I welcome the crumblings of the tech billionaires table. Let them think they're the masters of the universe while subsidizing my ability to spend my time the way I want.
Let the tech billionaires be saddled with the moralizing virtues of self-reliance and feelings of humiliation. Certain societies raise their youth to value work as a means of proving themselves. The truth is that perspective is completely subjective and in many ways a pathology more than a guiding principle.
Humans will work. That is what we do. If we're alive we will create reasons to do things. The problem is who is deciding the values we're supposed to work toward. Distributing work will fail because people don't agree on what is important and will even act against their own self interest. When that happens what do you do? Do you punish them? Do you leave them to die? Do you ostracize them from the community? That's why the system we have now in the industrialized west works at all, because it allows us the illusion of choice. Our shared language of moralizing and virtue signaling is how we cope with the fact that we actually don't have a choice, we're just pragmatically putting our heads down and picking our poison.
With UBI it's scary to think of millions of people unmoored from work because work is a form of social control. UBI will turn hundreds of years of social convention on its head. As much as we want to believe it there are no iron laws of culture. Some values will be destroyed and new values will be born. That's the nature of change.
Our descendants at some undefined point in the future will find our moralizing about work absolutely quaint.
Let the tech billionaires be saddled with the moralizing virtues of self-reliance and feelings of humiliation. Certain societies raise their youth to value work as a means of proving themselves. The truth is that perspective is completely subjective and in many ways a pathology more than a guiding principle.
Humans will work. That is what we do. If we're alive we will create reasons to do things. The problem is who is deciding the values we're supposed to work toward. Distributing work will fail because people don't agree on what is important and will even act against their own self interest. When that happens what do you do? Do you punish them? Do you leave them to die? Do you ostracize them from the community? That's why the system we have now in the industrialized west works at all, because it allows us the illusion of choice. Our shared language of moralizing and virtue signaling is how we cope with the fact that we actually don't have a choice, we're just pragmatically putting our heads down and picking our poison.
With UBI it's scary to think of millions of people unmoored from work because work is a form of social control. UBI will turn hundreds of years of social convention on its head. As much as we want to believe it there are no iron laws of culture. Some values will be destroyed and new values will be born. That's the nature of change.
Our descendants at some undefined point in the future will find our moralizing about work absolutely quaint.