A World Without Work

nitro

nitro

This article claims it is coming, and that most people will use their free time sleep and watch TV. What a waste when people will have the chance to live life to the fullest.

I will attend university classes around the clock trying to build a quantum computer. And when I am done with that, I will provide a Theory of Everything. Then, I will become a chess Grandmaster. Then I will finish my sci-fi novel. I will take a week to learn Haskell. Then I will read all the classics. Who knows, maybe I will get interested in painting and learn that too. I will date lots of interesting pretty women, maybe one a night trying new restaurants and food I have not tried before. If I were younger, I would try to go on Mars 1. [1]

Then I die.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/395294/

What will you do?

[1] Actually, without a bunch of people working to pay rent, there might be 100 Mars 1's, each competing to get there first. How much can be accomplished and how much more interesting are the lives of human beings when they are freed from the drudgery of spending 33% of their lives (or more) slaving at some job, and then plopping on a couch to watch some dumb tv show because they are too tired to do anything else?
 
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wildchild said:
What is a Quantum computer?
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A quantum computer is a computer that uses the properties of "individual" fundamental particles and the physics that govern them, known as quantum mechanics, to form a qubit as its basic computing unit. This is in contrast to classical von-Neuman computers that use a "large" number of electrons to build logic circuits. Classical computers are also governed by the physics of quantum mechanics, but classical computers, as far as we know, can not exhibit superposition, which is at the heart of quantum computers. We use the properties of ensemble of electrons to build gates that are then assembled into classical computers. The standard classical digital computers uses the bit.

The idea behind a quantum computer is somewhat complicated, but essentially it uses the weirdness of superposition of quantum particles to explore solutions in a massively parallel way. Classical computers are essentially finding solutions serially. Here is a reasonable explanation:

http://www.dwavesys.com/quantum-computing

and

https://uwaterloo.ca/institute-for-quantum-computing/quantum-computing-101

It is important to understand that a computing unit can be built from just about anything. The reason we use electronic digital computers is that they are fast, and quantum computers are much much faster for a certain class of important problems.

Quantum Cryptography also have another perhaps even more important application, guaranteed secure communications. You can send a message, and know whether it is being tapped in between. Here is a readable article on quantum computers and quantum cryptography one after the other in a concise way:

https://blog.kaspersky.com/quantum-computers-and-the-end-of-security/
 
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a world without work? Some just call it retirement. I worked hard (if you call trading es hard) to get to the point where all I have to do is smoke and drink and watch tv and trade a little fx. I said I would do it until I got bored. It's been 7 years now and I'm still not bored. When I have to come up with a security question I always pick "best friend", and the answer is "tv."
 
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but then again, I quit watching tv when I was in High School. Too busy with music. Didn't have time for it. I never saw Star Wars or a single episode of Seinfeld, so I had a lot of catching up to do. Now I think every child should be forced to watch at least an hour of the History Channel everyday.
 
The reason a "world without work" does not work is the same reason Communism does not work in practice - people are lazy and greedy.

You may get a small percentage who strive for greater things, but the majority will sit around doing nothing sucking the life out of the few who do work.
 
If people are not needed to work, why keep them around? So will say the ruling class. If we have robots that can tend to all of our needs, why do we need trading partners? If we don't need trading partners, no sweat dropping some nukes on countries we don't like. Just some thoughts.

fan27
 
gwb-trading said:
The reason a "world without work" does not work is the same reason Communism does not work in practice - people are lazy and greedy.

You may get a small percentage who strive for greater things, but the majority will sit around doing nothing sucking the life out of the few who do work.
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Correctamundo!

America's version of Leftism supports "subsidized life without work at the expense of other citizens"... in exchange for votes... supporting more of the same.

Give many the chance to "live a lazy life at the expense of others, and they will TAKE it"... rationalizing all along how they are "deserving"... because others (the MAKERS) have so much more.

America was founded upon THE OPPOSITE! The Genius Founders envisioned (and tried to enshrine via the US Constitution), the opportunity to live one's own life to his own satisfaction and capability WITHOUT THE GOVERNMENT ON HIS BACK! We had that up until about 100 years ago.

Now we have "American style Leftism"... that is, "Government so far up everybody's ass we can taste the Brylcreem"

:(



:(
 
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fan27 said:
If people are not needed to work, why keep them around? So will say the ruling class. If we have robots that can tend to all of our needs, why do we need trading partners? If we don't need trading partners, no sweat dropping some nukes on countries we don't like. Just some thoughts.

fan27
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All good points. But think about the industrial revolution. Something along the same lines happened back then when people weaved clothes by hand and output one sweater a month was replaced a machine that could weave 30 sweaters in parallel and output one every ten minutes. And then you racked the machines. Heck, think about the pits at the CME!!!

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/05/us-cme-group-closure-idUSKBN0L82QJ20150205

The point is, machines will continue to replace people on certain jobs, and "certain" will become "most" soon. And mind you, these are not necessarily low skill jobs. There will come a time soon where you will explain to a computer that you want a program that does so and so, and in ten minutes, poofff, there is your ten million lines of code program, completely free of bugs.

The point is that human beings don't scale very well. Once the human/machine language barrier is broken (as well as having machines that can see and walk fine and have other fine motor skills) there is no need for human beings to do the job at 1/10000 the efficiency of a computer for 1/10000 the price. They don't get sick, bored, have to go to the bathroom, have egos, and don't need time off for anything.

It isn't that people are choosing not to work, it is that the singularity is near.

 
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A world without enough work. When machines and technique are "doing it all", patterns of ownership will emerge as the more pressing concern.
 
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