it's the structure of how we humans rely on jobs for income
1. We don’t need everyone in society to be involved in trade.
2. We made it so that if you do not take part in trade (trade labor for income), you cannot live.
3. Thus, people will fear losing their ability to trade in society.
The question is, when did we make this shift? It used to just be slavery, and you would be able to survive so long as you slaved.
The fear is coming from something odd, the reality that you won’t have to trade anymore to live. Our society has convinced us you won’t have any value otherwise.
>We made it so that if you do not take part in trade (trade labor for income), you cannot live.
We did not make it so, this has been the natural state for as long as humans have existed, and in fact, it’s been this way for every other life form on Earth.
Maybe with post-scarcity (if it ever happens) there could be other ways of living. We can dream. But let’s not pretend that “life requires effort” is some sort of temporary unnatural abomination made by capitalists. It’s really just a fact.
You think every other life form on earth survives due to trading with each other? Most of human history has been some contingent contract between owner and labor, where most humans lived under some form of servitude or just pure slavery.
Paradigm shift means, “I can live without being involved in a financial contract with another entity”. This is the milestone before us.
It certainly survives by working, one way or another.
My point is that until now, we have never been able to find a functioning system that frees us from work (trade is just one type of work, so is hunting for survival, or photosynthesis), and until something changes dramatically (like a machine that caters to our every need), I find it hard to believe this can change.
That’s fine. I understand. I have a ridiculous belief that the universe is finally here to free us from work. AI is absurd, and magical, and if it does what we think it can, then the paradigm will shift. We as custodians of the transition have to work diligently to make sure this paradigm shift is not perverted by forces that want to reenable the prior way (which was that, whatever can be reasonably had to live, be wrapped in a scalping structure where one side can extract additional value).
One of the ways this shift will have momentum is that children today are going to be born into the light. They will live decades without the concept of having to make decisions around the scarcity of work and resources. They will not have the same values and viewpoints on society that, we, legacy components of the system, are currently engulfed by.
Our generation will be the last to join all other prior generations, in the boat of economic slavery, and it will be allowed to drift and sail away from port for the final time. It was a long journey, generations and generation were involved. Lots of thieving and abuse, good riddance.
1. We don’t need everyone in society to be involved in trade.
2. We made it so that if you do not take part in trade (trade labor for income), you cannot live.
3. Thus, people will fear losing their ability to trade in society.
The question is, when did we make this shift? It used to just be slavery, and you would be able to survive so long as you slaved.
The fear is coming from something odd, the reality that you won’t have to trade anymore to live. Our society has convinced us you won’t have any value otherwise.