I think the "people living with UBI would suffer from pointless lives devoid of meaning" argument has some truth to it, but people take it too far.
Humans in general derive a lot of meaning and satisfaction in life from engaging their mind and body to solve problems and overcome challenges, and doing those things collaboratively with other humans. A good job ("good" in this case meaning subjectively pleasant to work at, not high-status or high-earning) provides this satisfaction to many people, whether they know it or not. There's no reason a person couldn't find alternative ways to achieve this with hobbies if they didn't need to work, and many do. However, it would require more agency on the part of each person. Individuals would have to actively work to understand what their needs were to live a reasonably happy and meaningful life, and seek out hobbies and groups to achieve their preferred level of challenge and socialization, because they're no longer forced to by economic pressure, and many people might fail to do so.
I personally know people who have fallen into this trap already, who do not have to work and have their needs met by various benefit programs, and who spend most of their day lazing around and watching Netflix or doing other extremely passive activities, and seem to be unhappy and miserable most of the time. I cannot know what their subjective experience is like, but I strongly suspect they would have a more pleasant life if they engaged with activities that challenged their minds and bodies and forced them to socialize and collaborate with other people. However, there would be hurdles of discomfort and inertia to overcome in order for them to start doing this--just like the hurdles that prevent you from going to the gym, even though you know that in the long run, the exercise will make your life better if you go.
I believe if you implemented a UBI and a post-work society tomorrow, you'd see many people like OP flourish and have very happy and fulfilling lives, and many people who failed to actively design a good lifestyle for themselves stagnate and become more miserable than they were when they had to work. I don't believe this is a reason not to do it, but it might be a good idea to consider how to help those people while still allowing them the freedom of personal choice. I don't have any great answers so far.
1I wonder if we could predict the outcome, and give UBI to those whom it makes happier, and the bullshit jobs to those who need them? Alternatively, UBI to everyone, and take it away after a few years if it makes the person unhappy?
I guess both these solutions would be politically unacceptable.
Alternatively, UBI to everyone, and take it away after a few years if it makes the person unhappy?
This seems like it shifts the meta from "pretend to be an extremely devoted soulless worker drone" to "pretend to be an extremely happy UBI recipient who loves Netflix so much". Which is a pretty funny premise for a piece of fiction but maybe not the incentives we want underpinning society.
1If we have ASI that's both smart and benevolent enough to hand over all real economic activity to, it could give each person a bespoke series of challenges that would keep them active and happy.
(It could even give everyone a unique "fake but real" job, where any person failing to perform their job naturally results in making others' lives worse in a way the AI archangel won't fix, albeit with a guarantee that nobody's life can actually be less than quite good overall. Say there's a little community where the archangel gives everyone their job - you're the one who keeps the garden, you're the one who brews beer, and if you don't brew beer nobody drinks it... If someone is bedrotting they get assigned more responsibilities, if they're wearing themselves out they get less.)
Yeah, and it's too hard to measure whether someone is "happy" anyway. It's inherently impossible to know another person's subjective experience, and people lie about their own experience for various social reasons all the time so self-reporting is pretty useless. Let alone effectively gauging whether situation A or situation B makes them happier. There probably are humans out there whose optimal life experience consists mostly of laying in bed and watching netflix, just like there are humans out there whose best life looks like training to run ultramarathons all day, and it's almost impossible to place anyone else accurately on that spectrum.
Probably the most important step would just be understanding and treating mental illness better, many of the people who are miserable but keep laying around doing passive activities probably have depression. My other idea was more in terms of social/cultural norms than policy, ideally you would have a society where people were culturally encouraged to live active livestyles, and being sedentary was frowned upon unless you were old or disabled or whatever, but deliberately implementing changes to cultural norms from the top down is notoriously impossible, and some of the worst outcomes in history have happened because nations have tried to do that.
Which is why so many of us pretend to be the former. Even when we are not. Because we prefer that our families not starve. Thus the job interviews often become humiliating exercises in lying.
Maybe I'm atypical but this doesn't match my experience in the tech industry. I've worked at 3 companies ranging from 30 person startup to Google, and intrusions on my personal life has been limited to:
- prod outages out of hours once every couple of months or so. Annoying, but at the end of the day we need to handle this if we want to keep our customers.
- leaving drinks for an hour after work once every 3 months or so. Doesn't make much of a difference either way.
- 1 or 2 day off-site event every 6 months or so. Usually fun, but for 2 days off sites the burden falls on my wife who has to take the kids to daycare alone.
On 98% of days I start work at 9, stop work at 6, and can take as many breaks as I want for doctors appointments, emergency childcare, or even hanging out with friends for a beer at lunch.
None of the interviews made a fuss about how many hours I'd be willing to work or how dedicated I was to the job.
My experience of the tech industry, and that of many people I've talked to, contains the following as a less-than-rare event:
"Hey, you know that deadline we set last year, the one that you and your coworkers thought was wildly unrealistic? Well somehow we're way behind on it so we need everyone to work weekends until we're caught up."
Most tech companies will give you several interviews with several different people. When going through these I try to identify whoever is the least associated with management, the in-the-trenches guy who has the least incentive to lie to me about how appealing the company is, and I ask that guy what the overtime situation is like. Answers vary but I've asked it enough times to say that you seem lucky.
That could well be the case in some tech companies. I have never once been asked to work weekends (or even overtime excepting prod-outages) in 8 years, so there's clearly a large variance.
I don't mind the drinks so much (also because the company does not mind if I skip half of them).
For me an off-site event means "the company decided to take away my free afternoon". I am introverted. Most things that are fun for my colleagues, especially the managers (who make the decisions), are not fun for me. It is less of a burden for the family now that the kids are 6+; it was significantly worse when I had to take a one-week business trip and the kids were e.g. 1 and 3. Especially annoying when the company described the business trip as a reward (albeit one you cannot opt out from), and the days were meeting after meetings, and the evenings were mandatory social activities. I need to spend time alone to recharge psychologically.
I accept the occasional need to fix a production outage. It would be nice if I didn't have to get to the work early the next day, right after I spent the night fixing the production bug. It would be nice if on top of production outages we didn't also have various security tests that also have to happen at night so that we do not inconvenience our customers. Or if there were more people on the team to rotate these duties among. If I spend two nights awake during the weekend, doing some mandatory security testing, it feels like I am working a 12-day week, and then I get cranky and write articles like this. (Also, I start interviewing.)
Note that this did not happen during my first year or two in the company. In my experience, these things increase gradually.
I am happy that your experience feels better. I had occasional good jobs, too, but sometimes the situation changes dramatically in the same company, e.g. if there is a change in management.
Off site events always happen on what would otherwise be work days, is that different for you? They're also optional for us, but we have to work otherwise.
I've never gone on any business trips - I think they're far less common now after COVID.
In general all companies I've worked at have given some extra free time the next day if a prod outage took up a significant amount of time.
I guess it just seems our experiences are very different, it would be interesting to ask some more people to see which is more typical.
Ah sorry, I misunderstood the off-site event as business trip. (Not a native English speaker.)
Yeah, the business trips stopped since covid. In my current company, managers keep talking about restarting them, but so far it's been just talk. When I interviewed for another company, I was told that the business trips would be regular and mandatory (maybe that was also just talk). But it seems that the companies are getting ready... Perhaps no one wants to be the first?
Similarly, companies around me are gradually limiting work from home. No one wants to be the first to remove it completely, because obviously half of their developers would quit the next day, but they e.g. limit it to N days each month, and then reduce N by one every year, trying to stay in sync with competition.
In my job, you get extra money for the evening/weekend work, but not extra free time.
Different experiences could reflect different countries. I wish we had reliable data to compare, not just anecdotes.
i feel conflicted about this. on the one hand, i used to be someone who didn't enjoy much in life other than work. i spent approximately all of my time working or doing things that would help me work better. my hobby before i started working was approximately what my job ended up being. on the other hand, I'm currently pretty burnt out and trying to figure out whether this is sustainable or whether i am doomed to burn out repeatedly by doing this. my guess is there are a sizeable number of people in a similar position.
As a software developer working for almost 30 years, I feel like the profession has changed in ways that are hostile to people like me. And I feel like there are fewer people like me in the profession, so maybe these things are related.
At the beginning of my career, we were like 2 or 3 people working in a small office. Then the office sizes expanded to about 5 or 8 people, often including the boss. Then came the open spaces, with managers talking on the phones, and lots of noise, and everyone seeing everyone all the time. I am a strongly introverted person. The current working conditions, that now exist in almost every company I interview at, increase my stress levels significantly throughout the day, even if nothing else happens. And god forbid I do some stimming (luckily that doesn't happen often), of course someone will notice and comment on it. Is it really that important whether I shake my head while debugging?
At the beginning of my career, I was given a complex task to do (such as a small application, or a dialog in a larger one), and then left alone until I did it. I mean, I had to report my progress each day or two, but the assignment did not change in the middle of the work. These days, instead of receiving the entire assignment, I am being spoonfed the information, and they call it agile. "Add an 'Arrange' button that will arrange the items." "You mean, arrange them alphabetically? Or by size?" "Good question, let's have a meeting on Tuesday about that." Ironically, as a junior developer I was treated like a senior; I was shown the big picture and I was expected to fill in the details. After a few decades of experience I feel micromanaged, and worse, micromanaged by people who don't seem to understand the large picture, because it's often like "Change functionality F to do this instead." "Done." "Testers are reporting that it broke functionality G." "Yeah, F and G are related: G displays the data retrieved by F, so if you want F arranged by size, G will also be arranged by size. Is that not what you wanted?" "Good question, let's have a meeting about that on Thursday."
And because there is so much time wasted waiting for yet another meeting, people work on two or three projects at the same time. "Prioritization? What do you mean by that? Task A has priority 1. Task B also has priority 1. Task C also has priority 1. Task D does not have a priority assigned, but it is crucial that it be done this week; the entire company depends on it. These are all very important tasks!" Apparently the words "priority 1" are a magical incantation that is supposed to increase productivity by 30%, which is why it is important to assign the priority 1 to every task. (Except for refactoring and documentation. That is priority 2, which translates as "this will never be done, because there will always be priority 1 tasks to work on instead.") I worked at a company that started using decimal places, because everything was priority 1, so the managers had to specify that priority 1.1 task are more important than the priority 1.2 tasks or priority 1.3 tasks (but no one actually used the priority 1.3 because they knew that it would never get done). Another company solved the problem by introducing priority 0, and later priorities -1 and -2; I wonder how far they got by now.
This creates additional complexity, as the managers seem not to understand that Task A and Task B are not two bricks that can be delivered separately, but that sometimes changes in Task B are implemented on top of changes in Task A. "Change the story of Harry Potter so that the protagonist is a girl." "Done, deployed to testing." "Also, rewrite it so that it happens in USA instead of Britain." "Done, deployed to testing." "OK, now deploy to production the version with USA but without the girl." "What? There was never such version. Version 101 is Harry in Britain, version 102 is Harriet in Britain, version 103 is Harriet in USA. We have no 'Harry in USA' version. I need to create a new version 104, and we should test it before deploying it to production." "Why do you programmers always make everything sound so complicated?"
Notifications everywhere. At least five different people send me a message on Teams every day. If the Teams application does not have a focus, I also receive an automatic e-mail telling me that I have received a Teams message. If the Outlook application does not have a focus, Windows automatically shows a notification window telling me that I have received a new e-mail. When people start chatting in Teams, I have to stop working because the notification windows keep opening and I can't click where I want. After a week of vacation, I have about 200 unread e-mails, most of them notifications for the sentences typed in Teams that I have missed. And a daily summary of the messages. And a weekly summary. And something called Yammer; I don't even know what it is, I just made a rule that moves it automatically to the spam folder.
The communication is so distributed that often three different people ask me about the same thing. And the next week they ask me the same thing again. Because we have so many communication channels that as a result no one knows where anything is. Dunno, maybe the extraverts enjoy this. So much communication!
And all these changes do not make my work more productive. It's actually less. I change things, then change them again, then revert the changes, then unrevert them. I have a separate meeting about every checkbox. I get pieces of information from different sources, try to put them together, realize that they don't match, let's have another meeting on Friday to figure that out and come to a conclusion that will probably turn out to contradict something else. We have more managers than developers. Managers tell me they keep looking for more developers, but it's hard to find good ones. Friends tell me they have applied but got rejected. Through the grapevine I hear that we actually can't hire more developers because the budget for them was still not approved. I don't know what to believe anymore. I just feel despair.
I would be happy to work in the conditions I had twenty years ago. Seems like not an option anymore.
4i'm sorry you are experiencing this. it sounds like you are in a company that doesn't understand how to treat software engineers. there exist companies that are much better than what you describe, especially in the bay area, but presumably elsewhere as well.
someone who didn't enjoy much in life other than work
I think this was an accurate description of a past version of myself, and I too experienced somewhat serious burnout at least twice in the past two years.
I reflected on this, and came to the conclusion that being really dedicated to your work ("workmaxxing") has a lot of the same vibes of addiction. In the sense that the majority of your satisfaction and self-worth becomes attached to a specific activity, to the extent where it can hijack your psychology. Similar to addiction I think workmaxxing has substantial health / happiness detriments, but we don't talk about it enough because it's glorified by SV grind culture.
I also think the mindset "I'm doing work in order to feel good about myself" is the wrong way round, i.e. it should be general good feelings about yourself that inspires / enables you to do your best work.
Anecdotally I notice I've always done my best work after coming back from a substantial break.
If we take an expansive definition of burnout, I consider anyone who has insufficient slack in their life to feel organic excitement about things to be burned out in a sense. Under this definition I would guess most EAs are burned out to some degree. And that many rats become post-rats when they burn out and become enlightened.
Anyway I don't have a very distilled take here but hope this helps
I always feel pressure to lie in the opposite way during job interviews. In software engineering, interviewers want to see relatable hobbies and strong social connections, with parenting being the holy grail, and they are as leery as you are of glorifying work. Literally thousands of versions of this post have gone viral in tech circles over the last 20 years, and as a result your view has percolated into the vast majority of corporate cultures, such that saying "at this company, we are like one big family" has acquired the same ring as "I can't be racist because I have black friends."
I also find that it's more spiritually unpleasant to face "what do you do outside of work" or "what did you do over the weekend" when the true answer is socially unacceptable than it is to exaggerate when asked "why do you want to work at this company" or "you don't mind doing a little overtime, do you?" Parents should be grateful that they have a permanent gold-standard answer to the first two. And people aren't really expected to be honest on the second two anyway.
I understand there are pockets within tech that this culture hasn't reached, and that it's different in other industries like finance. I also agree that the "waging gives life meaning" argument is mostly ridiculous cope from people who have no choice, and they will drop the act the moment it becomes optional, similar to what will happen with aging and wireheading.
We need to switch bubbles. (If you are in Eastern Europe, please send me a private message.)
The only parenting-related thing I experienced, was one job offering to pay 50% of the cost of a private kindergarten (which by coincidence cost 2x much as other private kindergartens in the same part of town, but it was conveniently located next to the offices).
Hobbies? I heard about interviewers wanting to see your open-source repositories that you work on during your free time. Unfortunately, my hobbies are different from my job. (And I never understood how this is supposed to work, considering that many companies want to own all the IP you produce while you are employed by them. Will they allow you to work on the open-source projects while you work for them? Or is the idea that you would also channel all that extra energy to working for the company?)
I agree that what you are doing in your free time is none of the company's business. And yes, it is convenient to have a socially acceptable excuse against doing too much overtime. But it would be better if no one needed the excuse in the first place.
For what it's worth, I'd like to offer you a data point. I was working a miserable software job nearly identical to the one you describe in the comments (including the absurd priority system, excess of meaningless notifications, and constant deferral of decision-making to later meetings). I had the same opinion you did: the idea that this wretched place is "necessary" for my life to be "meaningful" is absurd and insulting. I'm trying my best to find meaning in the hours outside of work, given that my time spent inside could have been equally productively spent staring at the wall. To just have the same money without needing to work for it would be a dream, as I could focus all my attention on the people and hobbies I care about.
So, I decided to test it. I saved up enough to live off of for ~18 months, then quit my job, intending to just do more of the other things I was already doing with the extra time.
I am now 5 months into this sabbatical, and results have been mixed. To be sure, I do feel much more free now that I am not working a bullshit software job. I am, especially, much more socially active than I used to be, and I have more room to care about the people around me. This is very nice. I also like that I can spend long periods of time uninterrupted on things, instead of fitting them into isolated fragments of time.
However, I've also found the experience stressful and disorienting, which I did not expect. Even a meaningless bullshit job still serves as an anchoring point around one's life in a way that's difficult to replace. Another commenter points out that some people who live off benefit programs fall into unhappy, passive media consumption, and while this hasn't happened to me, I can feel myself constantly fighting to make sure it stays that way. There's no buffer between me and staring-at-the-wall-doing-nothing, so if I start feeling like I don't want to leave the house, or that hobbyist work doesn't seem like much fun today, why not?
I expected some amount of this, but assumed that once I'd started filling the time with meaningful things, momentum and inertia would do the rest of the work for me. Maybe, but if so, the momentum takes longer to build than I thought. It may also be that UBI-world would be better, since I'd be one among many people trying to anchor themselves in the world without a job, rather than an isolated individual going against the grain. Or, maybe I'm still just stuck in the mindset of the employed, and a relatively passive lifestyle wouldn't be so bad in a culture less focused on work and productivity.
Any of these might be true, and I'm certainly not saying having a bullshit job made me any happier. But, I'm less confident now that UBI-life is straightforwardly good. It seems more likely to me that there is a problem of structuring life without work, but it's a solvable one, and worth trying to solve.
Sometimes I have a free day and I waste it reading Reddit, so I can imagine a possible future where I do this every day, and then regret it at the end of every day. (I mean, not just free from the job, because that would be almost every weekend, but sometimes my wife decides to take the kids for some all-day activity and suddenly I am left home alone.)
That said, if I take the worst possible day and imagine a future consisting only of days like this, that sounds like motivated thinking. I mean, if I took the best day instead and imagined a future consisting only of such days, people would remind me that it is an obvious fallacy.
Another argument is, how do we expect people to manage their own free time, if they never had the opportunity to practice it? I mean, sometimes when I have free time, it's an experience so much out of the ordinary, that it leaves me confused. Suddenly there is an enormous burden of responsibility -- this is the moment you were waiting for so long! make absolutely sure that you won't waste it! who knows when you get a similar opportunity again? -- that it paralyzes me, and makes me feel guilty before I even started doing something.
Maybe it's the other way round: if I had more free time, I would start working on some project, and then the obvious action each day would be to continue on the project. Instead, if I only get free time when I am too tired to do something meaningful, of course I associate free time with meaningless things, and then when I get a free day the habit pulls me towards them.
And if my friends had free time too, then we could meet and do something together. Heck, we might even do something job-like together, but the difference would be that it would be meaningful, without arbitrary pressures and deadlines, and with the people I like.
EDIT:
Uh, this reply was a little incoherent, like I said a few unrelated things, most of them not really addressing your comment. The connecting point is this:
In the past, my activities were usually connected to my social life. For example, I tried to write science fiction stories, and I also attended various sci-fi conventions and clubs; one thing reinforced the other. But what was back then when I was at school. These days, I don't care about sci-fi that much, but if I did, I would have to choose whether to spend my free time trying to write it, or talking to other sci-fi fans, but I wouldn't have enough time to do both meaningfully.
What social activities do you have during your sabbatical? Have you even tried to bring more of them to your life? If we assume that other people mostly work during the day and are free in the evenings, it would make sense to organize your days so that you work on something during the day, and do the related social activity in the evening. And during the social activity, write the to-do list for the next day.
(And if we both had a sabbatical at the same time, and lived next to each other, we could meet tomorrow and spend the day brainstorming about how to solve the problem of being productive during the sabbatical.)
if I had more free time, I would start working on some project, and then the obvious action each day would be to continue on the project
I can attest to having observed something like this directly. With some distortion and fog applied for privacy: the project was not targeted toward being of use to anyone else (plausibly someone would have found it interesting, but they felt uncomfortable in the relevant hobby communities for political reasons), had no well-defined end point as a whole though individual pieces could become complete (scope creep was to some degree actively embraced), and existed within a semi-defined space but was open-endedly creative rather than closed-form (not purely playing existing games, solving packaged puzzles, watching TV, etc.). The person was also occasionally using modern AI chatbots to help explore ideas, find prior work, and connect the dots on some details.
The causal reason they were spending their time this way rather than on paying work was actually quite sad; they were basically trapped in rubble, even barely able to leave the house due to chronic mind-body type illness. So there is a lot of ambiguity here because they weren't thriving in a broader sense. But it suggests the “need work to have something to look forward to doing” trap is avoidable at least for some personalities.
If you tell me: “Hey, no one owes you anything. Why should anyone give you money for free? You need to provide value in return for the resources you consume; and when the AI outcompetes you, then you deserve to die; you should have been smarter and luckier and probably born rich to start your own AI company,” then all I can say is: “Fair point.”
You don't even have to say fair point. You can say this instead: all land and resources occurring in nature somehow ended up owned by people in a very unequal way. (It's well known that the miracle by which naturally occurring land turns into land owned by somebody is not explainable by libertarianism.) This was the Big Steal. So there's no need to force anyone to work for you; everyone can keep 100% of the proceeds of their work, and the profits of their businesses and so on. All we're asking is that the proceeds of the Big Steal, not borne of work, be divided equally among all people. This would be enough for everyone to have food and shelter, from the calculations I've seen.
I am sympathetic to this position. But I also suspect that in a parallel universe where I own the land, I am probably right now writing a sophisticated economical argument for why people should want, from behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, that the land be owned by the people who have superior... uhm... land-owning skills. (Though if I own lots of land, I probably have a think tank to write these things for me.)
Then the debate might switch to open borders, et cetera, and we might end up debating nature versus culture, the repugnant conclusion, or that the planetary UBI actually wouldn't turn out to be that much.
So I chose a smaller scope on purpose: my preferences. And I am stating them, not trying to justify them.
This comment's proposal is totally wrong and would very badly break all sorts of things throughout the economy and society, creating some weird combination of instant financial collapse + instant civil war. But the intuition that this proposal is crudely groping towards (rent-seeking is distinct from the kind of genuine labor we want to incentivize; we should heavily tax rent-seeking and distribute the revenue to everyone) is called georgism and is basically correct and good.
I certainly know about Georgism and my comment was partly a pointer to it. It's a very good description of a system we might want to build. But it's lacking as a description of how we might build that system, what obstacles we have to overcome and how we can overcome them. To me this points to a clear next step in thinking after Georgism and I wish more people understood it. In a comment sometime ago I phrased it like this:
My view of Georgism has shifted from “obviously good idea economically” to “good idea, but those with more land will block it” to “oh, that’s why people say the only important war is class war” to “if class war is won, people can get a right to housing and healthcare, and it’s not super important which taxes it’ll be based on”.
The "not super important" is a bit polemical, but the point is, when solving a problem we need to focus on the actual hard part. For this particular problem the hard part is conflict-theoretic, not mistake-theoretic. We're not all in this together. The beneficiaries of the big steal will fight tooth and nail to keep their unfair advantage. This needs to be acknowledged.
I think for Gen Z / Gen Alpha, UBI will melt them. They hang out with friends less, have less kids, scroll more, have less sex,..., you get the point. If you take a 14 year old and say "getting social status is meaningless since everyone is on government welfare, going to the gym is pointless because everyone is jacked from the myostatin inhibitors Eli Lilly put out, talking to a woman is pointless since there are sex bots walking around that are more charismatic and attractive than any human that has ever lived, we have AI generated VR short form video, and also you never formed a "real life" since you grew up on Instagram Reels, anyways go figure it out" they will completely melt down.
I think for people that have already formed a structured life, they can cope with it. But for a lot of kids, they have none of that structure and so they will get torpedoed by extreme hedonistic pleasure given the freedom to.
The worry I have that rhymes the most with this is the political economy stuff, personally. Right now a large fraction of humans in democracies can live and support their families as a direct result of voluntarily exchanging their labor. It'd take active acts of violence to break from this (pretty good, all things considered) status quo. As a peacetime norm, this is unusually good
At some point in the future (in the "good" futures, I'd add), there'll be a natural transition from that to people living and supporting their families as a result of UBI or welfare or other gifts from companies or the State. Ie they will now be surviving explicitly due to someone else's largesse[1]. This seems bad!
I'm not saying I have a better solution here[2] than UBI, but it seems worth considering.
- ^
State power is of course backed by the threat of violence, so it may not be just largesse. But a) "my desired system is the peaceful default, and it takes violence to wrest me away from it" is more stable than "my desired system relies on the constant threat of violence to hold", and b) a fair amount of democratic power comes from the democratic nature (and the ease of mass mobilization) of guns, and this has also been eroded by technological developments in the last century, and will also likely be further eroded by developments in AI.
- ^
Plausibly universal ownership of AI/dividends is better. Transforms the relationship of post-singularity bio-humans from welfare recipients to rentiers. Still not ideal, but better.
Will MacAskill has a workaround which is Universal Basic Resources, which is better than UBI at avoiding concentrations of power.
UBI = each perosn is paid an income by the government or a quadrillionaire philanthropist
UBR = each person is allocated some basic bundle of resources — compute, land, patch of the sun — which they can rent out the resources to the wider economy
(You're probably aware of UBR, I'm including this for other readers.)
The thing that I am preaching here is that people are different, so... maybe there actually are many people like that.
There is a general ethical problem in our society: do high IQ, high human capital people with impulse control have a responsibility to model behavior that will also work for those without the positive traits? Or should the lucky upper echelon feel okay to conduct behaviors that are safe for them but risky for the lower groups?
Examples: recreational drug use, single parenting, pursuing a career in the arts, dropping out of school, polyamory, etc
UBI-dependent lifestyles will likely fall into a similar pattern. Some people will thrive; some will be destroyed by UBI. But it's hard to legislate that some people should get UBI and others not (for their own safety/benefit).
Examples: recreational drug use, single parenting, pursuing a career in the arts, dropping out of school, polyamory, etc
One of these thing is not like the others, one of these things doesn't belong.
(I can see the appeal of a norm that no-one uses recreational drugs whether or not they personally would be able to handle it; but wouldn't a norm that no-one pursues a career in the arts imply that no more art would be made, except in people's spare time?)
We haven't yet figured out how to find a good equilibrium with humans in control given humans not doing the work (https://gradual-disempowerment.ai/). If humans were ever in control https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kbezWvZsMos6TSyfj/the-eldritch-in-the-21st-century .
The biggest problem with gradual disempowerment is that we want it.
Ignoring all of that, I would try to avoid as many sign of immoral mazeness as possible!
Honestly, from everything I've seen in my life, I tend to worry a lot more about people that don't work and don't have the financial need to work. They often seem to fall into mental health troubles. The healthiest people I do know that didn't need to work, ended up doing so anyway.
That doesn't necessarily mean that the job they pick should maximise money. The benefit of having lots of money, is that you can choose a job that is fulfilling for you that might not fall under the category of jobs that cover your expenses. Or maybe your dream job required so much up-front investment that you couldn't get into it in the first place, like car racing.
Substantially agree with a lot. And not crucial, but just for epistemic humility & precision how I'd phrase it:
The following sentence I bold-emphasize sounds like it remains a wholly open question, even if other things you write seem very plausible, not so unnatural, and maybe underappreciated indeed.
If you gave me a perpetual UBI starting tomorrow, I would quit my job, and spend my days with my family, my friends, and doing my hobbies. And I would be much happier than I am today! I would consider my life better, more full of meaning. Because I find the meaning outside of my job, in my free time. I just wish I had more of that free time.
So I do not wish your bet to be put on the test so much - or at least not exactly how you describe it. You don't know that other self within you that never had the chance to become realized. You might think it's true. Maybe not least because, of course, you regularly do already now experience this self partly in shorter term non-work, and who knows, you might even still as adult have enjoyed some prolonged non-work time - and wholly enjoyed it, just how I might. All this does not make me convinced you'd be "much happier" than you are today. For numerous reasons related to the human mind within today's world. Your cheap talk [meant here in a technical, not denigrating sense] doesn't change this.
I appreciate the reality check. Here are some data points that seem to point in favor of my hypothesis:
- I am happy on Saturdays when I realize "not only was today a free day, but tomorrow is also going to be a free day"
- I am happier when I work from home than when I work at the office
- I am happier during 3-day weekends (when Monday or Friday is a holiday) than during 2-day weekends
- I am happier during vacation that during a work week
This is my general impression; we could probably measure it more reliably by having an alarm clock that would ask me at random moments to note my current mood, or even better if it could just somehow measure it directly.
But it is also possible that the happiness is a result of a contrast; and if the work was gone, then my mood would just average out. It is also possible that a part of my happiness is supported by various lies, such as me telling myself "if only I had more free time, I definitely would..." that would be proved false if I actually got that much free time. (An analogy to "If It Weren’t For You" in transactional analysis.)
I see a few ways how it would be easy to get unhappy even with lots of free time. Doomscrolling. Fucking up my day cycle by staying online until late night, and then staying in bed until afternoon. If I didn't have a family: staying alone at home all the time. Probably a few more ways.
The job has a good influence by making sure that I wake up every morning, leave my house, meet other people. Uhm, maybe we should try working 2 hours a day, from 8 AM to 10 AM?
EDIT:
Connotationally: I feel a need to emphasize the original point of the article, which was about my preferences; specifically how I am triggered when someone talks about the "revealed preferences" of hoi polloi and I realize that I am included in that set, and the constraints that I am working under are misrepresented as my wishes.
It is possible that my desires would ultimately hurt me. They are still my desires. Also I think that if things were wrong, I would be able to learn and figure out a better plan. It is possible that I am wrong about this, too. I still would prefer a world where I can make the choice (with the risk of being wrong) over the world where someone else makes the choice for me (and can also be wrong, but will smugly ignore my feedback). I may be wrong about what is ultimately best for me, but I am not wrong about what my desire is at the moment.
And frankly, the hypothesis that the 40-hour work week just happens to be the optimal setting for everyone, is a priori just as unlikely as Hegel's hypothesis that a 19th century monarchy is the optimal setting for everyone (because it was the "revealed preference" of the people living in the 19th century).
This article is a scream "don't you fucking dare to talk about 'my' preferences, if you got them obviously wrong", rather than a claim that I have a perfect knowledge about what environment would be the best for me.
UBI would be a truly horrible idea, even in the age of full automation, because people would suffer existential horror and emptiness,
The claim of existential horror and emptiness could be a strawman. I would steelman the argument by transforming it into something like "UBI creates a lack of motivation for the humans to learn new things or to keep their capabilities." Additionally, I don't understand which white-collar jobs are "the intellectual equivalent of digging a hole and filling it". Maybe they are something like Recursive Middle Manager Hell or obvious BS jobs?
I didn't want to add another section that would distract from the main point, but I think it would be more precise to call some jobs semi-bullshit, described approximately like this:
*
Non-bullshit job: Dig a hole, plant a tree.
Bullshit job: Dig a hole, fill it up.
Semi-bullshit job, version A: Dig a hole. No, not there! Fill up the hole and dig a new one here. Actually, wait! Fill up that hole, too, and dig a new one here. Okay, you can plant the tree here.
(The tree is finally planted, so this can be justified as a non-bullshit job, but the majority of your everyday work experience consists of digging the holes and filling them up. You could have planted the same number of trees during a 3-day work week.)
Semi-bullshit job, version B: Dig a hole, plant a tree. Two weeks later, cut down the tree and plant some flowers instead.
(You plant the tree, but the long-term outcome is almost the same as if you didn't.)
*
Now, to be fair, when I use Claude it's very similar. "Do this. Nope, I changed my mind, do that instead. Nope, change it again. You know what, just delete it all and start over again." Not necessarily because the generated code is wrong somehow, often just because it is cheap enough to give commands first and think later.
It just feels really unpleasant when you are a human in that same situation.
I think that most people are really bad at managing their mental health and identifying what makes then feel good/bad.
Work, which is not a choice, provides the necessary challenge for many people. But they don't want to go to work. And when they don't, nothing is a challenge, the don't know how to challenge themselves enough to be happy.
In a UBI scenario we just have to teach people, maybe even in school, how to manage your mental health without externally forced challenges. That's it.
And people who already know how to do that (like you) at just fine.
The depressing thing is, constant overworking doesn't even result in more work finished. As Watts S. Humphrey said in "A Discipline for Software Engineering": "you can put in some extra hours and easily double your productive time. When you do this for any length of time, however, you will tire pretty quickly and the quality of your work will suffer." (pg 170, 6.6 Schedule Estimating).
While I would like to believe that, it seems to me that the empiric success of high working hours American and Chinese startups counts against that thesis. We don't see that 40 hour-work week successful startups that I would expect to see if the thesis would be generally true.
Hm, I may have to see if I can track down Humphrey's original data (DfSE did not have a direct citation).
Possibly Humphrey was wrong.
Two other possibilities I can think of are that Humphrey's data was of a different sample of people (I would imagine that 20 years old could possibly mange more productive time per week for longer than say a sample that included 20 to 60 year olds.)
Another might be that startups long weeks include a mixture of technical work and "team bonding" and other non-technical work that is beneficial, but less exhausting 40+ hours of technical work.
I have seen that argument online, but the usual response is that overworking only applies to working more than 40 hours a week. (Not my opinion, I am just reporting on it.)
Somehow 40 just happens to be the optimal value, regardless of the profession and the century. More is worse because you get tired, burned out, and sleep deprived. But less is also worse because you get less work experience and... something else, I don't remember what.
TLDR: Make working optional, but require a medium friction process to opt out of working which is designed to prevent people from becoming aimless/depressed.
We might need jobs which are designed not to be productive to society but to provide purpose / fun / fulfillment.
If anyone has something they'd really like to be doing which is not a job, they can apply for money to go do that and probably get funded.
But most people who don't have the motivation to design their own active and challenging life which keeps them happy will do the default thing which is get a job that seems like something they'd enjoy, and they will be happier than if left to their own devices without direction.
I completely share your preferences and your willingness to bet your soul on it; I'd bet mine, too.
I thought this line was very funny and accurate:
So from the fact that I didn't choose from an empty set you can figure out what my true desire is. Amazing!
Sure, smart guy. Show me where can I find the job advertisements for the 3-day work week jobs
Go to any job board and set a filter for "part time".
Go to any job board and set a filter for "part time".
I did, a few years ago. Among hundreds of jobs in my area and my profession, it found two part-time jobs.
I called the first one, they told me that the HR department probably filled out the form incorrectly, because it was definitely meant to be a full-time job.
I called the second one, they told me that the position is meant as part-time only for women returning from a maternity leave, and even they are supposed to switch to full time after a year.
I think that the country makes a huge difference here. It's of course naïve to assume that you specifically had the choice, but there are most certainly places where that choice does genuinely exist.
The working population in my own country averages 27.7 hours per week. Excerpt from that source:
Use refers to labour market participation. Net labour participation is trending upwards. In 2024, 73.2 percent of all 15 to 74-year-olds were in employment, and in 2023 the Netherlands had the highest net labour participation in the EU. The average worker worked 27.7 hours per week in 2024. This is the total number of hours actually worked by those in employment; hours not worked due to leave and sickness are not included. The number of hours worked is partly determined by the number of working days in a year. Compared to other EU countries, the number of weekly working hours per worker in the Netherlands has long been very low. The number of weekly working hours has been stable for a decade or so, however, while other countries have seen declines. Because net labour participation in the Netherlands is relatively high, the total number of hours worked per inhabitant is slightly higher than average compared to other EU countries.
Outcomes refers to proceeds from work, working conditions and occupational safety. The outcomes point to stable well-being, at best. Dutch workers’ real hourly wages are among the highest in the EU: in 2021 prices, workers earned an average of 28.8 euros per hour worked in 2023. Real hourly wages have not increased since 2009, except for a brief spike during the pandemic. In 2009, the real hourly wage was 29.8 euros per hour worked. Hourly wages are also stable in other EU countries, although there have been particularly pronounced increases in Ireland and Eastern Europe.
The Netherlands has the highest percentage of workers in flexible employment in the EU. In 2024, 32.8 percent of workers had temporary employment contracts or worked a flexible number of hours per week. This figure is currently trending downwards after peaking at 37.1 percent in 2017. While a degree of labour market flexibility benefits entrepreneurs, it also has a negative effect on the well-being of workers. This is because a flexible employment relationship offers less livelihood security. Job and income security can influence the decisions that people make, for instance when it comes to buying a house or having children.
Now, you could of course remark that this age group is quite broad (15-74), but for people aged 20-64, it is still 32.1 hours. Of course, there is still the man/woman split, but this does not account for everything.
But of course not everyone lives here! So indeed we should be mindful that not everyone has this choice, and even in this country, there are plenty of people who do not have the luxury to be able to work part time.
I think that the country makes a huge difference here.
Yes, I guess it depends on the labor law, and the culture i.e. how patriarchal the country is.
for people aged 20-64, it is still 32.1 hours.
Curiously, in my family it is also 32 hours on average. Me 40, my wife 24.
I get that there isn't an enormous abundance of ideal 3-day work week jobs in all areas. Your challenge was "show me where they are". They exist in rather large numbers in many places. It may be inconvenient for you to move to one of those places, but that doesn't mean it's an empty set.
In the past, we did not live in a society where everyone could just do what they wanted and have life still be good for everyone. So "You need to provide value in return for the resources you consume" was valid in a "the alternative is that nobody is creating value and are only consuming, so society would not work" way.
If we're heading to a society where AI can create so much value that most people don't need to be working, then perhaps we'll be able to transition to "everyone just does what they want and life is still good for everyone."
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the post, I'm thinking the post is focusing on how it's BS that people moralize about the value of "hard work," and it's playing with the concept of "having no life outside of work" being seen as good vs bad for the individual and high status vs low status. I agree that, from the individual lens, "no life outside of work" is bad for us and we shouldn't pretend it's not, and it's not such an ideal state that it should always get rewarded by high status while "having a life outside of work" is punished by being comparatively low status.
But if we focus on the lens of society functioning, yeah, society probably will not function if the actually "good" ideal of "doing whatever you want" is realized before necessary systems of value automation are in place (separate from the degree of "having a life outside of work" at all, which is obviously good, but just because everyone is LARPing that the % of this being 0% is good, doesn't imply that the alternative of 100% is better)
Yeah I guess I'm wanting to contribute this lens/interested in seeing discussion on, separate from the "work gives the individual meaning/prevents existential horror" argument (because yeah, that genuinely isn't the point), it's "how much work is right for every individual to be doing in order for society to function."
I think we mostly agree.
"Work is necessary to produce the things we need." - yes
"Work is necessary to give meaning to life." - no (at least not for me)
What is have now is an adaptation to the current situation. When the work is necessary, it makes sense to give higher status to the people who work, and to find some meaning in your work.
(But even today, some people find some meaning or status outside work.)
If human work even becomes unnecessary because a machine can do everything much faster, better, and cheaper than a human would... well, those who will own the machines will decide whether to exterminate the rest, or give them some welfare. They might even decide to torture them for fun, because there is nothing they could do about it anyway.
Giving people bullshit jobs would be somewhere on the scale between "welfare" and "torturing them for fun", if the work no longer makes sense economically. Where exactly on that scale, that depends on the specific work environments, how much time and energy it takes, how much the people need to be afraid of losing the bullshit job if they fail to perform well enough on its bullshit metrics, etc.
I think "at what point should work be considered unnecessary by the individual" is an interesting question. I think I would go a step further than whether it makes sense economically—if many people's lives are still not very good beyond basic survival, I imagine a society of people that see moral value in working to improve the overall experience for everyone would be a better society than one where everyone just taps out when their own life becomes sustainable/meaningful without additional work required. I see no value in bullshit jobs that don't actually produce anything useful, but I think there will always be ways to help improve the human experience of life even if the jobs of today become outdated.
(Ignoring the consideration of an aligned ASI that understands all our problems and solves them for us because of course there's much to be done before we have a shot at getting there)
I think there will always be ways to help improve the human experience of life even if the jobs of today become outdated. (Ignoring the consideration of an aligned ASI [...])
I agree.
Problem is that "useful things" seem not much aligned with "profitable things". For example helping other people is less profitable than finding new ways to get them addicted. So there is a risk that we will use helping people as a justification for making people work more, but in reality the extra work will be spent doing something else.
"What an idiot!" you probably think. "Doesn't he realize that at his next job interview, HR will probably use an AI that can match his online writing based on a short sample of written text, and when they ask 'hey AI, is this guy really 100% devoted to his job, and does he spend his entire days and nights thinking about how to make his boss more rich?', the AI will laugh and print: 'beep-boop, negative, mwa-ha-ha-ha'."
When this happens, you know what to send them:
I have two shameful secrets that I probably shouldn't talk about online:
"What an idiot!" you probably think. "Doesn't he realize that at his next job interview, HR will probably use an AI that can match his online writing based on a short sample of written text, and when they ask 'hey AI, is this guy really 100% devoted to his job, and does he spend his entire days and nights thinking about how to make his boss more rich?', the AI will laugh and print: 'beep-boop, negative, mwa-ha-ha-ha'."
And, hey, I get it. If I had a company, and I could choose between two people who are about equally qualified, but for one of them, working hardest for me is the true meaning of his life, while the other one hopes to collect his salary and then go home and spend the rest of his day with his wife and children, I would also prefer to hire the former.
Which is why so many of us pretend to be the former. Even when we are not. Because we prefer that our families not starve. Thus the job interviews often become humiliating exercises in lying.
"Hey, you don't mind doing a little overtime, do you?"
"Heh (nervous smile), uhm, no I don't. It's (deep breath) okay. (Oh my god, did I sound enthusiastically enough???)"
"Sometimes we will send you on a business trip for a week or more. Our company benefits include team building activities during weekend, and once in a week the entire office comes for a beer together after work, you know, to have some fun and social activities."
"Ah (oh fuck, that means the company will also take away some of my evenings, weekends, sometimes entire weeks at a time), that sounds nice (damn, I really need this job)."
"That's nice to hear, because at this company, we are like one big family. We are all really passionate about making the company grow. There is no place here for that kind of lazy people who just want to do their 9-5, collect their paycheck and go."
"Ha ha... of course, that... heh... is definitely not who I am, don't worry. (Is there actually a life before death, or is this all there is?)"
*
Wikipedia article: Preference falsification
*
This is not meant to blame people who naturally find their jobs to be their greatest hobby. Enjoy your luck; I mean it. Sometimes I wish I was one of you.
This is just my attempt to pierce the bubble of the preference falsification. You are surrounded by many people who claim to be the same as you. Many of them are lying. They are trying to survive in an environment that would strongly prefer if there was less of them, and more of you. (And perhaps in the age of em, this dream will become true.)
The reason I am writing this is because I feel constantly gaslighted when I read articles about how jobs give meaning to life, and how UBI would be a truly horrible idea, even in the age of full automation, because people would suffer existential horror and emptiness, therefore a truly compassionate government would have to create artificial scarcity and suffering and bullshit jobs, to save people from themselves.
Eh... I don't want to generalize from one example. The thing that I am preaching here is that people are different, so... maybe there actually are many people like that.
But I am not one of them. (And I suspect there might be other people like me.)
If you gave me a perpetual UBI starting tomorrow, I would quit my job, and spend my days with my family, my friends, and doing my hobbies. And I would be much happier than I am today! I would consider my life better, more full of meaning. Because I find the meaning outside of my job, in my free time. I just wish I had more of that free time.
If you tell me: "Hey, no one owes you anything. Why should anyone give you money for free? You need to provide value in return for the resources you consume; and when the AI outcompetes you, then you deserve to die; you should have been smarter and luckier and probably born rich to start your own AI company," then all I can say is: "Fair point."
But if you tell me: "Hey, it's actually better for you to live in a constant worry about tomorrow, to spend your days doing the intellectual equivalent of digging a hole and filling it, over and over again, to wish you had more than isolated fragments of time for all the things you actually consider meaningful," then my answer is: "No. Fuck you."
Stop telling me what my preferences are. You are wrong.
Oh, and please stop this bullshit about "revealed preferences". We all know it's just a fancy term for the just-world fallacy.
"It's not fair that black people are slaves." -- "Don't worry, it means they have a revealed preference to be slaves. Otherwise, they wouldn't be." -- "But they say..." -- "Hypocrites."
"Keynes said that in hundred years the productivity would increase so much that we would only need to work 3-day work weeks." -- "Well, I guess people have a revealed preference to work 5-day work weeks." -- Sure, smart guy. Show me where can I find the job advertisements for the 3-day work week jobs. Oh, there are none! So from the fact that I didn't choose from an empty set you can figure out what my true desire is. Amazing!
*
Next time someone tries to organize an experiment about how people live on UBI, pick me! I will show you how it is done properly. I am willing to bet my own soul on it.
If I am wrong, then liberating me from the endless cycle of semi-bullshit jobs will destroy me. I will sit at home, motionless, looking at an empty wall. Then kill myself with alcohol and drugs. (Or... whatever it is that people without meaning of life do in your fantasies.)
But if I am right, you will find me laughing, doing my own projects, having fun with my family and friends, traveling, playing, reading books, watching movies, vibe coding, playing computer games, blogging, meeting people, volunteering, probably a few more things that I don't even have the capacity to think about now.
Even a 50:50 chance of either outcome sometimes feels like a bet worth taking. Because the alternative is 100% certainty of wasting most of my time doing the things I hate.
Oops... I really screwed up by saying this out loud, did I?