And before you shrug and go “great, jobs are bullshit”:
Jobs, for all their cruelty, provide:
•structure (“I know where to be at 9”),
•community (office friendships, shared memes, gossip),
•identity (“I’m a nurse / teacher / carpenter,” for the lucky ones),
•a script (“I know what next year roughly looks like”).
Take that away and you don’t get instant utopia. You get a psychic freefall.
Imagine millions of people waking up one day structurally unnecessary to the economy, with no replacement narrative in place. Not “You’re free now,” but “The system doesn’t know what to do with you, please manage your own despair.”
That’s not liberation. That’s cruelty on a scale our nervous systems are not built for.
Think about Appalachia when the textile mills closed. Everywhere.
EDIT: for people who didn’t pay attention to my “think about Appalachia” comment.
Just because you can manage your own structure, community, and identity without a job doesn’t mean the people around you can too.
Especially older people who have spent their lives in the American capitalist system, which tells you over and over you are defined by the job you do and the things you buy with the money from that job. Hell, any of you with older relatives probably know somebody who retired, didn’t know what to do with themselves, declined and died a few years after.
And especially teenagers and young adults who were raised with the expectation of “grow up, go to college, get a job, raise a family” - and who suddenly won’t be able to get a job, as is already happening with the death of entry-level jobs and the increasing uselessness of college degrees - and have to define themselves and their future without ever having learned the tools to do so.
And when people lose the structure that gave their lives meaning, a lot of them find new meaning in their race, sex, or religion. And that’s how you get nationalist / fascist uprisings.
Because, going back to Appalachia, the reason Vance country is so deep fucking red is because “free trade” and neoliberalism sent all their jobs overseas and let Big Pharma addict their communities to opioids for profit, and because Democrats did two things about it, jack and shit.
You do not want to see what America turns into when half our jobs disappear into data centers and MAGA influencers convince millions of young men to blame immigrants and the left for their lack of a future. But I’m afraid you’re going to.
No job, no problem. We’ll just need to learn how to live like children again; make and meet up with friends to play sports, hang out, etc. We need other people to provide meaning in our lives, so it will happen.
People without jobs still need to eat. That means someone has to grow food, which requires land and resources. That land is either rented or purchased… With money. Stolen land is too risky for crops.
The entire economy can crash, but it will always start again with food production. Those who cannot grow will have to trade or barter for it.
Why would someone care about you if you are unable to provide anything of value to them, the only other option you have is to be a threat to them. That doesn’t have to mean violence, if you have a fair and working democracy.
Compassion is why, sadly lots of people lack the basic empathy that comes before it.
We can’t rely on that from those in power.
Lol the author’s breathless optimism at what AI is currently capable of tells me all I need to know about their grasp on reality
And like… So many of us make space in our lives for jobs, build ourselves around them. Of course losing that thing would be traumatic.
If we built ourselves as much around being eaten alive by vicious wild animals then regrowing the lost flesh in a magical regeneration tank for a couple hours literally every day, losing that would be traumatizing.
Doesn’t mean it’s bad; means change is hard and making things better is hard sometimes. Maybe that not everyone gets to come along to a better world.
It’s fair to think that automation will continue to improve. I imagine it will improve quite a bit in the next 20 years. There may even be breakthroughs in that time that result in AGI or ASI.
Yeah automation for sure. This guy seems to think that LLMs are flawlessy coding and debugging right now, which is just false.
Thanks for posting this by the way - I needed to see it 👍
My adult life has been an experiment in disengaging from the economy and reducing liabilities. To a large extent I’ve succeeded; I live off-grid, taking care of my own energy, water, sewage and most of my digital stuff. Part of the reason for this is that I’ve never been able to simultaneously hold down both a full-time job and the will to live for very long.
I can confirm that the above (structure, community and identity) are indeed missing from this ‘freedom’. It is gnarly lifestyle.
A friend of is doing the disconnected thing out in the woods pretty similarly to you. Built a cabin, got it all set up, farms, hunts, his grocery bill is probably a tenth of mine, very simple lifestyle. Last I heard from him the fun was wearing thin and another winter living that way was pretty daunting. I should try to get a hold of him and see how he is. I had a teacher in highschool that emphasized “One foot in, one foot out” meaning not to completely disengage from community and modern living, but to deliberately and purposefully keep that other foot out, spending time in nature, keeping material possessions limited, and being grateful for the comforts available by removing them occasionally.
One thing that I think many people don’t realise is that it can actually be the opposite of a simple lifestyle, at least if you want to have modern levels of comfort. Setting up and maintaining your own infrastructure is actually really complicated and daunting. And unless you have the serious money needed to invest in things like boreholes and 10x redundancy for solar in midwinter you will always be juggling and tweaking and faffing around with water filters, vehicles & trailers and generator spark plugs, just as a few examples.
You should definitely try and get in touch with him - especially if he’s really out in the sticks it will probably do his mental health a lot of good!
There are great things about living like this too, but you know how it is; the grass is always greener on the other side and it’s easy to take things for granted…
I think the situation in Appalachia is more about poverty and hopelessness than structure and identity. I.e. “shit-life syndrome.” Community is a big one too, but that’s already severely lacking in most of the modern world.
What I personally think will happen is that wages will get driven so far down where it doesn’t make sense for the capitalists to automate. I.e. global south-like living conditions and slavery. The capital owners will not let go of their power or support anything like decent UBI/USI. They’ll opt for company-towns and “charity” that serves their purposes.
There are some good points in there somewhere about how losing one’s job affects the mind. I’m just hung up on the proffered idea that LLMs are actually going to replace anybody in an efficient sustainable way, or even reach AGI someday. They’re not. We’re already reaching the limit of how much power and silicon we can throw at this, and LLMs still can’t actually replace a thinking person. Also the post completely misses the reason billionaires are pushing LLMs so hard, and ignores the water and electricity resource limitations we’re already up against.
I’m just hung up on the proffered idea that LLMs are actually going to replace anybody in an efficient sustainable way, or even reach AGI someday.
I share your concern with that point, to some degree. On the other hand, Cory Doctorow makes a great point: an AI cannot do your job as well as you can, but a salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI, because it’ll make your boss money:
The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself, and give the other half to the AI company.
And even if AI is shit at your job, the cost savings from not paying humans means corporations will still make more money providing a shitty AI product than a good human product, just like corporations make more money now selling shitty mass produced plastic crap than they do quality products from skilled workers.
And from there you get mass unemployment and all the social and cultural impacts therefrom.
(What is your view on why billionaires are pushing AI? I think it’s a combination of “number go up” and an excuse to build the data centers the surveillance state needs for mass real time facial recognition, travel monitoring, and conversation recording/sentiment analysis, but that’s just me.)
AI cannot do your job as well as you can, but a salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI, because it’ll make your boss money
Agreed, exactly. In the short term, at least. The LLM industry is the world’s biggest ponzi scheme right now though. If they had to start charging people enough to float themselves without borrowing from investors, the whole thing would collapse overnight because no one would pay for it. The endgame is not a profitable product to bring to market, because that’s not possible with this technology.
What is your view on why billionaires are pushing AI?
They’re trying to race as fast as possible to the closest they can get to AGI (a delusion) for their own use before climate change starts killing off billions of people in the near future. They know that humanity is near-term fucked, and they’re feathering their nests and ripping the copper out of the walls at our expense. Some of them, like Musk and Yavin, are deluded though to think they can actually rule over a scaled-down human population (only the ones they can’t replace with AI) in a dystopian techno-feudal system. Either way, we’re expendable assets to be shoveled into their furnace.
I sure as heck don’t need a job to entertain me and if I did not need it to live. ie food, housing, healthcare, etc. Now without a job I might still do things that are job like in that the actions are something someone would do in a job. I would just be doing it for myself or others because I feel like it at the time.
I am in the same camp as you and I think most people will be as well. We all have heard about the person who retired with no hobbies and no purpose who just drinks beer and watches TV all day. This i think is more rare than this article suggests. I also think the younger you are the easier the switch would be because you would have less time for a job to break your spirit.
I have found that purposely working less and caring less has allowed other interests to grow.
I would spend that time insulating my house, updating my windows, etc.
If my needs were actually covered by the surplus of productivity brought about by automation instead of going to some rich asshole so he can buy another private jet to do ketamine on or lobby for racism or whatever it is they do anymore, I’d be very happy with it all.
structure (“I know where to be at 9”)
That’s stupid, you can create your own structure freely if you need it so much, but you also just don’t need it. Needing a paternalistic structure is intellectual laziness.
community (office friendships, shared memes, gossip),
But not a consensual one. It is more like prison inmates, even if you like them. You should find your own community.
Identity (“I’m a nurse / teacher / carpenter,” for the lucky ones),
That’s skill and passion though, not wage labour. That’s why some jobs mean something and others do not.
My job doesn’t even remotely touch on my identity even though it’s my profession and what I studied for because while I love studying complex computer systems for flaws, I don’t actually give a shit about preventing some dysfunctional private equity portfolio fodder company’s bottom line from dropping.
•a script (“I know what next year roughly looks like”).
More intellectual laziness. You can write your own script if you need one or just do what you actually want. Obviously that requires asking the hard question of what you actually want, but this shouldn’t be hard.
Take that away and you don’t get instant utopia. You get a psychic freefall.
I’m no psychic but this sure feels like projection, and not the astral kind.
Imagine millions of people waking up one day structurally unnecessary to the economy, with no replacement narrative in place. Not “You’re free now,” but “The system doesn’t know what to do with you, please manage your own despair.”
Thats great as long as the economy is restructured such that I no longer have obligations to it and benefit from productivity increases.
That’s not liberation. That’s cruelty on a scale our nervous systems are not built for.
That’s stupid, sweeping statements about what our nervous systems are and are not built for have no basis in reality, even the basic idea of “we were meant to x” based in the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology that’s parroted wildly by various bad vibe cottagecore enthusiasts and other conservative past romanticizers doesn’t make hold any more water than me saying that my nervous system was actually meant to post comments on Lemmy.
We weren’t meant to do anything, no one exists and nothing happens for any particular reason, we are a chaotic yet structured event on the way from a big bang in a race towards the thermodynamic equilibrium and ultimately the heat death of the universe.
This is a good thing, actually, because it means that you have the freedom to find your own purpose outside of merely wage labour or some other manufactured divine intent.
Go explore, go learn something or make something, once capitalism no longer demands of us the wageslavery we provide, we will be truly free to be ourselves, and I look forward to that day.
Hopefully the age of jobs will end as it should.
Your allegations of “intellectual laziness” are evidence of a lack of understanding of or empathy for the mental state of many (if not most) people. There are billions of people alive today that don’t have the mental framework to cope with this kind of change because our education systems are abysmally incapable of teaching people how to think critically, structurally, and existentially.
There are billions of people alive today that don’t have the mental framework to cope with this kind of change because our education systems are abysmally incapable of teaching people how to think critically, structurally, and existentially.
So if I can, what does that mean?
Because I’d prefer to assume, out of empathy, that it means that others are capable of it as well. I am nothing special at all, if I can do it, so can others.
If anything that’s the humble, empathetic assumption. I did not need to be taught, I went out of my way to learn these things. So it must be that others are capable of that too, right?
Because the alternative would be to assume less of others than of myself, which is actually the ugly, unempathetic assumption, which I’d prefer not to make.
My worldview rests on judging myself by the same standard I judge others, extending a theoretical stranger the same benefit of the doubt I’d extend myself. That - to me - is empathy.
Am I missing something? Is there a third way? Because I’d love to hear it.
So it must be that others are capable of that too, right?
People are capable of a great many things, but most people do not accomplish everything they are capable of.
I look at it this way: hypothetically, everyone is capable of running a marathon…until you consider that most people have not had the time, resources, or opportunities to train for a marathon, or are out of shape, or have physical injuries or disabilities, or they just don’t have time to train for and run a marathon. I don’t see it as “empathy” to assume that everyone is capable of the same things or that everyone has had the same opportunities that I have. If I expected everyone to have the knowledge and experience that I have sought out and worked for, I would be an atrocious physician because I would just assume that my patients were “non-compliant” instead of understanding that there are barriers that prevent people from achieving the things they want or need to do.
This is the difference between “Equality” and “Equity”. “Equality” gives everyone the same resources, assumptions, and expectations, regardless of where people are starting from. It’s the top-down approach. “Equity” is the bottom-up approach where you adjust resource allocation, alter expectations, and make educated assessments instead of assumptions to try to get everyone to the same end-point.
“Equity” is justice is how we build a better world. “Equality” is when we assume that everyone is capable of everything that we are, regardless of the barriers that others may face. It is not pity, devaluing, or dehumanizing to recognize that some people need more help than others. Not everyone is actually capable of everything, and we succeed as a society when we work to our own strengths and help to cover each other’s weaknesses.
Woaah now we’re talking opportunities? I never mentioned that at all.
I think it’s fairly obvious that in a world where we would no longer have to do work and there wasn’t a need to work to survive ala capitalism or hunter-gathering that people would have literally unlimited opportunities and unlimited time, and that’s what this conversation was originally about.
When you claimed “not everyone is a leader” in that context you are referring to innate ability only, not opportunities. There is an implied “all things being equal” in there.
You and I obviously agree on what you wrote in regards to equity etc, these are basic humanist notions, but they are also irrelevant in this discussion.
All things being equal, if a person could not find meaning in their life to move towards I would judge them for it because I was able to, and if I see myself as not innately better than others, then there is no reason that innately others shouldn’t be able to accomplish to a similar level that I had done.
The discussion is not centered around a post-work world that people have grown up in. This is a discussion about what happens to hundreds of millions of people when the fabric of their lives changes suddenly because the vast majority of people alive today have grown up and lived in a reality where their life is functionally defined by work. I’m not saying that this is a good thing, but it is the reality of the situation. Most people are not comfortable enough to sit with themselves and decide who they are as a person and figure out their real internal motivations because the necessity of work has made it fairly easy to avoid doing that difficult work.
It isn’t a pleasant opportunity, but the experience of being left rudderless, of having to sort things out on your own without a script or a clear path forward is one that many people don’t get, and one that many others fail to seize upon. There are enough people, particularly in America, that have been just comfortable enough to never have to really think about back up plans or contingencies for what to do with their life in the absence of its current structure.
And there are many reasons why people may not have the wherewithal to find meaning in their lives. Some people are so focused on survival that meaning hasn’t even occurred to them. Others are depressed or traumatized or otherwise miserable and it’s hard to find meaning in blinding pain. Some people have been spoon fed meaning by way of work since the day they were born and literally do not know any other way to exist. Personally, I was stuck in a blend of these things when I was still working in tech and it was in the throes of abject despair that I finally forced myself to make the changes required to pursue my life’s meaning through work as a physician. Getting into and through medical school has been a brutal process and it has been immensely painful to try to imagine alternatives after the amount of work I’ve put in to pursue this goal. I’m now within 6 months of graduating and will be starting residency next summer, but it won’t be in the specialty that I had hoped (and that I had already staked a piece of my identity to). I’ve suffered more hardship than many, but I have also been more comfortable than plenty of other people, but I would find a great deal of turmoil and misery trying to restructure my life without being able to work as a physician (and that’s not even getting into the financial nightmare of my student loan situation.)
If society really collapsed, and for some reason the post-society world didn’t leave space for me to be a physician or a healer of some kind, I would probably figure it out…but it would be so incredibly painful to do so. It would be horrible to give up on everything I have worked so hard for to have to replace it with whatever I could manage and I would be unlikely to be happy with whatever that solution ended up being for a long time until I finished grieving what could have been, because that’s what this process is. Losing everything you’ve structured your life on is a form of grief and not everyone is equipped to handle that grief gracefully and effectively while being able to carry on with their lives.
Most people are not comfortable enough to sit with themselves and decide who they are as a person and figure out their real internal motivations because the necessity of work has made it fairly easy to avoid doing that difficult work.
Source? Proof? Or you just throwing that out there as if it means anything?
That also sounds incredibly condescending. I prefer to assume better of my fellow human beings, I see no reason they are not capable of this if I am, because I don’t think myself as better than “most people”.
It isn’t a pleasant opportunity, but the experience of being left rudderless, of having to sort things out on your own without a script or a clear path forward is one that many people don’t get,
Oh, do people not choose what to do with their life for work as young as 14 in America or…? Because by then here in the UK I had to pick my subjects for my GCSEs that i’d study for two years, then make sure I can nail the exams so I am eligible to go for the A-Level subjects I want to pursue for the 2 years of school after that, and make sure that I nail those so I can go to uni and get the degree I need to pursue the career I want for the next 20-30 years while also keeping in mind that I must be good enough at it all to actually compete and thrive.
As a working class person who had no parental backing and an immigrant who had to find a way to stay in the country for my own safety, I had to make the right decisions when confronted by an extremely brutal reality at an age when my immediate concerns were heated fandom debates about mass effect 3’s endings.
As far as I’m aware both here and there at 16 someone could literally choose to pursue military service too.
So literally all of us are forced to make extremely comitting choices that impact the rest of our life and figure these things out.
There are enough people, particularly in America, that have been just comfortable enough to never have to really think about back up plans or contingencies for what to do with their life in the absence of its current structure.
That might have been true 80 years ago, but that’s not how these things work in such a dynamic job market either.
And there are many reasons why people may not have the wherewithal to find meaning in their lives. Some people are so focused on survival that meaning hasn’t even occurred to them. Others are depressed or traumatized or otherwise miserable and it’s hard to find meaning in blinding pain. Some people have been spoon fed meaning by way of work since the day they were born and literally do not know any other way to exist. Personally, I was stuck in a blend of these things when I was still working in tech and it was in the throes of abject despair that I finally forced myself to make the changes required to pursue my life’s meaning through work as a physician. Getting into and through medical school has been a brutal process and it has been immensely painful to try to imagine alternatives after the amount of work I’ve put in to pursue this goal. I’m now within 6 months of graduating and will be starting residency next summer, but it won’t be in the specialty that I had hoped (and that I had already staked a piece of my identity to). I’ve suffered more hardship than many, but I have also been more comfortable than plenty of other people, but I would find a great deal of turmoil and misery trying to restructure my life without being able to work as a physician (and that’s not even getting into the financial nightmare of my student loan situation.)
None of these things have anything to do with wage labour specifically. You mention financial nightmares and not being able to be a physician, the former is a product of capitalism, not wage labour, the latter is not relevant as no one is actually stopping you from being a physician in a post-work world, you would be free to be a healer, in fact - more free to be a healer because you would not be stuck in a tech job, or any kind of job for that matter.
If society really collapsed, and for some reason the post-society world didn’t leave space for me to be a physician or a healer of some kind
Again, I would sure hope in a post-wage-labour utopia that doctors exist. Just because you would not be in wage-labour “work” doesn’t mean you can’t do something. The vast majority of what people do and even more of what people want to do or like to do isn’t and actually can’t be wage labour either, whether it’s art or scientific research etc and many professional like doctors and teachers and janitors that actually do something necessary for society are wildly underpaid by said society because they exist at odds with the capitalist wage labour structure, not because of it, and they existed before and will exist long after as professions.
Losing everything you’ve structured your life on is a form of grief and not everyone is equipped to handle that grief gracefully and effectively while being able to carry on with their lives.
Of course, but that isn’t what actually would happen so the entire premise is faulty.
We weren’t meant to do anything, no one exists and nothing happens for any particular reason, we are a chaotic yet structured event on the way from a big bang in a race towards the thermodynamic equilibrium and ultimately the heat death of the universe. This is a good thing, actually, because it means that you have the freedom to find your own purpose
Is this Cosmology Sartre? Astroexistentialism? I love the combination 🤩
you have mad ‘bootstraps’ vibe. not everyone is a leader and without that skill/mindset, loads of people will be rudderless.
Thats specious reasoning, I see no evidence anyone is a “leader” any more than anyone else, so I think you should be your own leader. Self-governance in your humanity and your life is a joy to be celebrated.
Bet you’re fun at parties
Yes
LLMs suck and anyone who tries to replace people with them is a stupid asshole who deserves to fail.
I’m not a representative sample, but…
…my hobby is my job. I learnt to code and to build stuff as a hobby, and now it’s my job.
I don’t think I could exist without designing and building something interesting. Even if I know that someone out there does it better. Because I want to understand the process and be able to alter it. I’m OK with someone else doing something that I find boring. If the subject interests me, I want to do it myself.
As for the concept of being free, if someone said “you’re free now”, I would ask “in what sense - am I free to stop paying taxes and repaying debt? can I finally squat land, start a license free mobile phone network and start practising medicine, or free in some other sense?”. I would likely conclude that I’m not free yet, and mutual dependencies are in fact quite numerous.
A yearn for the day when this “structure” is gone. I only have it for systemic reasons anyway. I do not need it outside of it being setup to provide the masses wkth housing, food, and water however scarcely.
Good, humans & jobs suck.
The system doesn’t know what to do with you, please manage your own despair.
That’s not liberation. That’s cruelty on a scale our nervous systems are not built for.
Pathetic: get a life, learn markdown, find a better purpose, whatever.
