This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Are we all going to work fake jobs?
Thoughts on Semi Automated Luxury Earth Social Democracy
I
Imagine you are appointed the colonial governor of a faraway land. Your own country has a small population but is technologically advanced and largely automated. The land you are taking over has a vast population but little development. The natives neither love nor hate you, they are ambivalent. At trivial cost, you establish a largely automated domestic economy using your advanced technology; food production, infrastructure, consumer goods, all are now produced and distributed locally at negligible marginal cost, by machine. The native cut (determined by your own democracy’s moral value system, which has also determined that you have a duty to look after the locals and facilitate to some extent their self actualization) of some colonial extractive resource mining easily covers the imports required. Self driving cars are maintained by automated workshops, houses are built in prefab factories and assembled by humanoid drones maintained in automated warehouses, that kind of thing.
You find yourself faced, now, with the choice of how to distribute the food, water, houses, clothes, electronic goods and so on that your society produces. Complete abundance is, after all, impossible even with advanced automation; you are still constrained by space, electricity, material resources. Some inequality is probably inevitable, too, even if it can be reduced; someone is going to live in the house with the nice view, although you could probably turn it into a ‘people’s timeshare’ where every family gets a day every ten years, or something like that. And a ‘basic income’ is feasible. You can hand out resource credits or dollars and give everyone the same amount, a socialism without labor.
But do you want to?
II
A central reason for capitalism’s success is its relatively positive alignment of incentives (phrased in a variety of ways). The provision of useful and in-demand goods and services begets the provider status and resources, which alongside a robust market economy drives innovation blah blah blah. The point is that, generally speaking, a large amount of prosocial behavior is implicitly incentivized by a capitalist system. You want money for a vacation, or your kids’ college, or to retire, so you want a good job, so you work hard, so you pay attention in class, so you don’t assault a police officer or commit a crime that will go on your record.
None of these are perfect, but broadly they work. It’s why “bail reform” (eliminating cash bail), so beloved of the left, quickly became a disaster: it turns out that the ability to raise a few thousand dollars at short notice is strongly predictive of someone who is less likely to commit crimes while on bail.
III
Those of us who regularly travel the far reaches of the third world will be familiar with the distinct form of overstaffing common everywhere from Belize to Bali. You will walk into, for example, a convenience store, a bodega, in Thailand and there will be 7 people working there. African restaurants are perhaps the most iconic example, a few customers a day and yet twenty members of staff, some uniformed.
It’s tempting to see this through the lens of that Dalrymple narration, but it’s not purely an east- (or south-) of-Hajnal-line thing. The Philippine store owner runs a profitable business (grocery margins are much higher in the third world, for a variety of reasons) and that has an extraordinary, universal tendency to result in expanding employment, regardless of necessity. The same thing is true in America, just replace 7/11 with Google. Google increased headcount by 20x during a period in which its core product responsible for almost all profitability remained search ads. Most of the new hires were not working on search. The company grew because it made more money, more than because ‘it’ wanted to do more things. Managers built up their fiefs. The point is that job creation has always been divorced from economic efficiency, even without state incentives.
IV
If you read about how white collar work was conducted before modern computers, the extraordinary amount of paperwork, the millions of clerks and secretaries, the vacuum systems to move papers around a building, the memos and the people who circulated them, the manual research that took so many hours to do what takes seconds today seems extraordinary. Then consider how many more women are in the labor market than shortly after the baby boom. Consider the relative decline in manufacturing employment. Consider that many of the sectors with the largest growth in employment have been precisely those - like law and finance and insurance and healthcare administration - that have seen previously unbelievable efficiency gains because of even basic software like spreadsheets and databases and email. Think about the internet, which people correctly predicted in the 1990s would destroy huge numbers of jobs, reduce opportunities for arbitrage, kill large sectors funded by paper advertising, etc. It did all of those things and yet employment remained steady.
Economists will tell you that technological unemployment always creates new jobs. Productivity rises, goods become cheaper, people can buy more, demand creates larger markets, drives demand, drives new employment. I think they are right about the consequence but wrong, as of late, about the process.
V
I have a conspiracy theory, one shared in part by the late David Graeber. Starting in the late 1970s, rich world governments - often without anyone even really explicitly acknowledging what is going on - began deliberately creating tens of millions of private and public sector jobs, both directly through specific lending and indirectly through regulation and other government activity. This, in combination with the inevitable tendency of profitable private enterprise to overemploy, and a certain residual aversion to leisure in some cultures, has preserved, arguably unnaturally, full employment.
Lower birth rates mean a greater proportion of the public are old and not working. Mass college attendance means many people start working at full time at 21 or 22, rather than 16 or 17. College loans and regulations, including title ix created reams of bullshit jobs in the universities. Social security, medicare, medicaid, endless charity donations by the state and the rich, homeless outreach, awareness, infinity startups funded by ZIRP money, regulations that have tripled compliance, KYC and regulatory employment in finance since 2009, environmental legislation that mandates hiring people to write reports and fill forms, to sign off on emissions statements. The legal, consulting, accounting and professional services sectors where a combination of circular outsourcing and demand created by regulation have seen employment skyrocket despite tasks that took an accountant in 1960 days taking minutes now.
There is often a supply of jobs when the demand is in many cases employment rather than its product.
VI
Was this wrong?
I remember realizing as a child that pretty much everyone who worked at the DMV (at least in New York) was an overweight black woman. Some would say the DMV itself is a jobs creation program for these women, many of whom support children. Is this a bad thing? It may be better that someone works than that they don’t, even if that employment is unnecessary, maybe even if it is mildly inconvenient. If anything, one of the central achievements of Protestant modernity was a work ethic that saw labor not necessarily as an end but as a means of accomplishing more than just production.
There are three categories of medium-term AGI scenario:
Extinction (whether fully autonomously or at human direction; “fifty rich guys starve everyone else” also falls into this category btw)
Abundance (of the heaven on earth, all material limits quickly fall away, it’ll happen faster than you possibly expect) AGI 2027 school, each of us can have our own solar system, The Culture, whatever
A system in which scarce resources and goods continue to be divided among humans even though non-negligible amounts of human labor is no longer materially necessary for the production of goods and most services, and in which prosocial behavior continues to have a substantial impact on society’s wider quality of life.
The first two scenarios are mostly uninteresting in their grand scale and absolute finality. The third is in my opinion more likely, but definitely more interesting. Mass unemployment is destabilizing, which is bad for owners of capital. Muahahaha evil aside, the rich lack the coordination to somehow blanket eliminate the poor and abolish democracy at exactly the moment the robots take everyone’s job, these things aren’t so neat, not to mention much of their own net worth would be caught up in a near total economic and debt crisis caused by falling demand and mass deflation.
It makes sense, in this scenario, to pursue a more aggressive version of the program that has been ongoing now for many decades. To manufacture employment. To have people do, perhaps ever more overtly, ever more ridiculously, what everyone knows is unnecessary. New Jersey has banned pumping your own gas since 1929. You can ban self-driving cars. You can require that companies of x revenue employ y human auditors for z hours, that a human radiologist has to review each x ray for y minutes before it’s allowed to inform any medical decision or be handed over to a patient. This is just the overt stuff. You can pay millions of people to be the even less useful AI-monitoring equivalents of night time security guards at a non-target; once in a hundred of their lifetimes, something unusual might happen. The rest of the time they get played to sit and play Switch. And that still might be better, and smarter than not doing it.
If the only line you can’t cross is something that sends you to jail, will you behave the same? Will most people? The threat of a lost job, of lost opportunity, the reward of a financially successful life, all these things drive a lot of prosocial behavior. It may be better to simulate them than to do without them entirely.
Surely 'even faker jobs' can only be a transitional step to either eudaimonia or annihilation?
Why would govts buy voters off if voters can no longer riot and overthrow the govt, if the power of millions of people in the capital city is insignificant compared to Slaughterbot Swarm #873? Why would leading corporations care what regulations there are if they can send their slaughterbots in and turn the regulators into meat paste? Or less dramatic scenes of 'super-charismatic AI explains the best course of action to take and calmly, politely shows why your particular idea, senator, would be expensive, risky, embarrassing and actually produce the reverse of what you wanted + some huge kickbacks to sweeten the deal.'
The key factor here is power transitioning from human armies to machine armies, leadership roles being taken by AIs. The rich/AIs can always renegotiate the deal later when they're more powerful. Who would trust Sam Altman to uphold a deal a moment longer than self-interest dictates?
I think we should focus on dull but important outcomes over more interesting but less significant transitional stages.
More options
Context Copy link
This is tangential, but I think people underestimate the effect wireheading will play in this. For those unfamiliar, wireheading refers to experiments where rats and people have had stimulatory electrodes inserted into certain parts of their brain and sometimes, due to misplacement in people or correct placement in animals, result in completely addictatory behaviour surrounding the stimulation of the electrode.
We already have this to a large extent in drugs. Anyone with any experience with this knows its incredibly profound the extent to which "push a chemical button" (and a very crude button) changes subjective experience. Societies nearly have (or perhaps have) collapsed under this even with these crude mechanisms which are naturally opposed by evolutionary homeostatic mechanisms.
If we end up with true wireheading a lot of these concerns become redundant. Wireheading without reason is extinctatory so we may see future life as a combination of wireheading with rational self-preservation (in contrast to the self-annihilation of the heroin addict).
A lot of modern suffering is from a brain poorly adapted for modern conditions. Luxury-automated-gay-space-communism is further from the adapted environment. Our experiences with drugs have demonstrated an arbitrariness to experience you can bypass. I think you'll have to be a pretty enlightened creature to overcome the pull of this technology if (or as) it becomes available.
Once this comes online it would greatly affect what you're proposing, but hard to predict timelines.
More options
Context Copy link
Perhaps I am too economics pilled but at a sufficiently high level your outcomes (2) and (3) seem like the same thing to me. Or, to the extent they aren't, (3) seems like it contains a contradiction. On the one hand there are still going to be unmet human wants and desires. On the other hand I am supposed to believe there is no scalable use human labor could be put to in order to satisfy those desires. I am skeptical that both these facts can obtain.
I guess I'm also skeptical of the concept of "bullshit jobs" more generally. I have not read Graeber's book but browsing the wikipedia article for some examples does not give me confidence. For basically all the listed jobs it does not seem difficult to me to describe how the people doing the jobs provide value for the people who are paying them. Maybe "bullshit" is supposed to mean in some broader societal sense but then you are just saying you value things other than what market participants value. That's fine, but you shouldn't expect the market to produce outcomes as if it valued something else!
Graeber was an activist far more than he was a serious academic. The "bullshit" label for jobs is just a vibe. It's very emotionally pleasing to look at the local Vice Presidents of Spreadsheets and say, "what do you even do, maaaann?" while smirking. But the fact of the matter is that those Spreadsheets might actually be moving tens of millions of dollars of real corporate value that ultimately help people get anything from basic needs (groceries) to durable goods that meaningfully improve their life (appliances, cars, etc.) Even if it's just AI slop marketing, digital commerce is a hyper efficient abstraction of the movement of value. You can make very good metaphysical critiques of this, but Graeber tried to make economic critiques. He failed.
Graeber, to be clear, was a shit academic when he reached outside his field (I have no way to vouch for his anthropological work). 'Debt' is riddled with sloppy work and treats 1800s economics as the state of the art to beat up on.
More options
Context Copy link
I guess I see Molochian incentives create bullshit jobs. Sure, locally speaking, I value hiring a super expensive lawyer to defend me in court, but only because the guy suing me hired his super expensive lawyer. We could take away those two jobs and be in the same place.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think that's the point. There is a gap between what people think is a valuable use of their time and what their boss / the market thinks is a valuable use of their time. For example, if some guy is being ordered to dig holes all over the place then being paid to fill them in is providing a marketable service to your employer, but nevertheless the overall work is going to feel stupid and pointless.
Sure, but what fraction of jobs does that describe? The examples in the wikipedia article are things like store greeters, lobbyists, academic administrators, and managers. I think it would be pretty hard to characterize those jobs, depending on the specifics, as being like digging a hole and filling it back in!
It is often argued that management is, by and large, a bullshit job because it has expanded so hugely and yet the same organisations (eg universities and hospitals) used to run perfectly well with smaller numbers.
Management seems to have grown with the ability of people to generate, communicate and store paperwork. If Person A is spending all of their time sending emails to other departments and then Person B is filtering a department’s incoming mail to sort out the dross, we can be back at digging a hole territory.
Previously, if someone took the time out of their day to physically travel to you and tell you something, you could reasonably expect it to be important.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link