Japan's employment rate is hard to compare, in that many of these job just wouldn't be seen as real jobs in any other country ("bullshit job"), and it's compound by half of the population being over 50. A high employment among the elderly could just be masking the harsher truth when that upper half passes away.
Humans are older than money, so evidently we don't need it to survive, but there is more to existence than mere survival. I agree that people's basic needs to be taken care of, but I think that is an issue that needs to happen because of automation. It needs to happen because it is simply the right thing to do. I would go as fas as saying It shouldn't just be basic needs. Society should be aiming to provide the entire hierarchy of needs for everyone.
I think having employment delivers some of the higher needs to a subset of people, but it is a privileged few. A huge number work just to provide the basic needs. Advocating using the advances in automation to raise everybody up is what we need. Instead we seem to be maintaining a system that gives a few what we want and the rest of us are too busy with the survival part to influence that change.
Money is a tool (maybe not the best) to make an economy with division of labor work. It's not required and probably also doesn't work in societies where everybody knows everybody else and can make sure that the right things are done and nobody slacks off.
> Society should be aiming to provide the entire hierarchy of needs for everyone.
I don’t know. Society should provide the framework within which people can achieve their needs (and wants), but not the needs and wants themselves directly.
Otherwise you put an artificial cap on human growth and inefficient allocation of resources.
You didn't answer the question, you answered a different question: "why would someone want to work, just in general?" The question that was posed was, why would someone who has already chosen to retire, or who is already fully occupied, or who is sick, want to work?
Why not simply pay the homemakers? Why is it so important that everyone produce economic output at the widget factory?
Allow me to translate into a language you can understand: The people who are all “unemployed” are actually performing valuable services like maintaining the future labor pool, learning how to become skilled workers, and so on. These people should not have a second job, they should be paid for the valuable services they’re providing.
IMO, basic income for parents is absolutely a policy that Japan should enact.
And the question of how much the payment should be has a straightforward answer: adjust until the birth rate reaches replacement.
If the payment ends up high enough that some mothers or fathers opt to leave the labor force to focus on raising their kids, then so be it; that's probably healthier for society in the long term.
It would be expensive, yes, but cheaper than the alternatives. And anyway, Japan's stagnant economy would likely benefit from the boost to consumer demand.
Those people can work for their income then; the policy I was discussing only relates to the government paying parents an income, ideally on a per-child basis (up to some maximum, maybe four; you need to have some people having bigger families to balance out the ones who don't have any children at all, but you also don't want people farming kids for money).
I don't know what's more crushing, not having a job, or knowing deep-down that there is a machine that can trivially do your job.
If I was made to lamp street lamps 5 years after incandescent street lights were invented, while not working on any way forward, I'd probably fall into a deep existential crisis.
Indeed. My first job was in a factory doing things that we had machines to do, but not enough of them or efficient enough. I spent the whole time dreaming of automating the factory properly.
I think that nihilistic sentiment arises only when you are materially satisfied, maybe in the 90s and 00s (like office workers in Fight Club or Office Space). Many of us are in survival mode now. We just need money to keep up with inflation. We don't have time to think about the deep meaning of life.
"Survival mode" is quite an overstatement of current conditions for most people in most of the West. Prices have risen, but people aren't in as rough of a position as 2008, 1970's stagflation, or certainly the great depression.
I agree with aspects of what you mean. But there are exceptions on both sides.
Ofc people dont want to become human fax machines (Morse decoders) nowadays, it would feel absurd.
But also if a role allows someone to feel satisfaction in accomplishment and in being an active member of a society it can be meaningful. For example tidying up streets/yards in low income neighborhoods can make the place look much better and you can feel like you're serving folks who are in need.
Huge amounts of effort go to feeding our desires, and to feeding our fears, but it actually doesn't take much to meet our needs.
Only 2% of our efforts as a society go to getting food out of the ground.
The reason to have a job, to own property, to earn and spend money, to reproduce and fight in wars, it seems, is to maintain a valid stake in the whole game lest your masters designate you an undesireable.
For said master the more viable the alternatives to humans become, the more all those excess humans start to look like a liability.
But this guy googled it and apparently there are 18% of Japanese people not working, so obviously their entire society pivoting towards automation is wrong.
Yep. In a society with an aging population and a low birth rate, people who would prefer to be full-time parents staying home and raising their kids ought to instead be doing undesirable, monotonous, easily-automatable jobs that robots can do. Or at least two families could agree to pay each other to raise the other's children, so that it counts as employment, rather than raising their own. Yes, maximizing labor force participation... That's how things ought to be.
Inference cost has dropped 300x in 3 years, no reason to think this won't keep happening with improvements on models, agent architecture and hardware.
Also, too many people are fixated with American models when Chinese ones deliver similar quality often at fraction of a cost.
From my tests, "personality" of an LLM, it's tendency to stick to prompts and not derail far outweights the low % digit of delta in benchmark performance.
Not to mention, different LLMs perform better at different tasks, and they are all particularly sensible to prompts and instructions.
“Thing x happened in the past, therefore it will continue to happen in the future” is perhaps one of the most, if not the most pervasive human-created fallacies anywhere.
US will have to refinance $ 10T of debt next year. That's a gargantuan amount of money and I see no scenario in which this won't have quite higher yields than the expiring one, remnant of the low rate decade.
With foreigners and hedge funds less prone to buy US debt right now it's going to be quite interesting to see what will happen.
It’s going to be a couple of humbling decades for the USA.
The western world was happy to keep the USA as a global police force, as long as they didn’t step too far out of line and at least paid lip service to international law.
With that gone and now caring only about brazen self interest, there is little reason to support the USA as an ally, so they have been demoted to a trading partner(unwillingly).
Honestly it’s much better to do trade with literally anyone else besides the USA.
And yet the current administration is fixated with trade balance (which conveniently ignores the most important US export that's not accounted: services).
Look at them countries sending food, cars, machinery for pieces of paper. They taking advantage of us!
> A particular concern, they said, was threats made by the US to Iran’s energy infrastructure. “International law protects from attack objects indispensable to the survival of civilians, and the attacks threatened by Trump, if implemented, could entail war crimes.”
I am not going to lie, I am beyond disgusted at the United States.
And the "it's Trump" card doesn't work, Americans defend this travesty of an old non functioning constitution.
It was a pretty solid setup when everyone wanted it to succeed. We will get a few more safeties put in place via statute after this experience, of course, but what really needs to happen is meaningful improvements to the Constitution. We know enough now to spot plenty of weak points which could be addressed. When I'm feeling particularly spicy I think a Constitutional Convention would be seriously awesome. But then I think of the possible outcomes and I'm not so sure. Were the majority of the population acting in good faith, I'd feel better about it.
There is no easy way out of this mess. There has to be some faith in the overall good will of the people, but if Russia and other societies are any indicator in a modern world, it will take the US getting a lot shittier, with more people dying in protests, more people losing their careers and their homes, and the middle class in breadlines.
We need a different voting system, we need the structure of Congress gutted, and we need a far less powerful presidency.
I thought I made it clear that I don't generally think that would be a good idea. I think it would be interesting, which I sometimes think might be worth the risk. Certainly discontent with the status quo is a broadly held sentiment not at all unique to the current right wing.
This includes early retirees, full time students, home makers and people unable to work for health related reasons.
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