[extropy-chat] >H pleasure (was: MOVIE: "The Singularity")

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Emlyn <emlynoregan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Some days, I have great trouble working out how that differs from
> right now.

Which is what inspired my post.  Perhaps it can be more easily
explained in the context of the future, but it's certainly a problem we
can start solving today.

> Might we not view large chunks of the service industry and the
> creative class workers as producing nothing tangible? I do wonder
> whether much of modern work is the market inventing make-work to keep
> the money flowing.

Just because it isn't tangible doesn't mean it's worthless.  My own
primary industry, computer software, is a classic example of this: the
"product" is purely intellectual property, and yet the effort to figure
out how to get a machine to do certain complex tasks is, in many cases,
worth far more than it costs, especially when the fruits of that effort
can be easily distributed to millions of computers, most of which
belong to people with similar problems that the same software can
solve.  And then there's the subset of AI programmers, who figure out
how to get computers to figure out further problems on their own; since
programmers' output has value, programmer-programmers' output has some
value too.

It's only make-work if it would never be worth doing under any natural
circumstances.  Most of the non-core-production work is stuff that is
worth doing, but not as much as basic survival - but now that a few can
do that work for the many, the rest are free to tackle lower-priority
tasks.

> How are these workers, perhaps the *majority* of workers (including
> myself), distinguishable from lotus eaters from the outside?

The lotus eaters don't have even the appearance of generating anything
of worth, and they're not trying to justify their worth.  There are
already lotus eaters today, to compare to.