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green_meklar t1_j0ab8l9 wrote

Reply to comment by ShowerGrapes in The problem isn’t AI, it’s requiring us to work to live by jamesj

>we shuoldn't define it as just doing things, like hunting, or picking mushrooms or even growing your own garden.

Those sure sound like work to me. Why would you define 'work' so narrowly as to exclude those things? What's the criterion for excluding specifically those things?

>because people out of work still do things like that.

In that sense, everyone was 'out of work' for their entire lives up until, what, a few thousand years ago?

That seems like a bizarre notion of 'work'. It strikes me as doing prehistoric hunter/gatherers a disservice to dismiss their livelihoods as 'not real work', considering how difficult and precarious their lives were.

>for it to be work in this context, in what we're talking about here, you have to have an employer.

So then in what sense does capitalism require everyone to do that?

>can you spot the difference between that type of work and work where you have no employer?

Yes, but I think it's a strange notion of what the word 'work' means and I'm also not sure what the connection with capitalism is supposed to be.

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ShowerGrapes t1_j0abspg wrote

do ants work? do beavers? what about birds? there has to be some baseline where we can talk about work as being separate from other activities. if you define mice as having a job the whole discussion becomes ludicrous. perhaps that is the point of people making these silly arguments.

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green_meklar t1_j0r80kj wrote

>do ants work? do beavers? what about birds?

Colloquially speaking they do. Economically speaking they don't because they aren't economic agents.

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