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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   18461 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 24, 2025

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I'm thinking about the culture war around AI, specifically the whole UBI debate. If AI truly does take over a lot of human work, there's a lot of people who are savagely agitating for a UBI on one side, saying we'll be post work. The other side of course says no that's not how it works, besides we aren't even close to being able to afford that. The left (generally) takes the former, while the right generally takes the latter.

What I'm surprised by is why nobody has so far mentioned what, to me, seems the obvious compromise - we just shorten the work week! As our forefathers did forcing a 5 day, 8 hour work week, why don't we continue there? Go down to a 4 day work week, and/or shorten standard working hours to 6 per day?

If AI truly will obviate the need for a lot of work, how is this not the more rational solution than trying to magically create a UBI out of money we don't have? How come this idea has barely even entered the discourse? I have been talking and thinking about AI unemployment for years and never once have heard someone argue for this compromise.

I'm not sure there's much reason for a UBI in a post AGI jobless world to begin with, you only need money currently to exchange with other people. Jobs exist to do things for other people so they'll do things for you.

Any jobless world then is either

  1. No one is alive

  2. People have their desires that are capable of being met by a job already met so they don't work to do things for others and those others don't work for them.

Of course there's a possibility that Person 1 has an automated life with no desires left unfulfilled and Person 2 has tons of desires, but that would only mean Person 2 has a job then, working to fulfill their own desires! And if there's lots of people who don't have their desires fulfilled, they can do what humans do now and participate with each other in trade of labor and resources.

Anything problematic regarding jobs is more likely to happen in the interim, where people get laid off and displaced in batches of suffering before they've achieved status of having their needs met without requiring others.

Regardless the greater problem here would be resource distribution. An AGI and automation might be able to do everything better and quicker than a human to the point there's no need for anyone to work ever, but eventually resources will run out. Maybe it'll be so super smart it even figures out how to prevent that, but the real issue seems to be

Group 1: Fully automated life Group 2: They literally can't work a job because all the resources are guarded by group 1's super robots and they die.

Even with all labor automated, there could still be scarcity due to lack of resources.

Fairly valuing and distributing the different kinds of resources could be via some kind of currency issued by and accepted by the AI overlords.

I think you also see changes in how quality is perceived: it's easy enough to put printed posters on your walls and sit in injection-molded chairs, but many (probably not all) who possess that sort of slop, to use a term coined by AI skeptics, will wish they had hand-crafted wood chairs and original paintings.

I think you also see changes in how quality is perceived: it's easy enough to put printed posters on your walls and sit in injection-molded chairs, but many (probably not all) who possess that sort of slop, to use a term coined by AI skeptics, will wish they had hand-crafted wood chairs and original paintings.

In fact they seem to prefer the posters. Nobody's willing to pay for original art, even when they can afford it.

Leaving aside a specific fandom that has other reasons to favor original art, KendricTonn on X Twitter has been able to make it work, and he's part of a non-trivial circle doing so just to a degree that's visible to normies.

((And also woodblock printing, which is kinda in a complicated place on the 'is it original, or is it a print' thing.))

I don't think the economics make easy sense at scale, but there's enough of it that it could in a fully-automated-world.

Nobody's willing to pay for original art, even when they can afford it.

This might be your bubble.

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