Beautiful piece, with a great closer (not reproduced here, you should go with it).
I do wonder if our society would be better if we had more honourifics and formality. China has instituted social media rules based on qualifications. Many indigenous societies have forms of secret and sacred knowledge.
I think too many people are concerned with the abuse of these sorts of social systems when we already live in a system of value that is rife with abuse.
It started off really interesting, but I had to stop once the "AI could lead to post-scarcity" bit came.
Sorry, no offence, but I wish that this was the "problem" with AI.
The "Problem" is actually that it turns known tractable problems into non-reproducible problems.
Giving the illusion of giving the right answer is significantly more dangerous than giving an obvious wrong answer. So we're not going to AI ourselves into post-scarcity, whitecollar work will just sleepwalk into even further absurdity. (because, the fact is, humans also suffer from this issue; the worst among us give the appearance of competence and fuck it up massively).
AI consumes resources like a motherfucker, to maybe replace white-collar work, but the bluecollar stuff isn't going anywhere. It's a harder problem so people (companies) avoid it the same way that they avoid writing native GUIs. Much more convenient to just focus on pretty things and in the digital realm, but farming? agriculture? textiles and everything that society actually relies upon?
AI isn't coming for those jobs, because it's harder and has more definite outcomes. You can't trick people into believing that a pig has been slaughtered, carved and cooked properly.
It's comparatively easy to trick people into thinking that the man behind the curtain is a wizard, however.
I don’t think my concern is that AI is going to make everything too awesome for people to cope. The fact that I can now DoorDash lunch doesn’t really matter when I can’t afford a place to live or healthcare.
> There is a running joke in the U.S. version of The Office where Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson), who is “Assistant to the Regional Manager” keeps insisting that he is “Assistant Regional Manager”, which sounds a bit better. When he is officially promoted to the title he prefers, he is delighted
As with so many of them, the joke is more subtly, brilliantly, and originally from The Office; not The Office (US).
Freedom is not “doing anything you want”. It’s “not having to do the things you don’t want to do”.
AI may automate a white colar subset of those, but modern day society has for the longest time used wives, young people, immigrants from countries with bad currency devaluation, etc, to fill the gap above. The article talks about status and attention as the ultimate goal, but that may be a male-only perspective. Or even a him-like-perspective. The reality is humans chase many ladders since brains have may proclivities. For more than half of the population (wives and the poor) the goal may be freedom or time to do more.
> Freedom is not “doing anything you want”. It’s “not having to do the things you don’t want to do”.
Both of those are anemic views of "freedom".
The most robust understanding of freedom is and must be rooted in morality and thus human nature:
Freedom is the ability to do what is *good*, or what one *ought*.
Because we're talking about human agency, "good" and "ought" here are normative and thus moral in nature. But morality itself is determined and underpinned by human nature. What makes a human act "good" depends on what it means to be human. There is no other basis for morality. Everything else is arbitrary, circular, or ultimately a tacit appeal to human nature.
And human nature has a direction. Good acts further human beings along that general axis (neutral acts at least do not retreat or deviate). Eating lead is unhealthy, but doing so intentionally, knowing fully well that lead is harmful, is evil, because a choice was made in light of knowledge to do what one should not.
> But when everyone spends more, the effect is merely to raise the bar that defines special. The average American wedding now costs $30,000, roughly twice as much as in 1990. No one believes that couples who marry today are happier because weddings cost so much more than they used to.
It seems odd to claim this increase is due to keeping up with others' weddings when inflation between 1990 and 2015 was roughly the difference here. The weddings were/are more expensive because everything was/is more expensive. $15,000 in 1990 had the same purchasing power as ~$27,000 in 2015. So this hardly seems related to bigger, more extravagant weddings. People have had to spend more to maintain the same quality of wedding as the previous generation.
Despite “post scarcity” still being infinitely far away, we have moved towards it. A lot of things still suck, but a lot of things would be miraculous to a time traveller from 100 years ago, or even 50 years ago. Unfortunately, the hedonic treadmill is real at the societal level as well as the individual.
> Titles mean something because they mark one’s status—where one stands relative to others. [...] The inevitability of hierarchy, that some people will do better than others and be more respected for it, leads to all sorts of social pleasures and social pains.
But why? What is their purpose? What is social hierarchy for?
Let's be frank. Most title chasing is pure vanity. There is no substance in the chase. It's a game that takes schoolyard stupidity and flavors it with "adult" respectability. But underneath, it's generally vacuous and theatrical.
The only purpose of social hierarchy is to serve others. Why does a manager exist in a firm? To serve the workers he manages so that they can do their jobs which are also in the service of someone else. Why is there a king or a president? To serve the common good according to his station. We elevate for service. If someone has more to give and the necessary character to do it well, ideally, we elevate him according to his good so that he can better serve according to the good he has instead of allow that good to rot on the vine. It is service that makes sense of social hierarchy. Social hierarchy is about gift. It's what makes a society a society.
In a tyrannical, upside down world, hierarchy is about domination and exploitation, about taking. Here, the scramble goes by the motto "eat or be eaten". We claw over each other like crabs in a bucket, because we don't want to be "eaten", and because we wish to "eat" others. It is a perversion of our human nature. When Christians speak of "the world" in the pejorative, they mean this systemic pathological condition of human societies. I laugh when people wax poetic about utopia here on earth, as if "resources" could fix the issue, because left to our own devices, it is dystopia that we tend to produce. This is why Christians speak of the need of a divine savior and why our "flesh" needs to be crucified so that we may live, not because the body is bad, but because we are stupid, corrupt, and weak.
> So long as we remain human, we can never be fully satisfied. [...] Reflecting on utopia might tell us something interesting about human nature more generally.
If the satisfaction of all finite desires leaves us with unsatisfied desires, then either there are unsatisfiable desires, or our desires can only be satisfied by something infinite. This is where God as the ultimate good and highest desire and ultimate source of joy comes in. If God is the ultimate cause, source, and sustainer of everything, then our "to be", our being—which is what desire is about—is to be found in this First Cause. All other created beings are in some sense intermediaries and mediators of the desired good. But if you can have the ocean, what, then, is a cup of water drawn from that ocean? Good, to be sure, but not the source.
On this view, many pathologies, obsessions, compulsions, and addictions, then, are misdirected desire.
> But I’ve never met anyone who was entirely indifferent to the opinions of others.
Likewise, if you have the fundamental approval of an omniscient God who knows you better than you know yourself, who willed you into existence with intention, who is the justification of your existence, who loves you more than anyone could and to whom you matter more than you could understand, who can give you joy nothing else can, then the approval of others becomes quite shabby in comparison. Perhaps not entirely meaningless, but not your foundation. Their approval is not your fickle pagan god.
This is what gives martyrs their strength and freedom to endure the injustices and envies and hatred of the world, even unto death. Their soul remains unsold for the measly opinions of others, untarnished by the indignity of desperately seeking the approval of others like a beggar licking crumbs off the floor. It allows one's focus to shift from an obsession over self toward a disinterested c...
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 27.6 ms ] threadI do wonder if our society would be better if we had more honourifics and formality. China has instituted social media rules based on qualifications. Many indigenous societies have forms of secret and sacred knowledge.
I think too many people are concerned with the abuse of these sorts of social systems when we already live in a system of value that is rife with abuse.
Sorry, no offence, but I wish that this was the "problem" with AI.
The "Problem" is actually that it turns known tractable problems into non-reproducible problems.
Giving the illusion of giving the right answer is significantly more dangerous than giving an obvious wrong answer. So we're not going to AI ourselves into post-scarcity, whitecollar work will just sleepwalk into even further absurdity. (because, the fact is, humans also suffer from this issue; the worst among us give the appearance of competence and fuck it up massively).
AI consumes resources like a motherfucker, to maybe replace white-collar work, but the bluecollar stuff isn't going anywhere. It's a harder problem so people (companies) avoid it the same way that they avoid writing native GUIs. Much more convenient to just focus on pretty things and in the digital realm, but farming? agriculture? textiles and everything that society actually relies upon?
AI isn't coming for those jobs, because it's harder and has more definite outcomes. You can't trick people into believing that a pig has been slaughtered, carved and cooked properly.
It's comparatively easy to trick people into thinking that the man behind the curtain is a wizard, however.
As with so many of them, the joke is more subtly, brilliantly, and originally from The Office; not The Office (US).
AI may automate a white colar subset of those, but modern day society has for the longest time used wives, young people, immigrants from countries with bad currency devaluation, etc, to fill the gap above. The article talks about status and attention as the ultimate goal, but that may be a male-only perspective. Or even a him-like-perspective. The reality is humans chase many ladders since brains have may proclivities. For more than half of the population (wives and the poor) the goal may be freedom or time to do more.
Both of those are anemic views of "freedom".
The most robust understanding of freedom is and must be rooted in morality and thus human nature:
Because we're talking about human agency, "good" and "ought" here are normative and thus moral in nature. But morality itself is determined and underpinned by human nature. What makes a human act "good" depends on what it means to be human. There is no other basis for morality. Everything else is arbitrary, circular, or ultimately a tacit appeal to human nature.And human nature has a direction. Good acts further human beings along that general axis (neutral acts at least do not retreat or deviate). Eating lead is unhealthy, but doing so intentionally, knowing fully well that lead is harmful, is evil, because a choice was made in light of knowledge to do what one should not.
It seems odd to claim this increase is due to keeping up with others' weddings when inflation between 1990 and 2015 was roughly the difference here. The weddings were/are more expensive because everything was/is more expensive. $15,000 in 1990 had the same purchasing power as ~$27,000 in 2015. So this hardly seems related to bigger, more extravagant weddings. People have had to spend more to maintain the same quality of wedding as the previous generation.
But why? What is their purpose? What is social hierarchy for?
Let's be frank. Most title chasing is pure vanity. There is no substance in the chase. It's a game that takes schoolyard stupidity and flavors it with "adult" respectability. But underneath, it's generally vacuous and theatrical.
The only purpose of social hierarchy is to serve others. Why does a manager exist in a firm? To serve the workers he manages so that they can do their jobs which are also in the service of someone else. Why is there a king or a president? To serve the common good according to his station. We elevate for service. If someone has more to give and the necessary character to do it well, ideally, we elevate him according to his good so that he can better serve according to the good he has instead of allow that good to rot on the vine. It is service that makes sense of social hierarchy. Social hierarchy is about gift. It's what makes a society a society.
In a tyrannical, upside down world, hierarchy is about domination and exploitation, about taking. Here, the scramble goes by the motto "eat or be eaten". We claw over each other like crabs in a bucket, because we don't want to be "eaten", and because we wish to "eat" others. It is a perversion of our human nature. When Christians speak of "the world" in the pejorative, they mean this systemic pathological condition of human societies. I laugh when people wax poetic about utopia here on earth, as if "resources" could fix the issue, because left to our own devices, it is dystopia that we tend to produce. This is why Christians speak of the need of a divine savior and why our "flesh" needs to be crucified so that we may live, not because the body is bad, but because we are stupid, corrupt, and weak.
> So long as we remain human, we can never be fully satisfied. [...] Reflecting on utopia might tell us something interesting about human nature more generally.
If the satisfaction of all finite desires leaves us with unsatisfied desires, then either there are unsatisfiable desires, or our desires can only be satisfied by something infinite. This is where God as the ultimate good and highest desire and ultimate source of joy comes in. If God is the ultimate cause, source, and sustainer of everything, then our "to be", our being—which is what desire is about—is to be found in this First Cause. All other created beings are in some sense intermediaries and mediators of the desired good. But if you can have the ocean, what, then, is a cup of water drawn from that ocean? Good, to be sure, but not the source.
On this view, many pathologies, obsessions, compulsions, and addictions, then, are misdirected desire.
> But I’ve never met anyone who was entirely indifferent to the opinions of others.
Likewise, if you have the fundamental approval of an omniscient God who knows you better than you know yourself, who willed you into existence with intention, who is the justification of your existence, who loves you more than anyone could and to whom you matter more than you could understand, who can give you joy nothing else can, then the approval of others becomes quite shabby in comparison. Perhaps not entirely meaningless, but not your foundation. Their approval is not your fickle pagan god.
This is what gives martyrs their strength and freedom to endure the injustices and envies and hatred of the world, even unto death. Their soul remains unsold for the measly opinions of others, untarnished by the indignity of desperately seeking the approval of others like a beggar licking crumbs off the floor. It allows one's focus to shift from an obsession over self toward a disinterested c...