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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 27/08/2012 23:49, Stefano Vaj wrote:<br>
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<div class="gmail_quote">On 27 August 2012 22:36, Anders Sandberg
<span dir="ltr"><<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:anders@aleph.se" target="_blank">anders@aleph.se</a>></span>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote">
I am often thinking about this, since I live an
ultra-privileged life as an Oxford scholar. Sure, I do grant
hunting and need to publish or perish, but let's face it: it
is a creative job with no heavy lifting, light demands and
very flexible hours in a lovely place.<br>
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<br>
Mmhhh. I suspect that "creative" work, either as a philosopher or
a music composer or an entrepreneur or even a politician, can
actually be much more demanding, competitive, challenging and
actually painful and/or risky than a 9-to-5 clerk-level
employment. <br>
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<br>
Richard Florida made the point that the creative class in many ways
is more stressed than the service class. It might be a better kind
of stress than the stress of fearing for your position when you pull
all-nighters to make your startup work or because you cannot drop a
mathematical problem. Knowing that you better come up with fresh and
unique ideas to do your job is deeply unsettling. 9-to-5 work has a
natural cut-off, but creative work doesn't, and if not managed right
will eat your life. However, I think the feeling of being in control
over one's life (no matter how real or imaginary) outweighs the
direct stress.<br>
<br>
There is plenty of workism around saying that it is good to work
(usually based on some kind of protestant assumption of
self-mortification or a variant of my Aristotelian virtue theory).
But this is unlikely to motivate many to dig ditches or be clerks if
they don't have to. The tricky part about creative work is that it
often seduces us: we do it because it is rewarding, and before we
know it we cannot drop it. In a post-scarcity world the creatives
are likely nearly as stressed as now. <br>
<br>
Over the long span we have a transition from a society were all
levels of human skill are economically competitive, over a situation
where automation makes skills under some certain level cheaper to do
by technology, to a situation where nearly all human skill is
redundant. This transition makes society in general much richer,
since the cost of producing wealth goes down. The current headache
is how to re-school people whose jobs have been substituted by
technology (either to something completely different or to jobs
enabled by this substitution) or find some other way to ensuring
their livelihood. This is likely driving lots of current stress in
society. But just as scary as lack of food and shelter is loss of
social status. Many people get their social positions from their
jobs (or think they do), and that is threatened by this trend even
if there is an endless supply of material security. In fact, if
material security doesn't matter then social status becomes nearly
the only thing. So this suggests that high-status people are going
to react even less well to automation of their jobs than low-status
people. So it might be the creatives who have the worst situation in
the long run: they self-identify with their skills, and automation
threatens their self concepts. <br>
<br>
Maybe the proles are going to be the long-term winners. Although I
do not think we should underestimate human creativity in creating
status markers. <br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Faculty of Philosophy
Oxford University </pre>
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