We’ve got work to do. I’m done waiting for others to say it. I know this will polarize and I don’t give a fuck. Join me or fight me. Either way, I love you, love the human family of Earth. I got you.
Wo is/are the "General(s)" saying that "although no battles need to be fought, training has to be kept up because without it peoples mental health would deteriorate". And does he reason so in good faith, not being familiar with mental issues?
Hey Janos! The analogy it’s the guy on Sam’s podcast episode. Ross Douthat. Nice bloke, no disrespect, but yeah. He maintained that:
“Even if we solved basics with AI, we’d need to keep FORCED WORK around in exchange for basics because it gives people purpose.”
It’s NOT a reasoned conclusion based on available data.
It’s a theoretical intuition based on incomplete anecdotal info. Good faith? Maybe. Who can say what’s in men’s hearts.
All I know is it completely ignores the fact that many don’t have to work and thus choose not to, and by all accounts they are content and productive enough.
To Sam’s credit he pushed back.
Extending the metaphor, I suppose it’s about people who are free from the forge, or safely nestled in it, who believe peasants or the paycheck-to-paycheck set lack the depth to make good use of free time.
Bertrand Russell has a line in “In Praise of Idleness.”
A rich person quipping “what on earth would the working poor need free time for?”
The implication is workers are boors and simpletons and meant to be plow horses, and left to their own devices, we in charge would rather not have these folks around, better to keep them busied with this or that.
But that’s too horrible to say, so they grasp for the “it’s for their own good” argument, and it’s important enough that they better damn well be right. And they’re not. Nor is it their call to make, legally or morally.
So the effrontery is generously stacked, dear, wise Janos The Good.
Our work is cut out for us.
Another great quote:
“There are men who, through ownership of land, are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work. These landowners are idle, and I might therefore be expected to praise them. Unfortunately, their idleness is only rendered possible by the industry of others; indeed their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source of the whole gospel of work. The last thing they have ever wished is that others should follow their example.”
Just to be clear, the "good faith" question is not meant judgmentally; for strategic reasons we need to know what kind or pushback we are facing.
As a larger issue, I think that the overall UBI movement is problematic for being limited seemingly to the income/poverty horizon instead of the broader framework of Universal Basic Dividend, widening "battles" to social and economic justice. In essence we have a class war the going on, actually, not just metaphorically; that need to direct attention to the role of “incumbents”—beneficiaries of the current status quo:
“…the mechanisms by which incumbents hold stuff back are well hidden. The decades of lobbying capability they have are not visible. So we don’t see the ways in which they’re doing it. It’s great to shine a light on it. Certainly my experience has been, if you are an incumbent, it’s a lot cheaper and easier to put a bit of money into lobbying and media and PR campaigns than it is into doing the hard work of reforming.” Greg Jackson, https://www.thersa.org/rsa-journal/rsa-journal-issue-4-2025/in-conversation-with-greg-jackson/
I have been contemplating semi retirement, just doing what I do and not worrying about it. I quit working a job job in 2012 and never looked back. No, it ain't easy, but me making money for me is way more purposeful than me making money for some corporate bullshit factory. UBI would allow me to be a much bigger resource for my community--which is exactly what I would do.
I wish we could clone you a million times and put a bunch of you in every town, capturing their stories in song, lighting up homes and coffee shops and weddings and funerals. Teaching the gift of music and just bearing witness, and turning witness into poetry, to children who don’t have exposure to that, and bring your noble battle cry to nursing homes to remind them who they are and coronate those who die well. That’s what UBI means to me. And it sickens me when they say we won’t know what to “do” with freedom of time.
Aw! That's the best thing anyone has said to me in a long time. But yes, you are right! Community songwriting! Sound healing on street corners! Just to be able to think in the morning, I think I'll go hang out at the Senior Center today and see if anyone wants to write a song with me, and GO FUCKING DO IT ... and not have to worry about how groceries are going to happen... yes please. Damn, I wish you lived next door so we could hang out and get Very Excited About Things together on a regular basis.
Some people (many people) unfortunately don't know what to do with themselves other than paid work for employer.
Sometimes, and maybe originally, the work is done for an honourable purpose such as supporting oneself and a family. But a workaholic becomes the proverbial dog that caught the car, or more accurately, they become like Colonel Nicholson from "The Bridge on the River Kwai". Their work and their idea of self become inextricable. They rationalise it as for the public good or maintaining the social order or "the economy". So the work now takes a much loftier much loftier purpose than putting food on the table to feed a hungry family. Hence the workaholic is so easily seduced by right-wing propaganda.
That being said, the "young radical left online hivemind" (basically video games addicts) doesn't have a plausible substitute either. I think sitting around playing video games all day would not be very fulfilling. (And I have some experience!) I think we need to look to a system of part rota-based work on necessary and desirable public duties, part entertainment such as sports and video games. AI as a substitute for human work is susceptible to the problem of "dictatorship as equilibrium" (the potential for the system to be centralised and controlled by a few or even a single individual) which won't be solved in anything like the near future. Our ability to provide useful work is essentially what keeps us, the masses of mankind, right now from slavery or population elimination. Give that ability up at our peril. For the moment, while we're compelled to do it, it is best as a palliative to seek to partially enjoy it, without usually seeking the kind of stupefying opiate of workaholism.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I still take a different view, namely strict rejection of a pattern that keeps showing up in the rhetoric like a persistent weed.
It goes something like:
Lack of compulsory jobs >> people will do (narrow band of 1-2 activities meant to sound unproductive) >> this is judged as unfulfilling by rhetor >> concludes SOME compulsory work in exchange for access to abundant resources will be necessary.
I find this formula problematic. I reject the cynical narrow-band reduction, making it sound as empty as possible. I reject the admissibility or the relevance of the rhetor’s value judgement about that or any activity chosen by a free adult. (Rich/retired people have leisure time and nobody suggests forcing them to work.) I then reject the nonsense that to remedy this allegedly unfulfilling activity we must create a compulsory economic situation.
Obviously I have no problem with people choosing to do jobs.
I reject the idea that automation or public basics necessarily leads to dictatorship. We already have some public basics and it’s fine.
You produce no argument against the risk of AI automation of the workforce other than "it's fine" and illegitimately bundling it together with "public basics" (which is a separate issue).
Why is fine? Do you believe that the tech companies that would create the robots and AI behind them, would generously provide you with utopia indefinitely? They won't even pay their taxes.
Transparently, by giving up all their know-how and their ability to get things done in the physical world, human beings will be giving up their power. And that will allow them to be enslaved or eliminated – all the more easily if in some mad rush, we allow the technology to be centralised in a few tech companies, as is happening now.
That conclusion follows as inevitably as night follows day.
Yes I believe that in a democratic constitutional republic it doesn’t necessarily matter what the rich people or tech elite want of we get a majority or supermajority from an educated public.
I think public basics are fine because a lot of other countries have public healthcare guarantee, and getting food and safe lodging is also very doable and not the filth pit and shame fest it is in the U.S.
Data shows this sort of floor is sustainable and actually boosts productivity and societal cooperation.
Getting there will be challenging, but yeah, that’s the vision and I think it’s possible.
We need to get there gradually and carefully, but we do need to get there.
If we can experiment and move forward slowly to reduce suffering without undo risk, we should. Basic moral theory.
Soviet communism did NOT have that attitude. They brute forced. I’m against that. If we can’t do it legal, with a vote, don’t do it with revolution.
To get the vote we need to educate and inspire with a free press and expression. Hence my writing. Enough people like me, maybe change is possible.
Every humanitarian change in the past was fought tooth and nail in this same way. Why assume it’s not still being fought?
Point of THIS post is about the moral logic of mandatory labor once survival no longer requires it, as dictated by the hypothetical, irrespective of whether you think that’s likely or possible.
IF we do reach a point where basic goods can be produced without mass human labor, THEN the justification for forcing people to work disappears.
How we govern AI, distribute wtvr power, or prevent corporate monopolies, etc, these concerns are real, I don’t see it as inevitably leading to centralized dictatorship, such that this hypothetical implodes on contact with causal market logic. Parsimony has me predicting AI/automation produces surplus, the UBI distributes enough to cover the basics and then people use that to pay suppliers, could be private or public, likely both.
Again, like 99% of my interest in this is the notion that we’d preserve wage coercion long after we need to, for the explicitly expressed purpose of protecting “meaning” for the worker, when we know rich/retired people don’t need that.
But don't you see that in the world as it exists today, there is no "WE". In practice the people who would be making the decisions would be Donald Trump and a few tech bros. Not "us". Not humanity.
Even if you had Jimmy Carter in there, there would be no sense of "we". You would in practice have a committee of experts, who would be accused of biases of all flavours. They would be presented with an impossible task which would be endlessly corrupting given the powers available to bend the entire human race according to their preferences.
So it will be for any political system we could conceivably obtain right now to engage with AI replacement of the workforce. That's why I say that solving the problem of "dictatorship as equilibrium" is beyond our capacities in the 21st century. This is our species' equivalent of first contact with the Borg. If we had several centuries to prepare, we might just get through it. If we take our encounters in neural space as a warning to our species and we spend the next several centuries preparing our science, our philosophy and especially our politics, we might just pull it off. If we charge ahead recklessly, there is no hope for us.
Unfortunately I don't have the time to continue this, but I replied to you because I thought you had some of the right ideas, only you didn't see certain points so took your ideas in the wrong direction. How about we both think about it more in good faith and see whose views evolve, including in view of current events and one's ever changing understanding of political reality?
"Some people (many people) unfortunately don't know what to do with themselves other than paid work for employer."
That is OK, but why am I forced to the labour market to take a job one of these 'many people would gladly take and I would gladly be without because I could concentrate on the *work* I WANT to do.
The "socially necessary work" argument is no problem since this army of people could derive their personal worth by doing it in a market uncluttered by competing reluctant workers.
Trying "to provide useful work [to]... the masses of mankind when half of the jobs are "bullshit" anyway is worse than useless since it diverts attention and resources from solutions with much better chances of success.
Thanks Janos, wise words. Thanks for your generosity and wisdom, you’re an inspiration and this year let’s make the messaging so clear and informed that it’s impossible to ignore!
Economic fairness doesn’t just happen by magic. Those who read, write and speak out have a role to play in the course of history.
Even if it’s small and hard to measure. I won’t give up, onward and upward sir. ❤️
Happy New Year to the inimitable and big-hearted Janos Abel, co-founder of Truicide, mentor to Stella Stillwell (me), and economic fairness visionary supreme. The world thanks you.
Working is an overrated concept.
Wo is/are the "General(s)" saying that "although no battles need to be fought, training has to be kept up because without it peoples mental health would deteriorate". And does he reason so in good faith, not being familiar with mental issues?
Hey Janos! The analogy it’s the guy on Sam’s podcast episode. Ross Douthat. Nice bloke, no disrespect, but yeah. He maintained that:
“Even if we solved basics with AI, we’d need to keep FORCED WORK around in exchange for basics because it gives people purpose.”
It’s NOT a reasoned conclusion based on available data.
It’s a theoretical intuition based on incomplete anecdotal info. Good faith? Maybe. Who can say what’s in men’s hearts.
All I know is it completely ignores the fact that many don’t have to work and thus choose not to, and by all accounts they are content and productive enough.
To Sam’s credit he pushed back.
Extending the metaphor, I suppose it’s about people who are free from the forge, or safely nestled in it, who believe peasants or the paycheck-to-paycheck set lack the depth to make good use of free time.
Bertrand Russell has a line in “In Praise of Idleness.”
A rich person quipping “what on earth would the working poor need free time for?”
The implication is workers are boors and simpletons and meant to be plow horses, and left to their own devices, we in charge would rather not have these folks around, better to keep them busied with this or that.
But that’s too horrible to say, so they grasp for the “it’s for their own good” argument, and it’s important enough that they better damn well be right. And they’re not. Nor is it their call to make, legally or morally.
So the effrontery is generously stacked, dear, wise Janos The Good.
Our work is cut out for us.
Another great quote:
“There are men who, through ownership of land, are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work. These landowners are idle, and I might therefore be expected to praise them. Unfortunately, their idleness is only rendered possible by the industry of others; indeed their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source of the whole gospel of work. The last thing they have ever wished is that others should follow their example.”
Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness
Thank you.
Just to be clear, the "good faith" question is not meant judgmentally; for strategic reasons we need to know what kind or pushback we are facing.
As a larger issue, I think that the overall UBI movement is problematic for being limited seemingly to the income/poverty horizon instead of the broader framework of Universal Basic Dividend, widening "battles" to social and economic justice. In essence we have a class war the going on, actually, not just metaphorically; that need to direct attention to the role of “incumbents”—beneficiaries of the current status quo:
“…the mechanisms by which incumbents hold stuff back are well hidden. The decades of lobbying capability they have are not visible. So we don’t see the ways in which they’re doing it. It’s great to shine a light on it. Certainly my experience has been, if you are an incumbent, it’s a lot cheaper and easier to put a bit of money into lobbying and media and PR campaigns than it is into doing the hard work of reforming.” Greg Jackson, https://www.thersa.org/rsa-journal/rsa-journal-issue-4-2025/in-conversation-with-greg-jackson/
I have been contemplating semi retirement, just doing what I do and not worrying about it. I quit working a job job in 2012 and never looked back. No, it ain't easy, but me making money for me is way more purposeful than me making money for some corporate bullshit factory. UBI would allow me to be a much bigger resource for my community--which is exactly what I would do.
I wish we could clone you a million times and put a bunch of you in every town, capturing their stories in song, lighting up homes and coffee shops and weddings and funerals. Teaching the gift of music and just bearing witness, and turning witness into poetry, to children who don’t have exposure to that, and bring your noble battle cry to nursing homes to remind them who they are and coronate those who die well. That’s what UBI means to me. And it sickens me when they say we won’t know what to “do” with freedom of time.
Aw! That's the best thing anyone has said to me in a long time. But yes, you are right! Community songwriting! Sound healing on street corners! Just to be able to think in the morning, I think I'll go hang out at the Senior Center today and see if anyone wants to write a song with me, and GO FUCKING DO IT ... and not have to worry about how groceries are going to happen... yes please. Damn, I wish you lived next door so we could hang out and get Very Excited About Things together on a regular basis.
Aw, I’m right here honey. Start today
Some people (many people) unfortunately don't know what to do with themselves other than paid work for employer.
Sometimes, and maybe originally, the work is done for an honourable purpose such as supporting oneself and a family. But a workaholic becomes the proverbial dog that caught the car, or more accurately, they become like Colonel Nicholson from "The Bridge on the River Kwai". Their work and their idea of self become inextricable. They rationalise it as for the public good or maintaining the social order or "the economy". So the work now takes a much loftier much loftier purpose than putting food on the table to feed a hungry family. Hence the workaholic is so easily seduced by right-wing propaganda.
That being said, the "young radical left online hivemind" (basically video games addicts) doesn't have a plausible substitute either. I think sitting around playing video games all day would not be very fulfilling. (And I have some experience!) I think we need to look to a system of part rota-based work on necessary and desirable public duties, part entertainment such as sports and video games. AI as a substitute for human work is susceptible to the problem of "dictatorship as equilibrium" (the potential for the system to be centralised and controlled by a few or even a single individual) which won't be solved in anything like the near future. Our ability to provide useful work is essentially what keeps us, the masses of mankind, right now from slavery or population elimination. Give that ability up at our peril. For the moment, while we're compelled to do it, it is best as a palliative to seek to partially enjoy it, without usually seeking the kind of stupefying opiate of workaholism.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I still take a different view, namely strict rejection of a pattern that keeps showing up in the rhetoric like a persistent weed.
It goes something like:
Lack of compulsory jobs >> people will do (narrow band of 1-2 activities meant to sound unproductive) >> this is judged as unfulfilling by rhetor >> concludes SOME compulsory work in exchange for access to abundant resources will be necessary.
I find this formula problematic. I reject the cynical narrow-band reduction, making it sound as empty as possible. I reject the admissibility or the relevance of the rhetor’s value judgement about that or any activity chosen by a free adult. (Rich/retired people have leisure time and nobody suggests forcing them to work.) I then reject the nonsense that to remedy this allegedly unfulfilling activity we must create a compulsory economic situation.
Obviously I have no problem with people choosing to do jobs.
I reject the idea that automation or public basics necessarily leads to dictatorship. We already have some public basics and it’s fine.
You produce no argument against the risk of AI automation of the workforce other than "it's fine" and illegitimately bundling it together with "public basics" (which is a separate issue).
Why is fine? Do you believe that the tech companies that would create the robots and AI behind them, would generously provide you with utopia indefinitely? They won't even pay their taxes.
Transparently, by giving up all their know-how and their ability to get things done in the physical world, human beings will be giving up their power. And that will allow them to be enslaved or eliminated – all the more easily if in some mad rush, we allow the technology to be centralised in a few tech companies, as is happening now.
That conclusion follows as inevitably as night follows day.
Yes I believe that in a democratic constitutional republic it doesn’t necessarily matter what the rich people or tech elite want of we get a majority or supermajority from an educated public.
I think public basics are fine because a lot of other countries have public healthcare guarantee, and getting food and safe lodging is also very doable and not the filth pit and shame fest it is in the U.S.
Data shows this sort of floor is sustainable and actually boosts productivity and societal cooperation.
Getting there will be challenging, but yeah, that’s the vision and I think it’s possible.
We need to get there gradually and carefully, but we do need to get there.
If we can experiment and move forward slowly to reduce suffering without undo risk, we should. Basic moral theory.
Soviet communism did NOT have that attitude. They brute forced. I’m against that. If we can’t do it legal, with a vote, don’t do it with revolution.
To get the vote we need to educate and inspire with a free press and expression. Hence my writing. Enough people like me, maybe change is possible.
Every humanitarian change in the past was fought tooth and nail in this same way. Why assume it’s not still being fought?
Point of THIS post is about the moral logic of mandatory labor once survival no longer requires it, as dictated by the hypothetical, irrespective of whether you think that’s likely or possible.
IF we do reach a point where basic goods can be produced without mass human labor, THEN the justification for forcing people to work disappears.
How we govern AI, distribute wtvr power, or prevent corporate monopolies, etc, these concerns are real, I don’t see it as inevitably leading to centralized dictatorship, such that this hypothetical implodes on contact with causal market logic. Parsimony has me predicting AI/automation produces surplus, the UBI distributes enough to cover the basics and then people use that to pay suppliers, could be private or public, likely both.
Again, like 99% of my interest in this is the notion that we’d preserve wage coercion long after we need to, for the explicitly expressed purpose of protecting “meaning” for the worker, when we know rich/retired people don’t need that.
But don't you see that in the world as it exists today, there is no "WE". In practice the people who would be making the decisions would be Donald Trump and a few tech bros. Not "us". Not humanity.
Even if you had Jimmy Carter in there, there would be no sense of "we". You would in practice have a committee of experts, who would be accused of biases of all flavours. They would be presented with an impossible task which would be endlessly corrupting given the powers available to bend the entire human race according to their preferences.
So it will be for any political system we could conceivably obtain right now to engage with AI replacement of the workforce. That's why I say that solving the problem of "dictatorship as equilibrium" is beyond our capacities in the 21st century. This is our species' equivalent of first contact with the Borg. If we had several centuries to prepare, we might just get through it. If we take our encounters in neural space as a warning to our species and we spend the next several centuries preparing our science, our philosophy and especially our politics, we might just pull it off. If we charge ahead recklessly, there is no hope for us.
Unfortunately I don't have the time to continue this, but I replied to you because I thought you had some of the right ideas, only you didn't see certain points so took your ideas in the wrong direction. How about we both think about it more in good faith and see whose views evolve, including in view of current events and one's ever changing understanding of political reality?
"Some people (many people) unfortunately don't know what to do with themselves other than paid work for employer."
That is OK, but why am I forced to the labour market to take a job one of these 'many people would gladly take and I would gladly be without because I could concentrate on the *work* I WANT to do.
The "socially necessary work" argument is no problem since this army of people could derive their personal worth by doing it in a market uncluttered by competing reluctant workers.
Trying "to provide useful work [to]... the masses of mankind when half of the jobs are "bullshit" anyway is worse than useless since it diverts attention and resources from solutions with much better chances of success.
Anyway,
Happy start (at least) to 2026 and
Que Sera, Sera
Thanks Janos, wise words. Thanks for your generosity and wisdom, you’re an inspiration and this year let’s make the messaging so clear and informed that it’s impossible to ignore!
Economic fairness doesn’t just happen by magic. Those who read, write and speak out have a role to play in the course of history.
Even if it’s small and hard to measure. I won’t give up, onward and upward sir. ❤️
Happy New Year to the inimitable and big-hearted Janos Abel, co-founder of Truicide, mentor to Stella Stillwell (me), and economic fairness visionary supreme. The world thanks you.
xoxo Stella