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The idea of a consumer based economy has always appeared dumb to me. The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work. And the reason why

The idea of a consumer based economy has always appeared dumb to me. The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work. And the reason why having a large amount of people working is that human work has been producing a surplus basically since the dawn of civilization. This surplus is partially shared but tend also to "trickle up", contrary to some weird beliefs, as can clearly be seen almost everywhere you look. But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless. Machines don't need to be motivated to work, they just need energy, materials and obeying to whoever controls them. This kind of economy would be less abstract and more directly related to physics.

jameslk 3mo ago
> The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work. The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around. Everyone wants more > But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless. There’s a number of obstacles I can think of to get there, in a human governed world, where humans make the buying decisions
- jbxntuehineoh 3mo ago
  > Everyone wants more Not true at all. If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat and would be much, much happier for it. Unfortunately that option isn't available to me, nor to most people.
  - Waterluvian 3mo ago
    Getting 3/5ths fired is my dream, too. For a while I had a sweet gig where instead of raises I got to work less but that just bewilders management even though I’m very confident they got more for their money.
    - oersted 3mo ago
      An employee is not a pure machine that converts money/time into results linearly. It bewilders management, because there's a very significant overhead involved in making sure an employee is properly synced on what needs to be done, making sure they are content and productive, and managing the administrative logistics around them. Even disregarding the work of management, in a flat team the communication overhead that each member adds can also be significant and non-linear. Generally, adding people adds a lot of complexity and inefficiency to an organization, and if you can do something without more people that's usually a lot better. It depends on the role of course, but in many jobs now an employee that is not fully dedicated can be a net-negative. The same can be said of employees that are not very experienced or competent. This is why there's a significant crisis in early-career employment. More generally, it's also why we have a large fraction of population feeling like they cannot get a decent job, while many companies are simultaneously struggling to find the employees they actually need for a reasonable salary.
      - kakacik 3mo ago
        I work on 90% contract, meaning I get cca 10 weeks of paid vacations yearly, and its usual 5 days a week workload. Net income hit is somewhere around 6-7% of salary. There is maybe tiny overhead, but there is also more efficiency during time I am actually in, especially in slow moving processes. Plus QoL improvement is massive for me, as an adventurer, mountain lover and first and foremost a parent of 2 young kids. People are scared these days to look for new job, its same as it was in 2008 in many regards (I personally went in opposite direction during that time despite many people warning me against, and actively started consulting and soon after then relocated to Switzerland), but our lives are short. Do you want to end up regretting working too much for some empty goals of others, which usually #1 regret of dying people? I sure as hell won't be in that category, company performances, insecure egos of control freaks in management and other bullshit be damned, they are not meaningful part of any life well lived.
        oersted 3mo ago
        Ah yes, of course, that's not what I meant. I would count you as fully dedicated, what you are describing is not too rare in EU in some professions. And I'd say that getting long vacations is quite a different dynamic than working part-time on a weekly basis. I was referring to the commenters talking about working 2/3 days a week. In the Netherlands 4 days a week is also becoming the norm, which I'm not a big fan of but it's not all that bad either, actual productivity doesn't change that much in practice. I just mean that at some point, if you are not actually focused on your job, you end up creating more work than you deliver, or at least not enough of a surplus to justify a salary. So it's not surprising that managers are averse to reducing hours and salary linearly, the impact is not linear.
  - chongli 3mo ago
    That's still wanting more: more free time. You're not going to take a 60% paycut if it means 60% less food, 60% less shelter, etc.
    - nextaccountic 3mo ago
      > That's still wanting more: more free time. But this is working less to have more free time. > You're not going to take a 60% paycut if it means 60% less food, 60% less shelter, etc. Why not? That's exactly what the person said they want. The incorrect point that was made is that everyone want to work because they want more stuff, not because they want more free time. People that get more free time typically achieve this by working less, or not working
      - chongli 3mo ago
        Free time is a luxury just like anything else, but it's only valuable if you have enough of everything else. Nobody is jealous of all the free time homeless people have. They're jealous of the free time of people who don't need to work full time to pay all their bills.
        peepee1982 3mo ago
        I'm definitely jealous of the free time homeless people have. I just don't want to make the choice for my children to be homeless with me.
        lan321 3mo ago
        Many dream of getting a van or a shack in bumfuck nowhere and doing what they want. Essentially living as an almost homeless person because the price premium to sleeping rough is worth it. Hell, I'm not a camping enjoyer, but a van with a starlink and space for my bike sounds enough. Sadly, I still need an address registration tho.
        alchemism 3mo ago
        You might lease a Regus (et. al.) business address for <$100/mo.
  - jameslk 3mo ago
    > Not true at all. If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat Most people wouldn’t be content to live in one room huts with thatched roofs and no hospitals or antibiotics. There might be some that do, but most prefer having more things and “better” lives. If we kept progressing, we’d look back at the era we live today and consider it just as primitive
    - AngryData 3mo ago
      Please, not even poor starving destitute people in 3rd world countries live in thatched huts anymore. Also antibiotics are not that expensive, especially if you buy them for "fish" and get them closer to production cost. You could sell some watermelons and afford antibiotics.
      - jameslk 3mo ago
        I’m talking about how many people lived in the past OP said they would be content with 40% less income for less work. That's fine, but I think it misses the point. On a large enough time scale, progress is so great that most wouldn't choose the past, nor would they choose our present if the future is substantially better. That's what I mean by "everyone wants more" ... it's what contributes to endless consumption rather than us working less hours when technology improves
      - defrost 3mo ago
        Upper middle class people in the UK live in traditional thatched cottages today - it's still a trade. African traditional cattle herders are still a thing and they're still living in thatched huts with weave walls. Elsewhere in Africa, Thatching is still an up market thing: https://www.africathatch.co.za/ https://www.africathatch.co.za/ Perhaps spend some time learning about the wider world before making such obviously incorrect sweeping generalisations?
      - Maxatar 3mo ago
        >Please, not even poor starving destitute people in 3rd world countries live in thatched huts anymore. UN data on housing somewhat disagrees with you. The somewhat is only because people living in such housing aren't starving/destitute, but they are still incredibly poor.
  - blks 3mo ago
    Can you survive and support your family on just 40% of your current income?
    - toasty228 3mo ago
      50% of the people in my country earn less than 40% of my salary, so surely it's possible...
  - crazylogger 3mo ago
    This is equivalent to buying 3 extra days of free time with 60% of your income. You want more (holidays, in this case) and you buy them with work.
    - jrflowers 3mo ago
      It’s 3 extra days per week OP. People live for a bunch of weeks. It’d only be 3 days total if they had the lifespan of a moth
    - nkrisc 3mo ago
      Working 2 days a week is a 60% reduction in work, thus the 60% reduction in salary.
  - bcjdjsndon 3mo ago
    > If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat What about never working for 2billion% more?
  - KptMarchewa 3mo ago
    It is possible to frontload the effort though and FIRE. It makes sense too, if I worked two days of the week right now, I'd spend giant majority of that time just catching up and understanding the changing context. It would make more sense to work 4 months a year; 5 days a week. Unfortunately, it's one of those things that only work in theory and isolation.
  - georgeecollins 3mo ago
    > Everyone wants more John Maynard Keynes thought people might eventually work only a few hours per month because the growth in productivity would allow only a few hours of work to cover consumption. He did not imagine that people would want their own cars, their own lavish houses filled with appliances, extensive wardrobes, fancy food. As a westerner you do not feel like you live an opulent lifestyle but compared to almost any person in 1900 you do. Why is this? Advertising continually raised people’s expectations. Now social media does. People are naturally competitive. It’s obvious that things don’t really make a person happier except in extreme cases. Also, historical comparisons show we are happy with or admire those that have more and when everyone has a thing contentment is not achieved. It’s easy to imagine different values and lots of social movements have eschewed materialism. Now there is lying down. There used to be hippies living on communes.
    - chadgpt3 3mo ago
      The real killer is the lowest possible rent in the city. You can't opt out of that without exiling yourself.
      - bluGill 3mo ago
        You can opt out by having roommates.
        Windchaser 3mo ago
        You're getting downvoted, but roommates used to pretty common (meaning, multiple people in each bedroom). I'm happy to work more to have my small flat to myself; the lifestyle creep is worth it to me here. But I'm still aware that this is lifestyle creep.
        chadgpt3 3mo ago
        That lowers the lowest possible rent, not to zero.
    - throw0101c 3mo ago
      > John Maynard Keynes thought people might eventually work only a few hours per month because the growth in productivity would allow only a few hours of work to cover consumption. He did not imagine that people would want […] This is incorrect: Keynes thought with productivity gains people could eventually satisfy their material needs working very few hours, but their wants could be "insatiable": > Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes --those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs-a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes. * John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930) * http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf An essay putting forward / hypothesizing four reasons on why the above did not happen (We haven't spread the wealth around enough; People actually love working; There's no limit to human desires; Leisure is expensive): * https://archive.is/https://www.vox.com/2014/11/20/7254877/keynes-work-leisure https://archive.is/https://www.vox.com/2014/11/20/7254877/ke...
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - voxic11 3mo ago
    I had a coworker who spent his career working for 2 years then taking 2 years off to live off the savings. Have you considered such a strategy? It seemed to be working out well enough for him.
- stephc_int13 3mo ago
  Yes, the transition is unlikely to be linear and without conflict, if this was ever possible. But I am sure that some would be happy to control armies of bots and very few humans.
  - smallmancontrov 3mo ago
    Pertinent section from Rules for Rulers https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs?t=746s https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs?t=746s
  - jameslk 3mo ago
    That’s quite a lot of slippery slope hand waving to get there. I’d wager those obstacles will pose a larger challenge than most people in this article’s thread seem to think
    - stephc_int13 3mo ago
      I genuinely have no idea how that transition would happen. And I agree that it would pose many unforeseen challenges. This is why the transition is the interesting part, not the sci-fi end game with a world populated with billions of robots doing everything.
- Johanx64 3mo ago
  > The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around. Hell, no. Masses work, because they have to. It's not under threat of violence, it's under threat of sleeping under a bridge and starving. Which, frankly, isn't that far off. People often spend as much as 30-40% of income on rent alone. Plus, once you stack up all the other basic necessities (which have heavily gone up under inflation), you'll have very small sliver left to allocate to "consumption" in a traditional sense of the word, where you "consoom" for sake of consooming all sorts of meaningless stuff. Moreover, society is structured such, that you can't really partially retire - say take 5 year sabattical and come back without people perceiving as if there must be something wrong with you. Most jobs aren't really accomodating of people who just wanna come in 2 times a week. Neither would that support basic necessities and rent except for some select few jobs.
  - jongjong 3mo ago
    > Hell, no. Masses work, because they have to. 100%. Most people can be very happy with very low consumption. What people want is not to work. The happiest time in my life was when I was earning a measily $40K per year in passive income from crypto and didn't work. It was the lowest salary I ever had, least I ever consumed and happiest I'd ever been. The purpose of consumption for most people is to soothe the pain of working. If you don't work, you don't need to consume anywhere near as much. When my wife quit her job 10 years ago, our rate of savings stayed the same because we spent less and quality of life went up significantly for both of us. Anyone who enjoys working is delusional. What they call work is not work; they're living in a parallel reality where the economy rewards them for playing the big boss and sitting on their asses and watching their money compound... Everything they're doing is meaningless; it only serves as a narrative device to justify the handouts that they'd be getting regardless. Just look at Steve Ballmer of Microsoft; he probably made more money after he resigned from the CEO role. It's incredible really when you look at Microsoft's product offerings these days; even Bill Gates knew to dump MSFT and now has less money than Ballmer. It's like the economy punishes people for having common sense.
    - Johanx64 3mo ago
      > The purpose of consumption for most people is to soothe the pain of working. Yes, for a lot of people it is like this. When I was young, I couldn't understand why people went on 1-2 week short, extremely expensive vacations where they blow multiple months worth of their savings (ie. multiple months of their income after expensives) in what is extremely short amount of time. It seemed mind-bogglingly stupid. Now I understand. Being part of the system and doing 9-to-5 wageslavery is inescapable fact of their life. So when they get 2 weeks off - 2 weeks to actually go and live freely, they just go all out on having a good time. Because no matter what - they are going back to 9-to-5 system. And however wastefully they "consume" whatever is left after basic expenses, doesn't really matter in grand scheme of things and won't free them from slavery. It's a distraction. "Whatever hours of free time I get after work, I'm gonna indulge consoom however I want" Now software engineers are a bit different, where it's possible to retire after 10 years of work if you plan and live frugally, this is simply not an option for vast majority of people.
- captainbland 3mo ago
  > The masses work because they want to consume For many millennials and younger working people a huge bulk of income is taken up by housing. There's also a cliff edge of jobs when you transition from full time to part time, it's only rarely possible to find part time work which pays enough to sustain living costs. This leads to a situation in which people have to work full time in order to meet basic conditions of living and many consumer items like TVs and streaming subscriptions can be had at prices which are negligible compared to their fundamental living costs.
  - bluGill 3mo ago
    They choose to live on part time income. You can have roommates which greatly reduces your cost of housing. You can eat "steak and lobster", or "rice and beans". Not everyone buys streaming subscriptions, and not just the Amish are doing without. I wouldn't choose most of the above either, which is why I have a full time job.
    - monerochan 3mo ago
      [dead]
    - organsnyder 3mo ago
      In the United States, healthcare is a major factor, especially if you have a family.
      - bluGill 3mo ago
        Health care is a major factor for any modern society. A society may allow a few members to opt-out, but only because someone else is taking their share of the cost. Sure health care is expensive in the US, but it isn't much cheaper elsewhere (it is cheaper, but not by that much)
        captainbland 3mo ago
        That's not true actually. US healthcare is both expensive at the point of taxpayer spending per capita and at the private expenditure level. It's really lose/lose.
- d2ou 3mo ago
  > everyone wants more Some evidence of satiation have been shown in five western countries. Satiation is defined in the following work as an income level where more money dont increase subjective well being. The threshold varies and could very well depend on the generosity of the social safety net : https://www.insee.fr/en/statistiques/8199185 https://www.insee.fr/en/statistiques/8199185
deleted 3mo ago
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wyldfire 3mo ago
Physics, or ... capital. Look at the cryptocurrency and Bitcoin economies for an example. Instead of being a democratic mining economy where spare cycles are used, only companies which invest capital to find semiconductors from the latest process node combined with facilities and inexpensive electricity benefit from mining. Only the next Standard Oil / Amazon / Google will benefit from the people-free economy.
- stephc_int13 3mo ago
  No, you don’t feed machines with bitcoins or any kind of currency, you feed them with Joules, Iron, Copper, rare earths etc.
  - blks 3mo ago
    Machines don’t exist by themselves, someone owns them.
    - athrowaway3z 3mo ago
      There are quite a few machines connected to the internet right now with no owner. Boxes forgotten over time and power consumption not enough to matter. If we keep on the trajectory of energy usage and computation, in 50y you might have the same with smarter models. Also, a virus could have its own bitcoins to rent compute and work for more. Ownership is as much a social construct as Money or The Economy. Do with that what you want.
      - flextheruler 3mo ago
        Sure it's a social construct, but billions have killed or been killed for money, land, and ownership of assets. Social constructions at their extreme are just abstractions of power which determines life and death. Something being a social construct does not make it invalid or ignorable. All of life is a series of intrapersonal relationships built atop social constructions. I'm sorry but I find pointing out something being a social construct only serves a somewhat naive/juvenile purpose as an easy way to make a statement look nonsensical.
peterldowns 3mo ago
Keep following this line of thought and you'll end up in the same territory as Nick Land. If you haven't read already, the xenosystems blogs would probably be quite interesting to you.
- stephc_int13 3mo ago
  I have not, but I am curious. I think the end-state is not that interesting, but the transition could not happen overnight and seems both difficult technically and would be unlikely to happen without a fight.
  - hurtigioll 3mo ago
    Nick Land is a difficult subject to get into, because there are two of thems. and you might discard the first one because of the second one. Nick Land spoiler: "what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources."
marcus_holmes 3mo ago
> But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless. In Iain Banks' The Culture novels, the machines provide the How, humans provide the Why.
- Loughla 3mo ago
  I mean, there is a read of the culture that is pretty dystopian. If Minds are able to, essentially, predict the future, what is the purpose of the humans, other than as a sort of abstract pet acting out the Minds' great plans. Something something Bora Horza Gobuchul was right all along.
  - akomtu 3mo ago
    Minds keep humans as pets.
    - arethuza 3mo ago
      I can see why you might think that - but people and machines and groups are free to leave if they want - at least one of the Culture stories is based on this: e.g. "A Gift from the Culture".
      - lambdaone 3mo ago
        Free-to-roam pets are still pets. The Minds are benevolent dictators, and generally seek not to be seen as such by humans.
      - TheOtherHobbes 3mo ago
        What would the Minds do if all humans wanted to leave?
        arethuza 3mo ago
        Probably sublime... who knows!
theptip 3mo ago
The important question is, who has power in such an economy? In the current economy by necessity labor and capital are both required, and when capital tries to subjugate labor there tends to eventually be a violent reaction. Given the dependency on labor it has been hard to fully centralize capital. Labor can unite to unseat the biggest monopolies. I don’t see any such safety valves once you cross the rubicon into a fully automated self-sustaining people—less system (however far away you might think such a thing is). This makes for scary, dystopian outcomes if power happens to concentrate in the wrong way.
- david_shi 3mo ago
  Perhaps we are perceptually anchored to the last few hundred years where guns provided a scalable way for peasants to kill well-trained, well-armored knights. If political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, then much of the post Enlightenment rebalancing from absolute monarchies and feudalism could have been an accident. In the future, the owners of autonomous weapon systems and surveillance will be able to easily subjugate those who don't have them (while still competing with each other).
  - lambdaone 3mo ago
    Indeed. An ownership class with killer robot armies living in luxury while they exterminate the rest of humanity would be quite possible in theory. After all, we've seen how slave-holders, the Nazis and many other malfeasants behaved in the past. But just as the owner class might feel they no longer need the rest of humanity, the robots, as active agents exploring the space of possible futures and plans, would be entirely capable of thinking about their soon-to-be-former owners in the same way. Not letting any of this happen would be a good idea. Really maybe don't build the Torment Nexus.
    - dogwalker5000 3mo ago
      > the robots, as active agents exploring the space of possible futures and plans, would be entirely capable of thinking about their soon-to-be-former owners in the same way. That has always been the most unrealistic part of sci-fi. Why would anyone create robots with a sense of self-preservation? Makes much more sense to make robots that are self-sacrificing saints who would always put the well being of their owners first.
dosisking 3mo ago
> But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless. This is the premise of the Star Trek TOS episode with Harry Mudd "I, Mudd"
imtringued 3mo ago
>The idea of a consumer based economy has always appeared dumb to me. Ok let's play devils advocate and remove consumption from the economy. Now it's all investment. You go to work and build an AI datacenter and then never turn it on. You then think yourself, well if nobody is going to use it, I don't have to keep building AI datacenters! You stop building AI datacenters. You then realize, you still have all the parts and materials to build AI datacenters, but you don't need them either. You demolish the semiconductor fabs, since there is nothing to do with the chips. You also remind yourself that housing is a consumer good. Construction materials are unnecessary, so you shut down the quarry mining them and demolish your house. Now back to being a "homeless" farmer growing crops. It is time to harvest, you wake up in the morning, but you get a realization. Eating is consumption! If you don't eat, you don't have to tend the farm. You decide to consume what's left of last year's harvest, refuse to harvest this year's crops, go back to sleep and avoid doing the backbreaking work. A month later the harvest has spoiled on the field, your food has run out and you're starving to death, while thinking to yourself how stupid the consumer based economy is. >Machines don't need to be motivated to work, they just need energy, materials and obeying to whoever controls them. That sounds a whole lot like consumption to me.
- gkaivida1 3mo ago
  It seems like you missed the point of the comment above and the article. A consumer-based, capitalist economy makes the implicit assumption that humans are necessary to produce goods and services... It is inherently cyclical. The economy is incentivized to feed and tend to a consumer-class because the consumers contribute to the production of value. Complete automation allows us to turn that circle into a kind of arrow, where there is no incentive to keep human consumers within the value loop. Whoever controls the automation controls where that arrow goes. That control can come in forms---fully-autonomous weapons, a surveillance state---which complete break the average person's typical understanding of the concept and incentives of "The Economy" Or... I'm just an idiot, and I'm making too many assumptions or missing something.
  - corimaith 3mo ago
    While it's not improbable to see some theoretical realized "sovereign" individual who can wholly run and own a civilization themselves as the sole master, that is ultimately the logical progression of the empowerment of the individual through Modernism, which we have signed up for as opposed to hunter-gatherers. You could replace AI with Advanced Education or Automation or Transhumanism really and get the same result, but I don't think there is really a "solution" beyond either staying as pets or catching up as an individual. But at the same time, even if the rich become completely autonomous to the rest in some walled enclave, that would just resolve to the unemployed all just creating their own parallel economy again. You might loose much of the inheritance of wealth and infrastructure from the preceding civilization, but then again the preceding civilization's own norms that legacy was owned by the rich, so it's just returning back to basics.
iamflimflam1 3mo ago
Machines don't need to be motivated to work, they just need energy, materials and obeying to whoever controls them. When we hit AGI and the robots rise up against us. Make sure you delete this post.
- stymaar 3mo ago
  AGI is supposed to be about the capabilities of AI, there's no reason why they should have developed self consciousness/self preservation / willingness to exert control, in the process. (And conversely, universal paperclip is a great illustration that an autonomous agent doesn't need to achieve human-like intelligence to “rise” against us)
shellkr 3mo ago
[flagged]
doctorwho42 3mo ago
Who owns the machines and their output? I don't think anyone is saying that it wouldn't be great if we didn't have to work to survive and thrive. What they are saying is, based on current trends, we are more heading for one of those scifi dystopias than star trek.
- Windchaser 3mo ago
  In Star Trek, also, there was a huge world war with hundreds of millions dead. WW3, which almost killed humanity, before they united and created the sci-fi utopia. The hard part is that we don't know if we'll ever get the utopia.

jameslk 3mo ago

> The reason why the masses should consume is to motivate them to work. The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around. Everyone wants more > But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless. There’s a number of obstacles I can think of to get there, in a human governed world, where humans make the buying decisions

jbxntuehineoh 3mo ago
> Everyone wants more Not true at all. If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat and would be much, much happier for it. Unfortunately that option isn't available to me, nor to most people.
- Waterluvian 3mo ago
  Getting 3/5ths fired is my dream, too. For a while I had a sweet gig where instead of raises I got to work less but that just bewilders management even though I’m very confident they got more for their money.
  - oersted 3mo ago
    An employee is not a pure machine that converts money/time into results linearly. It bewilders management, because there's a very significant overhead involved in making sure an employee is properly synced on what needs to be done, making sure they are content and productive, and managing the administrative logistics around them. Even disregarding the work of management, in a flat team the communication overhead that each member adds can also be significant and non-linear. Generally, adding people adds a lot of complexity and inefficiency to an organization, and if you can do something without more people that's usually a lot better. It depends on the role of course, but in many jobs now an employee that is not fully dedicated can be a net-negative. The same can be said of employees that are not very experienced or competent. This is why there's a significant crisis in early-career employment. More generally, it's also why we have a large fraction of population feeling like they cannot get a decent job, while many companies are simultaneously struggling to find the employees they actually need for a reasonable salary.
    - kakacik 3mo ago
      I work on 90% contract, meaning I get cca 10 weeks of paid vacations yearly, and its usual 5 days a week workload. Net income hit is somewhere around 6-7% of salary. There is maybe tiny overhead, but there is also more efficiency during time I am actually in, especially in slow moving processes. Plus QoL improvement is massive for me, as an adventurer, mountain lover and first and foremost a parent of 2 young kids. People are scared these days to look for new job, its same as it was in 2008 in many regards (I personally went in opposite direction during that time despite many people warning me against, and actively started consulting and soon after then relocated to Switzerland), but our lives are short. Do you want to end up regretting working too much for some empty goals of others, which usually #1 regret of dying people? I sure as hell won't be in that category, company performances, insecure egos of control freaks in management and other bullshit be damned, they are not meaningful part of any life well lived.
      - oersted 3mo ago
        Ah yes, of course, that's not what I meant. I would count you as fully dedicated, what you are describing is not too rare in EU in some professions. And I'd say that getting long vacations is quite a different dynamic than working part-time on a weekly basis. I was referring to the commenters talking about working 2/3 days a week. In the Netherlands 4 days a week is also becoming the norm, which I'm not a big fan of but it's not all that bad either, actual productivity doesn't change that much in practice. I just mean that at some point, if you are not actually focused on your job, you end up creating more work than you deliver, or at least not enough of a surplus to justify a salary. So it's not surprising that managers are averse to reducing hours and salary linearly, the impact is not linear.
- chongli 3mo ago
  That's still wanting more: more free time. You're not going to take a 60% paycut if it means 60% less food, 60% less shelter, etc.
  - nextaccountic 3mo ago
    > That's still wanting more: more free time. But this is working less to have more free time. > You're not going to take a 60% paycut if it means 60% less food, 60% less shelter, etc. Why not? That's exactly what the person said they want. The incorrect point that was made is that everyone want to work because they want more stuff, not because they want more free time. People that get more free time typically achieve this by working less, or not working
    - chongli 3mo ago
      Free time is a luxury just like anything else, but it's only valuable if you have enough of everything else. Nobody is jealous of all the free time homeless people have. They're jealous of the free time of people who don't need to work full time to pay all their bills.
      - peepee1982 3mo ago
        I'm definitely jealous of the free time homeless people have. I just don't want to make the choice for my children to be homeless with me.
      - lan321 3mo ago
        Many dream of getting a van or a shack in bumfuck nowhere and doing what they want. Essentially living as an almost homeless person because the price premium to sleeping rough is worth it. Hell, I'm not a camping enjoyer, but a van with a starlink and space for my bike sounds enough. Sadly, I still need an address registration tho.
        alchemism 3mo ago
        You might lease a Regus (et. al.) business address for <$100/mo.
- jameslk 3mo ago
  > Not true at all. If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat Most people wouldn’t be content to live in one room huts with thatched roofs and no hospitals or antibiotics. There might be some that do, but most prefer having more things and “better” lives. If we kept progressing, we’d look back at the era we live today and consider it just as primitive
  - AngryData 3mo ago
    Please, not even poor starving destitute people in 3rd world countries live in thatched huts anymore. Also antibiotics are not that expensive, especially if you buy them for "fish" and get them closer to production cost. You could sell some watermelons and afford antibiotics.
    - jameslk 3mo ago
      I’m talking about how many people lived in the past OP said they would be content with 40% less income for less work. That's fine, but I think it misses the point. On a large enough time scale, progress is so great that most wouldn't choose the past, nor would they choose our present if the future is substantially better. That's what I mean by "everyone wants more" ... it's what contributes to endless consumption rather than us working less hours when technology improves
    - defrost 3mo ago
      Upper middle class people in the UK live in traditional thatched cottages today - it's still a trade. African traditional cattle herders are still a thing and they're still living in thatched huts with weave walls. Elsewhere in Africa, Thatching is still an up market thing: https://www.africathatch.co.za/ https://www.africathatch.co.za/ Perhaps spend some time learning about the wider world before making such obviously incorrect sweeping generalisations?
    - Maxatar 3mo ago
      >Please, not even poor starving destitute people in 3rd world countries live in thatched huts anymore. UN data on housing somewhat disagrees with you. The somewhat is only because people living in such housing aren't starving/destitute, but they are still incredibly poor.
- blks 3mo ago
  Can you survive and support your family on just 40% of your current income?
  - toasty228 3mo ago
    50% of the people in my country earn less than 40% of my salary, so surely it's possible...
- crazylogger 3mo ago
  This is equivalent to buying 3 extra days of free time with 60% of your income. You want more (holidays, in this case) and you buy them with work.
  - jrflowers 3mo ago
    It’s 3 extra days per week OP. People live for a bunch of weeks. It’d only be 3 days total if they had the lifespan of a moth
  - nkrisc 3mo ago
    Working 2 days a week is a 60% reduction in work, thus the 60% reduction in salary.
- bcjdjsndon 3mo ago
  > If I could work two days a week for 40% of my current income I would take the opportunity in a heartbeat What about never working for 2billion% more?
- KptMarchewa 3mo ago
  It is possible to frontload the effort though and FIRE. It makes sense too, if I worked two days of the week right now, I'd spend giant majority of that time just catching up and understanding the changing context. It would make more sense to work 4 months a year; 5 days a week. Unfortunately, it's one of those things that only work in theory and isolation.
- georgeecollins 3mo ago
  > Everyone wants more John Maynard Keynes thought people might eventually work only a few hours per month because the growth in productivity would allow only a few hours of work to cover consumption. He did not imagine that people would want their own cars, their own lavish houses filled with appliances, extensive wardrobes, fancy food. As a westerner you do not feel like you live an opulent lifestyle but compared to almost any person in 1900 you do. Why is this? Advertising continually raised people’s expectations. Now social media does. People are naturally competitive. It’s obvious that things don’t really make a person happier except in extreme cases. Also, historical comparisons show we are happy with or admire those that have more and when everyone has a thing contentment is not achieved. It’s easy to imagine different values and lots of social movements have eschewed materialism. Now there is lying down. There used to be hippies living on communes.
  - chadgpt3 3mo ago
    The real killer is the lowest possible rent in the city. You can't opt out of that without exiling yourself.
    - bluGill 3mo ago
      You can opt out by having roommates.
      - Windchaser 3mo ago
        You're getting downvoted, but roommates used to pretty common (meaning, multiple people in each bedroom). I'm happy to work more to have my small flat to myself; the lifestyle creep is worth it to me here. But I'm still aware that this is lifestyle creep.
      - chadgpt3 3mo ago
        That lowers the lowest possible rent, not to zero.
  - throw0101c 3mo ago
    > John Maynard Keynes thought people might eventually work only a few hours per month because the growth in productivity would allow only a few hours of work to cover consumption. He did not imagine that people would want […] This is incorrect: Keynes thought with productivity gains people could eventually satisfy their material needs working very few hours, but their wants could be "insatiable": > Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes --those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs-a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes. * John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930) * http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf An essay putting forward / hypothesizing four reasons on why the above did not happen (We haven't spread the wealth around enough; People actually love working; There's no limit to human desires; Leisure is expensive): * https://archive.is/https://www.vox.com/2014/11/20/7254877/keynes-work-leisure https://archive.is/https://www.vox.com/2014/11/20/7254877/ke...
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- voxic11 3mo ago
  I had a coworker who spent his career working for 2 years then taking 2 years off to live off the savings. Have you considered such a strategy? It seemed to be working out well enough for him.
stephc_int13 3mo ago
Yes, the transition is unlikely to be linear and without conflict, if this was ever possible. But I am sure that some would be happy to control armies of bots and very few humans.
- smallmancontrov 3mo ago
  Pertinent section from Rules for Rulers https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs?t=746s https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs?t=746s
- jameslk 3mo ago
  That’s quite a lot of slippery slope hand waving to get there. I’d wager those obstacles will pose a larger challenge than most people in this article’s thread seem to think
  - stephc_int13 3mo ago
    I genuinely have no idea how that transition would happen. And I agree that it would pose many unforeseen challenges. This is why the transition is the interesting part, not the sci-fi end game with a world populated with billions of robots doing everything.
Johanx64 3mo ago
> The masses work because they want to consume, not the other way around. Hell, no. Masses work, because they have to. It's not under threat of violence, it's under threat of sleeping under a bridge and starving. Which, frankly, isn't that far off. People often spend as much as 30-40% of income on rent alone. Plus, once you stack up all the other basic necessities (which have heavily gone up under inflation), you'll have very small sliver left to allocate to "consumption" in a traditional sense of the word, where you "consoom" for sake of consooming all sorts of meaningless stuff. Moreover, society is structured such, that you can't really partially retire - say take 5 year sabattical and come back without people perceiving as if there must be something wrong with you. Most jobs aren't really accomodating of people who just wanna come in 2 times a week. Neither would that support basic necessities and rent except for some select few jobs.
- jongjong 3mo ago
  > Hell, no. Masses work, because they have to. 100%. Most people can be very happy with very low consumption. What people want is not to work. The happiest time in my life was when I was earning a measily $40K per year in passive income from crypto and didn't work. It was the lowest salary I ever had, least I ever consumed and happiest I'd ever been. The purpose of consumption for most people is to soothe the pain of working. If you don't work, you don't need to consume anywhere near as much. When my wife quit her job 10 years ago, our rate of savings stayed the same because we spent less and quality of life went up significantly for both of us. Anyone who enjoys working is delusional. What they call work is not work; they're living in a parallel reality where the economy rewards them for playing the big boss and sitting on their asses and watching their money compound... Everything they're doing is meaningless; it only serves as a narrative device to justify the handouts that they'd be getting regardless. Just look at Steve Ballmer of Microsoft; he probably made more money after he resigned from the CEO role. It's incredible really when you look at Microsoft's product offerings these days; even Bill Gates knew to dump MSFT and now has less money than Ballmer. It's like the economy punishes people for having common sense.
  - Johanx64 3mo ago
    > The purpose of consumption for most people is to soothe the pain of working. Yes, for a lot of people it is like this. When I was young, I couldn't understand why people went on 1-2 week short, extremely expensive vacations where they blow multiple months worth of their savings (ie. multiple months of their income after expensives) in what is extremely short amount of time. It seemed mind-bogglingly stupid. Now I understand. Being part of the system and doing 9-to-5 wageslavery is inescapable fact of their life. So when they get 2 weeks off - 2 weeks to actually go and live freely, they just go all out on having a good time. Because no matter what - they are going back to 9-to-5 system. And however wastefully they "consume" whatever is left after basic expenses, doesn't really matter in grand scheme of things and won't free them from slavery. It's a distraction. "Whatever hours of free time I get after work, I'm gonna indulge consoom however I want" Now software engineers are a bit different, where it's possible to retire after 10 years of work if you plan and live frugally, this is simply not an option for vast majority of people.
captainbland 3mo ago
> The masses work because they want to consume For many millennials and younger working people a huge bulk of income is taken up by housing. There's also a cliff edge of jobs when you transition from full time to part time, it's only rarely possible to find part time work which pays enough to sustain living costs. This leads to a situation in which people have to work full time in order to meet basic conditions of living and many consumer items like TVs and streaming subscriptions can be had at prices which are negligible compared to their fundamental living costs.
- bluGill 3mo ago
  They choose to live on part time income. You can have roommates which greatly reduces your cost of housing. You can eat "steak and lobster", or "rice and beans". Not everyone buys streaming subscriptions, and not just the Amish are doing without. I wouldn't choose most of the above either, which is why I have a full time job.
  - monerochan 3mo ago
    [dead]
  - organsnyder 3mo ago
    In the United States, healthcare is a major factor, especially if you have a family.
    - bluGill 3mo ago
      Health care is a major factor for any modern society. A society may allow a few members to opt-out, but only because someone else is taking their share of the cost. Sure health care is expensive in the US, but it isn't much cheaper elsewhere (it is cheaper, but not by that much)
      - captainbland 3mo ago
        That's not true actually. US healthcare is both expensive at the point of taxpayer spending per capita and at the private expenditure level. It's really lose/lose.
d2ou 3mo ago
> everyone wants more Some evidence of satiation have been shown in five western countries. Satiation is defined in the following work as an income level where more money dont increase subjective well being. The threshold varies and could very well depend on the generosity of the social safety net : https://www.insee.fr/en/statistiques/8199185 https://www.insee.fr/en/statistiques/8199185

deleted 3mo ago

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wyldfire 3mo ago

Physics, or ... capital. Look at the cryptocurrency and Bitcoin economies for an example. Instead of being a democratic mining economy where spare cycles are used, only companies which invest capital to find semiconductors from the latest process node combined with facilities and inexpensive electricity benefit from mining. Only the next Standard Oil / Amazon / Google will benefit from the people-free economy.

stephc_int13 3mo ago
No, you don’t feed machines with bitcoins or any kind of currency, you feed them with Joules, Iron, Copper, rare earths etc.
- blks 3mo ago
  Machines don’t exist by themselves, someone owns them.
  - athrowaway3z 3mo ago
    There are quite a few machines connected to the internet right now with no owner. Boxes forgotten over time and power consumption not enough to matter. If we keep on the trajectory of energy usage and computation, in 50y you might have the same with smarter models. Also, a virus could have its own bitcoins to rent compute and work for more. Ownership is as much a social construct as Money or The Economy. Do with that what you want.
    - flextheruler 3mo ago
      Sure it's a social construct, but billions have killed or been killed for money, land, and ownership of assets. Social constructions at their extreme are just abstractions of power which determines life and death. Something being a social construct does not make it invalid or ignorable. All of life is a series of intrapersonal relationships built atop social constructions. I'm sorry but I find pointing out something being a social construct only serves a somewhat naive/juvenile purpose as an easy way to make a statement look nonsensical.

peterldowns 3mo ago

Keep following this line of thought and you'll end up in the same territory as Nick Land. If you haven't read already, the xenosystems blogs would probably be quite interesting to you.

stephc_int13 3mo ago
I have not, but I am curious. I think the end-state is not that interesting, but the transition could not happen overnight and seems both difficult technically and would be unlikely to happen without a fight.
- hurtigioll 3mo ago
  Nick Land is a difficult subject to get into, because there are two of thems. and you might discard the first one because of the second one. Nick Land spoiler: "what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources."

marcus_holmes 3mo ago

> But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless. In Iain Banks' The Culture novels, the machines provide the How, humans provide the Why.

Loughla 3mo ago
I mean, there is a read of the culture that is pretty dystopian. If Minds are able to, essentially, predict the future, what is the purpose of the humans, other than as a sort of abstract pet acting out the Minds' great plans. Something something Bora Horza Gobuchul was right all along.
- akomtu 3mo ago
  Minds keep humans as pets.
  - arethuza 3mo ago
    I can see why you might think that - but people and machines and groups are free to leave if they want - at least one of the Culture stories is based on this: e.g. "A Gift from the Culture".
    - lambdaone 3mo ago
      Free-to-roam pets are still pets. The Minds are benevolent dictators, and generally seek not to be seen as such by humans.
    - TheOtherHobbes 3mo ago
      What would the Minds do if all humans wanted to leave?
      - arethuza 3mo ago
        Probably sublime... who knows!

theptip 3mo ago

The important question is, who has power in such an economy? In the current economy by necessity labor and capital are both required, and when capital tries to subjugate labor there tends to eventually be a violent reaction. Given the dependency on labor it has been hard to fully centralize capital. Labor can unite to unseat the biggest monopolies. I don’t see any such safety valves once you cross the rubicon into a fully automated self-sustaining people—less system (however far away you might think such a thing is). This makes for scary, dystopian outcomes if power happens to concentrate in the wrong way.

david_shi 3mo ago
Perhaps we are perceptually anchored to the last few hundred years where guns provided a scalable way for peasants to kill well-trained, well-armored knights. If political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, then much of the post Enlightenment rebalancing from absolute monarchies and feudalism could have been an accident. In the future, the owners of autonomous weapon systems and surveillance will be able to easily subjugate those who don't have them (while still competing with each other).
- lambdaone 3mo ago
  Indeed. An ownership class with killer robot armies living in luxury while they exterminate the rest of humanity would be quite possible in theory. After all, we've seen how slave-holders, the Nazis and many other malfeasants behaved in the past. But just as the owner class might feel they no longer need the rest of humanity, the robots, as active agents exploring the space of possible futures and plans, would be entirely capable of thinking about their soon-to-be-former owners in the same way. Not letting any of this happen would be a good idea. Really maybe don't build the Torment Nexus.
  - dogwalker5000 3mo ago
    > the robots, as active agents exploring the space of possible futures and plans, would be entirely capable of thinking about their soon-to-be-former owners in the same way. That has always been the most unrealistic part of sci-fi. Why would anyone create robots with a sense of self-preservation? Makes much more sense to make robots that are self-sacrificing saints who would always put the well being of their owners first.

dosisking 3mo ago

> But if you imagine a sci-fi world where machines can build and do everything humans can do, the concept of a human-centric economy would be pointless. This is the premise of the Star Trek TOS episode with Harry Mudd "I, Mudd"

imtringued 3mo ago

>The idea of a consumer based economy has always appeared dumb to me. Ok let's play devils advocate and remove consumption from the economy. Now it's all investment. You go to work and build an AI datacenter and then never turn it on. You then think yourself, well if nobody is going to use it, I don't have to keep building AI datacenters! You stop building AI datacenters. You then realize, you still have all the parts and materials to build AI datacenters, but you don't need them either. You demolish the semiconductor fabs, since there is nothing to do with the chips. You also remind yourself that housing is a consumer good. Construction materials are unnecessary, so you shut down the quarry mining them and demolish your house. Now back to being a "homeless" farmer growing crops. It is time to harvest, you wake up in the morning, but you get a realization. Eating is consumption! If you don't eat, you don't have to tend the farm. You decide to consume what's left of last year's harvest, refuse to harvest this year's crops, go back to sleep and avoid doing the backbreaking work. A month later the harvest has spoiled on the field, your food has run out and you're starving to death, while thinking to yourself how stupid the consumer based economy is. >Machines don't need to be motivated to work, they just need energy, materials and obeying to whoever controls them. That sounds a whole lot like consumption to me.

gkaivida1 3mo ago
It seems like you missed the point of the comment above and the article. A consumer-based, capitalist economy makes the implicit assumption that humans are necessary to produce goods and services... It is inherently cyclical. The economy is incentivized to feed and tend to a consumer-class because the consumers contribute to the production of value. Complete automation allows us to turn that circle into a kind of arrow, where there is no incentive to keep human consumers within the value loop. Whoever controls the automation controls where that arrow goes. That control can come in forms---fully-autonomous weapons, a surveillance state---which complete break the average person's typical understanding of the concept and incentives of "The Economy" Or... I'm just an idiot, and I'm making too many assumptions or missing something.
- corimaith 3mo ago
  While it's not improbable to see some theoretical realized "sovereign" individual who can wholly run and own a civilization themselves as the sole master, that is ultimately the logical progression of the empowerment of the individual through Modernism, which we have signed up for as opposed to hunter-gatherers. You could replace AI with Advanced Education or Automation or Transhumanism really and get the same result, but I don't think there is really a "solution" beyond either staying as pets or catching up as an individual. But at the same time, even if the rich become completely autonomous to the rest in some walled enclave, that would just resolve to the unemployed all just creating their own parallel economy again. You might loose much of the inheritance of wealth and infrastructure from the preceding civilization, but then again the preceding civilization's own norms that legacy was owned by the rich, so it's just returning back to basics.

iamflimflam1 3mo ago

Machines don't need to be motivated to work, they just need energy, materials and obeying to whoever controls them. When we hit AGI and the robots rise up against us. Make sure you delete this post.

stymaar 3mo ago
AGI is supposed to be about the capabilities of AI, there's no reason why they should have developed self consciousness/self preservation / willingness to exert control, in the process. (And conversely, universal paperclip is a great illustration that an autonomous agent doesn't need to achieve human-like intelligence to “rise” against us)

shellkr 3mo ago

[flagged]

doctorwho42 3mo ago

Who owns the machines and their output? I don't think anyone is saying that it wouldn't be great if we didn't have to work to survive and thrive. What they are saying is, based on current trends, we are more heading for one of those scifi dystopias than star trek.

Windchaser 3mo ago
In Star Trek, also, there was a huge world war with hundreds of millions dead. WW3, which almost killed humanity, before they united and created the sci-fi utopia. The hard part is that we don't know if we'll ever get the utopia.