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[Sergarr]

I don't want to imagine how a war over the girlfriends would look like. Too terrifying.

[Phmcw]

Well...

[MorleyDev]

I'd hope that people would, in such a society, be enlightened enough to view both man and woman as actual human beings on equal footing. But ignoring this 'trips my inner feminist' path of discussion... I think whether or not this is a good concept does somewhat depend on the kinds of people. Say you have 2 more hours a day available to you, what would you honestly do with them?

The "technology is making people lazy" idea comes from how some people are of the opinion that people need to be forced to do something of value, otherwise people'll do nothing at all.

But many of the people who work on that 'technology' are the kind of people who would then use the time that technology saves them to go and make even better technology. So they view the goal of this as freeing peoples time so they can exercise, write the next great book or poem, learn a new skill, work on doing more with less time wasted on the boring, repetitive actions in life.

It's an interesting culture-clash.

[Frumple]

I'unno 'bout you, but when I can do what used to be a five day job in five minutes (this is hella' common when it comes to anything involving bookkeeping, by the by, to say nothing of what five minutes of effort can kick off in regards to production automation and whatnot), I think a couple hours of not doing anything is perfectly acceptable. Or a couple days, whatever. Still making a tremendous net gain in productivity.

If you can make ten times the progress in a tenth the time, you can afford to be lazy, imo.

[Cthulhu]

People with their basic needs fulfilled and lots of time on their hands tend to start coming up with new ideas about how to run things, which doesn't sit well with the people who can lay down the structures that would fulfill your basic needs and time-use.

If we go by what we've seen in our actual real life society a post-scarcity society would have maybe 15% of the population building and operating matter replicators, 5% distributing matter replicators, 20% overseeing the building, operation, distribution, and oversight of the matter replicators, 50% performing various auxiliary roles to the building, operation, distribution, and oversight of the matter replicators such as consultation and training and overseeing the other auxiliary roles, and 10% disposing or recycling defunct matter replicators, which is necessary by design.

Edit:  When you can do a five day job in five minutes the left-over man hours are transferred to functionaries who know deep down that what they do is useless busywork.

[SalmonGod]

So, the current hang-up on the idea of post-scarcity is that if anyone has to work for it, it's not really post-scarce, right?  Fine, whatever, but what are thoughts on the following that I posted shortly before the conversation jumped threads? 

The focus on automation as a requirement for post-scarcity is ridiculous.  We don't need to automate everything.  It isn't a requirement that nobody has to work.  This is because a majority of people actually like working, and there are even enough people who enjoy doing jobs normally seen as undesirable to get those done if infrastructure is focused on simply getting the job done without loads of extraneous bullshit. 

But our perspective is all fucked up.  Our infrastructure is designed to create unnecessary work.  While it is an elite class capitalist imperative to eliminate work and reduce costs, it's also a political imperative to create work.  There is severe and deliberate obstruction by workers to prevent progress that eliminates work, because they need it.  And the nature of capitalist relationships creates shitloads of extraneous bureaucracy.  So most people don't see just how much better we're currently capable of.  All the business world and customer service bullshit associated with operating for profit easily makes up 3/4 of the workload associated with what I do for a living.   And the demands on workers are so high because of extraneous bullshit that most cannot conceive of having the will to do anything productive with their free time, leading to the misconception that human beings are naturally lazy.

So automation isn't prerequisite, because there are more than enough people who will still want to work to produce the essential needs of society, whether in pursuit of extra luxuries or because they just want to.

My concept of post-scarcity is where no one is forced to work to meet their basic needs.  Any work beyond that, I honestly see as recreational.  I know that when I have the time and energy to do so, I enjoy doing things that I know will benefit me in the end, and that I do completely optionally, under no duress.  And it wouldn't have to directly benefit me, like a building project on my own house or something.  I honestly enjoyed working as a package handler at Fedex, throwing boxes around.  If I had the time, the energy, and the option, I would absolutely go back and do that voluntarily once in a while.  Especially if it meant earning some extra luxury for myself.

So if we drop the discussion of strict post-scarcity or loosen the definition, how do everyone's thoughts change?

Disclaimer:  I expect to be heavily ninja'd, since I typed up half this post, got called away by family for a couple hours, and then came back and quickly finished it. :/

[Frumple]

Edit:  When you can do a five day job in five minutes the left-over man hours are transferred to functionaries who know deep down that what they do is useless busywork.

The magical word is "don't'. Just... don't do that.

[Cthulhu]

Don't tell me, tell the industries that are making that happen

I brought it up way back in the origins of money thread.  I once saw about ten suits outside a local dollar store performing administrative and oversight roles.  They were there all day.  Ten people.  Ten 40-hour-a-week jobs.

[Jelle]

Edit:  When you can do a five day job in five minutes the left-over man hours are transferred to functionaries who know deep down that what they do is useless busywork.

The magical word is "don't'. Just... don't do that.

If it were that simple. Pointless labor is not the problem but a symptomn.
In essense technological advancement allowing greater efficiency directly works against the way we think about labor. It's kind of sad when you think about it.

[smjjames]

Edit:  When you can do a five day job in five minutes the left-over man hours are transferred to functionaries who know deep down that what they do is useless busywork.

The magical word is "don't'. Just... don't do that.

If it were that simple. Pointless labor is not the problem but a symptomn.
In essense technological advancement allowing greater efficiency directly works against the way we think about labor. It's kind of sad when you think about it.

Symptom of what though?

[Sergarr]

Edit:  When you can do a five day job in five minutes the left-over man hours are transferred to functionaries who know deep down that what they do is useless busywork.

The magical word is "don't'. Just... don't do that.

If it were that simple. Pointless labor is not the problem but a symptomn.
In essense technological advancement allowing greater efficiency directly works against the way we think about labor. It's kind of sad when you think about it.

Symptom of what though?

Of classical capitalism stopping to work for benefit of the society and instead starting to harm it.

[Cthulhu]

The only thing capitalism has ever worked for is the creation of surplus value.  Anything else is tangential.

The problem is that since that expansion and creation accelerates exponentially we've passed the point where the production of goods and services is sufficient.  Most thinkers I've read on the subject put that point around the invention and commercialization of the automobile and the contemporary development of things like assembly line labor.  Marketing started to become a major industry around the same time to assist in the production and consumption of increasingly useless commodities and now it's one of the biggest in the world and you're subjected to it pretty much 24/7.

When the expansion of the market and the increased efficiency of labor lowered the number of people working in industrial labor the supplementary industries (service, administration, clerical, managerial, etc.) exploded to ensure that everyone remains firmly leashed to the cycle of production and consumption even if they're no longer necessarily working in factories.

[Sergarr]

The capitalism (from what I understand) has helped to concentrate large amount of power in a hand of a few individuals, thus allowing them to invest into large-scale machinery with increased productivity. In the age of scientific technical revolution, they started investing into science and engineering for the same purpose.

However, there's a limit where you reach the maximum amount of products the society really needs. The good choice here would be to start reversing the capitalization process - investing into making cheap, compact and (very important) user-friendly machinery. This will lead to a slight decrease in efficiency, however, because the economy is already over-producing, it doesn't really hurt.

Because the factories would still require some resources, and because the people will be more self-sufficient, this will lead naturally into dissolution of the large cities, as the people scatter among the landscape, settling near resource-sites.

[Cthulhu]

Good is not what capitalism aims for.  Whatever the good choice is, the path taken is what I described and I don't see it as a conscious decision

[Sergarr]

Good is not what capitalism aims for.  Whatever the good choice is, the path taken is what I described and I don't see it as a conscious decision

Yeah, and this is why capitalism needs to be overthrown. Because if it doesn't, then the Leviathan of capitalism will spend all the resources on Earth, producing increasingly short-lived things. Ever noticed how everything produced nowadays tend to break much, much faster?