you know you Java library is worth a breakfast?

I'm not sure this has anything to do with the original comment or point I was trying to make.

That being said:

> In a balanced system you are never "taking more than giving" or vice versa, because, as you know, price is a result of supply/demand.

Literally all of economic development and growth is predicated on the idea that this is not true. If work was actually zero-sum and all of the transactions gave you the exact value that you sold, there would be no point in forming a society around this.

Society works because combined labor produces more value than is put into the process. That has always been the case. You get more food out of farming than you put into it, otherwise it wouldn't be worthwhile to farm.

> That means those who make food will give it to you for free, which means they won't get tools, which in turn means they won't be able to make that food.

Also, the only reason we're having this conversation is because the "tools" that are being made will (very theoretically) be made for practically free by AI.

We're not talking about a world where the tools stop existing. This entire conversation started with someone asking "but what if there's no more need for humans to make the tools?"

You are talking about added value and it's beyond "basics" :) The point was "if your work has no value, there is no breakfast to exchange it for".

> You are talking about added value and it's beyond "basics" :)

I don't know, I think it's pretty important to a conversation about automating jobs that we not treat jobs as if they're an optimized equivalent exchange. The whole premise there is that the machines are going to start producing a lot of value without any human input. If it happens, it's not going to be equivalent exchange.

If we're not talking about added value, then there's nothing to worry about because then the machines can't automate the jobs, because that would be added value.

> if your work has no value, there is no breakfast to exchange it for

My point more specifically here is that there's a lot of value in the world that can't be exchanged for breakfast, something that (as far as I can tell from your other comments on this thread) you actually agree with, right? There's value that exists outside of traditionally monetarily compensated jobs.

In a (again, entirely theoretical) world where AI gets rid of the need to earn your breakfast, that doesn't mean there's not going to be anything of value to do anymore and that everyone's life is going to be meaningless.

Machines don't produce a value, humans do. Simply because the "value" (added or not) has a meaning only when you exchange goods or services. Nail gun makes things much faster but it's a carpenter who produces the value.

Money is simply a universal equivalent of that value, nothing more. So if you give me a breakfast for help with unloading your truck, it's still an exchange, and my work's value is equal to "one breakfast" even no money was involved.

AI is just a nail gun, there still needs to be somebody who trains/operates it (like with ChatGPT) and who will ask for something in exchange. It may eliminate some jobs (happened before), but it will create others because human society is not only about food (not sure ChatGPT can help here though), but about interactions which are not going to be automated by ChatGPT (think of sex, power).

> Simply because the "value" (added or not) has a meaning only when you exchange goods or services.

I feel like your definition of value is jumping around quite a bit. In another comment you described "value" as essentially any kind of social capital or personal reward. Now it's explicitly transactional?

In any case, this is a very narrow definition of value that I don't think matches up with what most people who worry about automation are talking about. It's certainly not what the original thread was talking about when it worried about people without jobs not being able to find meaning in work. What most people think of as useful or meaningful purpose in their lives does not strictly map to transactional value.

> AI is just a nail gun, there still needs to be somebody who trains/operates it (like with ChatGPT) and who will ask for something in exchange.

Then there is no problem! This isn't an issue if AI isn't going to take jobs away.

But it's not how economy works.

People on top of the company don't make anything but earn more than anyone that does, Not like 2x more or 5x more but 10-1000x more. There is no person on earth that produces million of value a month in actual improvement of society, aside maybe a world leader that stops a wary from happening. Not a man in widget company making beepy boxes that spends time on meetings about barely related to that. And then neither them or corporation gets taxes nowhere close to what the normal employee is, so the corporate wealth doesn't even benefit the country it is in.

The whole problem is that any improvement in production is only tangentially passed to society and mostly exploited to make few wealthy

> And then neither them or corporation gets taxes nowhere close to what the normal employee is

How did you figure that? Corporate tax rate in the US is 21% which is roughly equivalent to an effective tax for a single filer with about $180K in income. Can't say we are talking about "normal employee" here. Besides if you are talking about dividends (which are distributed _after_ 21%), there is a dividend tax on top of that, which, depending on your share class, can be the same as a normal tax rate. So yeah, nowhere close, usually +21% for the preferred stock.

Also don't fall to that communist idea. I grew up in the USSR where we had a "fair" distribution (no, it wasn't fair) -- trust me, you don't want to live in that world. There were some upsides, but still, and it didn't end up well.

>If this was true, the main question we would ask in a business is whether or not the output was useful. We don't ask that, we ask if it's "sustainable", "profitable", etc...

To be fair, we do ask that: if you have no revenue, then you don't have a business, because the output is not useful. An output can be both useful and not sustainable. Giving away $100 to everyone that high fives you is not sustainable, for example, even though it's very useful to the recipient. It's certainly not profitable.

> if you have no revenue, then you don't have a business, because the output is not useful.

I'm having some trouble reconciling this with the rest of your comment. You go on to describe an output (giving money away) that is useful but provides no revenue.

I would agree that a useless product will very often have a hard time generating revenue, but I would not say that a lack of revenue is a strong signal that an organization is not producing useful output. I mean, the software industry is filled with examples of projects that are wildly useful to everyone but are perpetually underfunded and produce very little money for the people working on them.

I would definitely agree with the truism that "if you have no revenue then you don't have a business", but it's just not clear to me where the "because the output is not useful" addition to that truism is coming from.

People who have enough wealth to not work for a living seem to manage their boredom pretty well.

People who have earned enough wealth to not for a living do, though those who've worked hard enough to do that typically don't have much in their life but work.

People who simply have enough wealth to not have to work are on a hedonistic treadmill most of the time

However, the previous argument was about boredom, not about being "on a hedonistic treadmill", which sounds pretty vague, not to mention judgmental.

No, I haven't been, just know some people who are.

I don't understand what you're referring to. Where was your money going? I understand you still have expenses when you aren't working, but the expenses don't scale up on their own.

By this argument, hobbies do not exist.

Hobbies are relevant personally. Fits his definition.

Hobbies aren't necessarily only relevant to oneself, so no, they don't fit. Running a marathon can be a hobby, and lots of people compete in those together.

Not necessarily, but more often so than not. Even the competitions that you mention are only valuable to other hobbyists, and only in so far people's free times allow. Non-hobbyists are not likely to pay much to see those competitions. And when free time runs out, those hobbies are amongst the first things to go.

Someone has to grow, process, and ship your food. Mine the coal, or build and maintain the energy infrastructure. And roads. They expect to be paid because in many cases its work more than keeping busy. Those things that are more valuable or meaningful are valuable and meaningful to you, so not really a fair trade to the people doing work to support you.

I want to be polite about this, but I hate how I can correct one specific point on HN, and then I instantly need to defend an entire philosophy.

The comment I was replying to argued that we were talking about abolishing all meaningful human activity, and I pointed out that "meaningful human activity" and "gainful economic employment" are not the exact same category.

I don't really think that warrants having an extended debate about whether or not decoupling income from "work" is fair or not. And it's kind of a weird sequitur anyway, because all of the jobs you're talking about are paid noticeably less than white-collar jobs even though they are arguably way more essential than any of the programming work that we do. So for this to suddenly be a conversation about fairness... I mean, what conversation do you want to have, do you want to have a conversation about AI or about the entire history of wages and about how human beings value blue-collar jobs?

It's not a problem, it's just... people read way too much into comments like this. I'm just pointing out that "meaningful work" can happen outside of an economy, something that I think is a pretty obvious, uncontroversial point to state.