alt Hacker NewsI am probably different to most people, but I always have trouble understanding why people want to have jobs so much. The obvious and direct answer immediately of course is "to be able to pay the bills".
But of course if we automated those jobs with AI, we could direct AI produced value into universal basic income so people wouldn't lose their income.
Then the concern is of course, that the owners will not share the produced value.
But the answer to that in my view is that we should rather do work to be able reach a society where this value will be shared, and not rely on "jobs" being the key thing ultimately.
If I could choose, I would rather not work, and just do what I want to do all day, stress free, for the rest of my life. Also what is the point of doing the same jobs generation after generation? Most of the jobs in modern world aren't really what fit our evolutionary primitive desires in the first place, and it's forced stress.
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I think for me it's hard to conceptualize what "do what I want to do all day, stress free, for the rest of my life." really means. Maybe it's just because i've been conditioned since a child to expect to "work" and "do things", but periods of my life where i've had that similar amount of freedom have always felt somewhat aimless and purposeless to me. But would i feel that way if i had never felt the need to work and be productive? Not sure.
For me personally, having the right job is actually more interesting to me than doing whatever i want all day then given my conditioning. I think because without the job I wouldn't have the same opportunity to encounter the "problems" i enjoy "solving" at work with critical thinking. It's kinda like training for a sport? Sometimes having a competition or a game is a nice forcing function to make it all feel real?
I think most people, correctly in my opinion, look around at the powerful people in our society and think that there is ~0% chance they willingly hand over most of their wealth for the betterment of humanity. Pretty much every single action from people like elon/trump/altman/thiel shows the exact opposite. They would much rather have millions of slaves they can treat how they like, rather than a bunch of independent citizens with rights and opinions.
If AI does live up to the hype the surpluses might end up distributed to support basic needs for everyone, but there's no clean path to get there; it will take a long messy and likely violent fight to get there. Most people are currently comfortable enough to not want to go down that road, things will need to get a lot worse before they get better in this respect.
> we could direct AI produced value into universal basic income so people wouldn't lose their income.
I wish we lived in this reality. After what's happened in the last 10-12 years (in the USA, specifically) I think a significant enough number of people would rather watch their neighbors starve than give them or vote to give them anything they "didn't earn".
UBI is never coming man. Rich countries don’t even properly provide healthcare or take care of pensioners, let alone handing everyone a paycheck every month for doing nothing.
> But of course if we automated those jobs with AI, we could direct AI produced value into universal basic income so people wouldn't lose their income. Then the concern is of course, that the owners will not share the produced value.
We have a few hundred years of tax policy and politics to draw on here.
> we could direct AI produced value into universal basic income so people wouldn't lose their income.
This would never get approved in the USA. Think of the backlash here against "Obamaphones" and "welfare queens" - we can't even get paid parental leave approved! Let alone disability, social security or SNAP/food benefits. UBI is not even an option. Even now we're taking away food benefits and tying it to mandatory work- ie moving in the opposite direction. https://ktla.com/news/local-news/stricter-work-requirements-...
American voters are far too resistant against any sort of welfare and/or social assistance for UBI to ever be feasible.
Even during the great depression FDR was only able to get work for pay programs approved that assigned jobs like Conservation Corps, Public Works and WPA rather than just handing out cash. And to get that passed we needed widespread bank collapses, failed farms, starving people and catastrophic unemployment there was STILL heavy opposition to any/all government assistance programs because there is a very deep fear entrenched in the American psyche that government aid creates dependency and weakens individual responsibility.
There is a widespread false narrative in the USA that any sort of government help, assistance programs and/or payments is leftist socialism and communism.
I think most humans have some intrinsic desire to feel useful to their tribe, to feel like they earn their keep. I know people on the equivalent of UBI, and they're all miserable. I don't think we're wired to do nothing all day, and I don't think everyone has it in them to be self-motivated artists or craftspeople.
This is all just my personal experience, obviously. I don't have any data to back it up. But I know that even though my job bugs me sometimes, I'm a lot happier when I'm busy than not, and I work remotely. I like the feeling of accomplishment. But do I like it enough to build things for free? Probably not. I'd probably just sit around and spiral, like I've seen friends do on extended unemployment.
Anyway, this all is a moot point imo because as long as one person still has to work, the billionaire class will turn the "lazy freeloaders" on UBI into scapegoats. See: current politics.
>if we automated those jobs with AI, we could direct AI produced value into universal basic income
We've seen this play out twice in history now (industrial revolution, then globalization/offshoring). Every time the pitch has been that automation would make life easier by trickling down the surplus productivity gains. And yet here we are still working 5 days a week with more intense competition than ever. Fool me once...
And also most of what AI can automate today is the "services" economy which was never really that crucial in terms of biological existence. ChatGPT will not build housing, raise livestock, or perform surgery.
what you say about your desires makes perfect sense. I too would enjoy that kind of world. But how do you envision that playing out in reality?
Would you just nicely walk up to the White House and ask them to pass a law for UBI? Would you politely knock on Jeff Bezos’s door and ask him to share his billions?
no disrespect intended, but your comment strikes me as one that a young child might say. what I mean by that is - it feels very naïve about the (political and greed) problems we face in the world. Reality is there is a small club of extremely powerful and wealthy people who run the show. It’s a small club and we ain’t in it. if we lived 500 years ago, we could just force them to share. But that’s not going to happen in 2026 with a military and a police force, etc.
Some want jobs because it's all they've known and they don't know what to do with themselves without one. I imagine some of these people would find things to do if they had more time and energy to spend on things other than recovering from/for their jobs.
Some have that answer because they think it is entirely unrealistic to create or have the idealistic society you describe. I am part of this group. There are many things I have on my backlog that I'd like to accomplish, but too much of the required time and energy is taken up by my job. Yet, I still hold onto it desperately, because the alternative is much worse, and I have no way of fixing that.
> and just do what I want to do all day, stress free, for the rest of my life...
In a saner society, jobs would be the measure of how we are mutually useful and bound to each other, and UBI would be there so that people are not coerced with freezing and starvation into doing things. But, when was the last time people got to negotiate the social contract at such a deep level? The French Revolution? Maybe the Bolsheviks? If we could, would we be able to do a good job of setting up something like that? When one remembers that the biggest democracy on the planet keeps electing Trump, one loses hope.
How do you envision that playing out? It would basically be like everyone that didn’t still have a job living off minimum wage. Would no one be allowed to work also?
> just do what I want to do all day
Are the things that you want to do productive in any way? A sizeable portion of people have an innate drive to "produce" actual value.
Has it ever occured to you, presumably, a white collar worker, to "give back" to others less fortunate than you? With your presumably, well-above earnings, does it ever cross your mind to give a recurring stipend to some other people, even though it could make a real difference to someone?
Not really? I guess you got your answer.
> But of course if we automated those jobs with AI, we could direct AI produced value into universal basic income so people wouldn't lose their income
Why would I ever believe that this would happen at all though? I don't trust the people making decisions to actually do this
And even if they do, what does that look like for me? I find it difficult to believe that we would live unchanged. Are we talking nice urban apartments, big suburban houses, or shitty cyberpunk megacity apartment habs?
My sense of worth is tied to the work I do because the work I do can provide the income to afford the life I want and choose to live. Which is probably very different from the lifestyle that will "be provided for me" under a UBI plan
We’ve been there for nearly thirty years. We make more than enough food for everyone on earth. Yet it hasn’t happened. Why? Now ask if you and me getting fired changes the answer.
>But of course if we automated those jobs with AI, we could direct AI produced value into universal basic income so people wouldn't lose their income.
That would be very nice, but,
Will not happen in the US. For example in the US, minimum wage. That was suppose to be the minimum people needed to get by. Now with factoring in inflation, minimum wage does not pay for hardly anything now.
So in the US, if AI does what some people think it will do, we will end up with 2 classes. A small very rich class, probably segregated from everyone else, and a huge very poor class, maybe something like this:
I want a job because I need to pay the bills, as you said. But also, I like my job. It is a big part of my life, and I truly love what I do. Moreover, this is the one job skill I have, so if this career dies I'll have to resort to manual labor and the like. My job going away is an extremely unpleasant prospect for many reasons.
> But of course if we automated those jobs with AI, we could direct AI produced value into universal basic income so people wouldn't lose their income.
There isn't the remotest possible chance that this would happen. Any surplus (if indeed one exists, which isn't certain) would be pocketed by the mega rich who own the corporations.
If the US did not spend more than ever Western country combined on "Defense", and stuck to just, IDK, 75% of every Western country combined, we could do it today. At a bare minimum, we could eliminate homelessness and starvation, today. But we live in a society that believes cronie capitalism for capitalism's sake is more important than people's lives, because of the off chance some of them might be "lazy". UBI is never going to happen.
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That's easy to explain. We live in a society that will absolutely NOT do that. We will let people starve and die on the streets like it's some personal moral failure while we start minting trillionaires. Your job is food, water, shelter, transportation, health insurance, education and everything for your children.
There is an alternate reality where the benefits of automation are shread with society so that we don't have to work as much, collectively. But in the US in particular, that's "communism".
We are (IMHO) bouldering a future that I can only describe as neo-feudalism where nobody owns anything and the only housing and jobs are working on the estates of trillionaires, a techno-serf if you will. The intermediate stage is probably fascist apartheid states with ever-shrinking in-groups where an increasingly militarized police force is used to enforce order as wealth inequality spirals out of control.
Google has ~190k employees (according to Google) and an annual profit of $133 billion. So despite a bunch of people being comparatively well-paid, the profit per employee is still ~$700k. There were times when that was well over $1 million. So by other measures, you're still being underpaid at ~$500k+/year.
Nobody who trades their labor for income would legitimately trust simply getting money for existing because we created such surplus. What happens if the checks stop rolling? It is undesirable to be that dependent on the state, in an environment where faith in institutions has declined. To give up labor is to give up any leverage one possibly has in our system.