We know what a world without work looks like

but i disagree. even in the past those rich people had to maintain their wealth, so a lot of what they did was economically necessary.

so i don't think that the economics of work will go away. it will change, but not vanish.

there is a lot of work that should never be replaced by machines. raising children for example, but also caring for the sick, elderly and disabled. yes, some of it will be machine assisted. those will be machines that increase the independence of people. also art and entertainment, while it may use machines for assistance should remain firm in human hands. also government, laws, jurisprudence. science, research, tourism, etc...

much of it can be done machine assisted, but the human touch is not optional, and a good part of that work is still something that people may not want to do without some sort of reward.

today economic benefits are the reward for humans making an effort. in the past it may have been social status, but i don't think it is a good idea to go back to that. social status is what gives rise to prejudice and racism.

work will not go away. the economic necessity for everyone to work just to put food on the table, that may go away, but the need to motivate people to do work that machines can't do on their own will remain.

therefore what changes is the motivation. today people are motivated to study and work because they need an income. in a world where income is not strictly necessary society needs to make an effort to motivate the future generation to study and work on things we still need despite that.

money is the most egalitarian way to motivate people to do work that is hard but needs to be done. everything else brings us back to status and class, which is not what we want.

As an American why should I believe a word of this, when our country's Overton window ranges from "lip service" to "open contempt" for the unemployed? How can I feel confidence for my economic future when, in less than a decade, the frontier AI labs have abandoned any semblance of caution and are embracing a lobby for fewer guardrails? When "move fast, break things" is applied to the "mass cognition replacement machine"?

Filing this entire article under "I'll believe it when I fucking see it". The pollyannic nonsense is willfully ignorant and only serves to excuse more concentration of wealth and the mass theft of leverage from the average worker.

In fact I'd say that angst from this type of person (I consider myself one) is a good chunk vocalizing concerns about "a world without work". "Going your own way" is a large part of the American psyche, so what happens in a world where there is not work that needs to be done, which had been laying out straightforward paths for "your own way" ?

I'm personally not feeling too much of this angst, being both happy working on the kinds of physical things that aren't going to be automated away any time soon, and also having the engineering knowledge/skills to effectively use LLMs and benefit from the automation. But I'm also not looking so far into the future as to worry about those endeavors becoming trite.