Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Nostr0m t1_itvrgq6 wrote

Interesting story, thank you for sharing. So it's basically imagining life in today's society on a typical day for a homeless/marginally housed person in a well-resourced area, if you took away the risk of violence.

There was a Reddit thread once asking people what they would want to do if they didn't have to work for money. They said things like: read books, plant a garden, study interesting things, learn practical skills like woodworking or baking, play sports, watch sports, make art of various kinds, travel, take naps, meet people in the local community, volunteer, hike outdoors, write a story, fix up an old house, play card games or board games, play musical instruments, develop an app or a game, host dinner parties, raise bees, raise other animals, take language classes, ride their bike, go swimming, etc. etc.

Why can't we do any of those things in our hypothetical post-work society? What does the AI overlord gain by purposely keeping us miserable, when it has basically infinite resources? I guess a related question is why do we allow homeless people to experience similar conditions in our own society, when we likely have the resources to improve their conditions. I guess the conventional answers (or excuses) relate to substance use, mental health conditions, cognitive disabilities, physical and emotional trauma, lack of social support, etc. (arguably a kind of victim blaming argument). But we certainly couldn't apply that reasoning to all of human society.

9