This isn't what the piece argues. It doesn't claim people need jobs to be happy, and the word "happy" doesn't appear in it. The argument is structural: when capital depends on labor, labor has political, economic, and democratic leverage. When that dependency ends, the leverage ends with it.

Whether people find meaning in work or outside of it is a separate question the piece doesn't take a position on, because it's not relevant to the point being made. The question isn't whether we can give people meaning without employment (I would argue that most of us find most of our meaning outside of work), but who has bargaining power in a system where human economic participation is unnecessary.

> "people need jobs to be happy, so we should design our society such that they need jobs"

No, this is not what the article said. It's more "people need jobs to have any kind of leverage in society" which is something different.

Star Trek isn't real life, when human labor stops being valuable the humans who's labor was previously vital will be at best left to rot in squalor.

>we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money

I think people get hung up on "job bad" and forget what the job is actually doing, functionally.

We are animals, on earth, attempting to survive. We have evolved where we actually really suck at doing it alone, but we do really well if we delegate the various needs of survival. Now, how do we make it so if you chopped wood in the forest you get a piece of the fishermans take? You can do it in kind, although that would quickly become logistically complicated due to the size of the logs and fish catches. Instead, we use money out of sheer convenience and its amazing properties of being a store of labor both past, present, and future.

So give everyone no jobs. Who fishes? Who chops wood? Someone or some thing has to do it right? And it needs to be delegated in some way. We can't all go happy go lucky and rave all day and fuck all night and have dozens of kids. Resources on the earth are finite. Forests will be depleted, fisheries crushed. There needs to be some counter to what would otherwise be runaway hedonism and resource depletion.

> not only is the premise wrong

The blog post offers several studies as evidence, where's yours?

You are ignoring the part where human labor is the leverage required for democracy to work.

> we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money

I agree, but those people will still need to eat and pay rent so I guess they're stuck either working or dying. People will always find something to do with themselves. You don't need to encourage people to explore their own passions much when they're able to do it. The need for jobs isn't really an issue as much as the need for money is.

I agree in theory, but this is so extremely far from the US political and social system that I think no nation has ever changed so much without being overthrown. So unless you’re talking about plans for a post-US world, this idea will always be theoretical and not how “the world” works.

Maybe people don't need jobs to be happy.

But it's a big change, and a better way to go about it, instead of huge layoffs is:reduce the hours of work gradually and equally. And possibly create some social infrastructure in the background, to fullfil the social roles of work.

> people need jobs to be happy

The happiness of the aristocracy depends on the spectacle of miserable workers performing humiliating tasks.

The problem is that he relies on a dubious Acemoglu estimate, without realizing that at best it's temporary. AI will be better than humans in doing tasks (the qualifiers don't matter in the aggregate). Any jobs then would be bullshit jobs, and everyone will know it.

https://aeon.co/essays/what-if-jobs-are-not-the-solution-but...

I'm sorry... you didn't understand the article.

The goal of having a job isn't happiness. At least not immediately. The goal is to have something to bargain with: employees offer labor, employers buy it. If employees don't deliver, they get fired, if employers don't deliver, employees leave / strike. This is what keeps system in a semblance of balance. But once would-be employees can be employees no more, they have no way of influencing any aspect of their governance. Not economical, not political, not military, not ethical.

In other words, people need jobs to try to secure their place in the world on multiple levels. It's not about socializing at work, at least, that factor is absolutely not a priority.

The solution is The Matrix.

The "real world" is just computers/AIs running everything in a pointless loop.

Humans aren't "batteries" (that never even made sense to begin with) but instead are living their happy lives in the simulation to provide something to simulate investment and shareholder value.

It's dumb, but it still seems more plausible than people accepting an overnight switch into the "space communism" of nobody needing to work. Everyone is too invested in their own spot in the hierarchy.

So there’s one reference to happy, investor happiness. There’s 4 to meaning though.

I don’t disagree with you but you’re also missing the scarier point that economic collapse will come before the meaning even is missed.

This article ideally should have been two. One about how a consumer economy without consumers cannot be an economy. Another about what comes next.

Assuming that’s true and AI is part of the solution, are you implying we should expect the AI overlords to create such a system? That will never happen. They have literally no incentives to decommodify the economy it’s what gives them power

Yeah, people need a creative output, not just for creativity sake but something that feels productive/constructive and beneficial to them and their society/community.

Open source is an example of such work, and amazing things have been achieved - arguably far more impressive and useful than any private tech company has achieved ( and arguably more than all for-profit tech companies combined).

We should focus on expanding the open source cooperative model to all other areas of society/productivity. With modern technology, knowledge availability, and AI, I don't see why people couldn't organize at the grassroots level and build/solve real problems their local (or global) communities may be facing.

I really don't see why we need all of the VCs, marketers and MBAs... No offense to anyone but the typical SV tech company structure and operations just don't even seem efficient... much of the focus is on marketing/manipulation, enshitification, dark patterns and other dishonest and ultimately counter-productive bullshit.

We should be able to organize and build open/cooperative alternatives to SV shitware (and not just software) and we should be able to outcompete the tech shittocracy.. simply because it's actually terribly shitty and inneficient.

> most people like the social aspect of work, but not being beholden to their boss

From what I see out there "being beholden to the boss" is the social aspect people like most. It is what gives the work purpose; knowing that you are pleasing someone else.

Some are quite capable of being their own boss, but the people who can actually sustain that long term seem few and far between. It seems that it becomes easy to spiral into a pit of depression when there is no clear feedback in the value being created. Having to regularly deal with another person is not always desirable but having to regularly deal with another person also forces the feedback loop to occur.

> we can give people meaning, community, culture, growth, without relying on employment and money

What's your proposal if not traditional work? The realistic outcome I see is shifting labor to unautomatable sectors like hospitality. That will keep people employed, but unhappy as they increasingly find themselves unable to find jobs they enjoy, or at comparable levels of income.

edit: I realize many people are unhappy with their jobs now, but by dint of labor, they can improve their lot. I am lamenting the closing of this window.

We would all love to move to a society where we don't have to work for others to survive, but our current system is fundamentally not set up to handle this situation. Capitalism is a useful system for employing scarce resources productively (most of the time) but it doesn't really have an answer for a post-scarcity world. If technology is developed to allow us to end scarcity, instead of everyone having enough, we will end up in a situation where the owners of that technology end up with far, far more than enough while the large majority of people who do not have anything to offer those owners will starve. That sounds dystopian (and it is) but I don't see how we avoid that fate with our current economic system.

You're absolutely right, and people will cite this while pointing to The Culture and saying "see, this is what we mean, everything will be fine."

Except nobody wants to get into the guts of how those systems came about. Nobody wants to discuss policy changes needed to ensure these sorts of outcomes, opportunities. Nobody wants to discuss regulations, tax schemes, land use requirements, accountability, ownership, shared prosperity.

Citing a potentiality as a certainty without any discussion as to how to get there is about as productive as daydreaming you're a billionaire and how you'd spend all that money. You have to do the fucking work, first, before any sliver of that outcome even becomes possible.

And if there's one thing the AIBros are adverse to, it's doing fucking work.

> we can do better than this

In theory we can do better than this, in practice we can't.

40% of the people in the US would rather starve to death themselves than live in a world where people they hate for their skin color get anything without toiling for it.