If you zoom out, the purpose of life is not just to do jobs.
Bill Gates
I found the above quote to be entirely asinine. There has always been this rosy notion that take away all the pesky jobs and give people a basic income, we unlock a million Shakespeares, Tolkiens, Louis CK’s, Bill Burr’s, Tarantinos or whoever else evokes the idea of great art for you.
With no work, a little cash and lots of time, we will tap into our creative potential.
We ran this social experiment five years back during COVID. We locked people at home. Told them here’s a little more time with your family and at home. We will pay you too.
I didn’t see a lot of poetry or art come out of it.
Just a lot of sulking, pissed off, depressed people and plenty of home bakers. And home bakers made plenty of crap that made the population even less healthy by launching a missile of sugar and butter right to your doorstep. No inconvenience of taking 20 steps to buy this crap.
Some people picked up a training habit. But most people lost the habit. And they replaced that time with more screen crap.
Even if most of our jobs are bullshit jobs, just like most of the stuff we learn in school is a bullshit education, it fills our days with something. It might be nonsense. It might not be productive. But it lends us with some sense of identity, purpose and social structure.
To take that away and say ‘go find your inner artist’ is exactly what I would expect from someone who owns an island and a private military to say.
There’s little evidence that any time or attention freed up by technology will be spent on creative endeavours.
Our only hope is if and when AI blows up an industry, out of the ashes will emerge some new industries. Humans have a terrific gift of inventing widgets, gadgets to build transactions and economies around. Something that AI can’t do or more likely can’t make any sense of.
Perhaps subsistence farming, cults, new religions, hand written books, jousting on Pulsars, small concerts, live plays and cage fights to the death will come back into vogue. That will surely give us greater purpose.
Bill Gates
I found the above quote to be entirely asinine. There has always been this rosy notion that take away all the pesky jobs and give people a basic income, we unlock a million Shakespeares, Tolkiens, Louis CK’s, Bill Burr’s, Tarantinos or whoever else evokes the idea of great art for you.
With no work, a little cash and lots of time, we will tap into our creative potential.
We ran this social experiment five years back during COVID. We locked people at home. Told them here’s a little more time with your family and at home. We will pay you too.
I didn’t see a lot of poetry or art come out of it.
Just a lot of sulking, pissed off, depressed people and plenty of home bakers. And home bakers made plenty of crap that made the population even less healthy by launching a missile of sugar and butter right to your doorstep. No inconvenience of taking 20 steps to buy this crap.
Some people picked up a training habit. But most people lost the habit. And they replaced that time with more screen crap.
Even if most of our jobs are bullshit jobs, just like most of the stuff we learn in school is a bullshit education, it fills our days with something. It might be nonsense. It might not be productive. But it lends us with some sense of identity, purpose and social structure.
To take that away and say ‘go find your inner artist’ is exactly what I would expect from someone who owns an island and a private military to say.
There’s little evidence that any time or attention freed up by technology will be spent on creative endeavours.
Our only hope is if and when AI blows up an industry, out of the ashes will emerge some new industries. Humans have a terrific gift of inventing widgets, gadgets to build transactions and economies around. Something that AI can’t do or more likely can’t make any sense of.
Perhaps subsistence farming, cults, new religions, hand written books, jousting on Pulsars, small concerts, live plays and cage fights to the death will come back into vogue. That will surely give us greater purpose.