Everyone needs goods and services. Not everyone needs work. Not everyone needs a teacher/supervisor/nanny to keep boredom at bay. People who need to be assigned tasks and bosses to feel a sense of purpose should have safe, legal access to that form of domination, of course. In general it does not seem like a good default to build theme-park imitations of antiquated labor patterns using the general public as cast members. Is Wayward Pines what everyone wants? Because that's how you get Wayward Pines. It's a creepy Disneyland where people are damned to forever repeat the motions of 20th century life instead of learning to think differently.
I'm all for software that allows people to spend more time on the interesting parts of their jobs, but the one paragraph about how CityGrows can reduce job drudgery feels out of place after so much praise of work.
I maintain that getting things for free, without having to earn them yourself, can feel good in the short run but is corrosive in the long term. When I think of a work-free dystopia I think of Wall-E.
I'm a huge proponent of people like Mr Money Mustache and the FIRE community who free themselves from the need to work, but still are engaged in purposeful pursuits whether it’s soap making, house flipping or care-taking (what I mean when I talk about 'good work'). The thing is: MMM and other early retirees earned their freedom through years of labor (and smart investing).
Yes, there are limits and exceptions and all of this notion of raising yourself up by the bootstraps is predicated on a level playing field (aka perfect market) that has never existed, but the end notion is, people who don’t have to earn what they have suffer.
The challenge is distributing opportunity so that people have access to work that enables them to progress according to their merits, with a strong safety net to catch those who through a lack of luck or ability are not able to make it. We have become unbalanced with too much of the opportunity (and money) being hoarded into a small slice of the population. I don't think automation will fix that - if anything, automation will exacerbate the trend and leave many caught in the kind of draining, involuntary, paycheck-to-paycheck work that I think you are arguing against (and which I also called out).
In either case, I appreciate you reading and taking the time to comment.
If all productive labor can be done better by machines, then making soap with your own human labor is just as much a game as playing paintball is. It doesn't really matter that one of those activities provided income for large numbers of people, historically, and the other did not. Not everyone needs a job-like activity assigned by others to avoid becoming a Wall-E blob of boredom. (Just as there are a lot of options for young adults with trust funds in between the extremes of "get hired for a job like other 22 year olds" and "suffer endless ennui.") Possessing material security without trading waged labor for it is "dystopian" the way that being a child in the summertime is dystopian. (And yes, some children are going to whine "I'm bored!" until someone gives them chores to do, but don't start planning needless chores for the children who aren't even bored...)
