The Protestant Work Ethic

[Tyson]

Is it good?  Is it bad?  I do think that modern civilization could not have been built without it.  But is it healthy? 

I look at people that are very wealthy and they keep working and it just doesn't make sense to me.  For me, work and money are tools, needed to buy freedom.  As soon as I have enough, I am going to FIRE. 

A personal anecdote - when I was young, my parents told me I was "smart but lazy".  I think it might have been because (even back then) I didn't value work just for work's sake.  If it had purpose and meaning, I was able to work very hard, indeed.  But drudgery?  Nah, count me out. 

Nowadays I am quite a bit more conscientious.  My work and life are pretty meticulously maintained.  But I still have some of those old voices of 'lazy' kicking around.  As much as I can, I fight against them. 

The only thing I can think, is that for some people, work itself is soothing?  That it somehow gives them a sense of control of the chaos of life? 

[MoseyingAlong]

I think you have to start with what the definition of work is.

For example, cooking. For me, it's not something I usually enjoy. For some of my friends, they really enjoy it. So is cooking work or not?

Or is it work if you don't enjoy it? And a hobby if you do?

[Metalcat]

If your internal voice is bullying you, it's definitely not healthy.

[Luke Warm]

My parents tried to instill that in me with meager results. I'm the first to admit I'm lazy but I've been ok with it. I was thinking about doing chores when I was a kid. My parents wanted me to empty the garbage every day. I was like 'but it's not full!'. I'm still that way. I don't take the garbage out until the can is full or smells bad. Nor do I take the can out to the street until it's full. Why make the garbage truck stop when the can is half empty?
I think there's a difference between working and being useful.

[Ron Scott]

You have permission.

[Rob_bob]

A personal anecdote - when I was young, my parents told me I was "smart but lazy".  I think it might have been because (even back then) I didn't value work just for work's sake.  If it had purpose and meaning, I was able to work very hard, indeed.  But drudgery?  Nah, count me out. 

Nowadays I am quite a bit more conscientious.  My work and life are pretty meticulously maintained.  But I still have some of those old voices of 'lazy' kicking around.  As much as I can, I fight against them.

It depends on what kind of work you are talking about.  Some work is necessary to maintain a quality of life whether you like doing it or not.

Other work could just be busy work, parents might assign that to you just to keep you busy.  Did your parents call you lazy because you didn't want to mow the lawn (needed) or some kind of make busy work?

[roomtempmayo]

One element of the Protestant Ethic that's been lost is the idea that work should both be service to others and inherently rewarding.  It's worth doing in and of itself because it is both human and humane. 

The abstraction of work from people or the land during the twentieth century and the proliferation of "bullshit jobs" more recently are a totally different sort of work than what created the Protestant Ethic.

Our challenge as a society is that pay is usually inversely related to whether the work looks like the old fashioned human and humane tasks.  Mostly you either use machines to crunch numbers and get paid well, or you work with people or physically with the land and you tend to get paid crap (medicine is something of an exception, which is one reason why it's held in high prestige). 

The Protestant Ethic was never for abstract work; it's for embodied, ensouled work.  Trying to apply it to punching keys is a disaster.

[Cannot Wait!]

I'm not lazy, I'm efficient!  ;)

[twinstudy]

On one hand I am a big adherent of FIRE (obviously) and I have no affinity towards a corporate job or a lot of the work-related BS that accompanies modern life. To that extent, 'work' has no inherent redeeming value, and is something you might do only to get a pay cheque.

On the other hand, I think every life requires passion and effort, and in that sense, a good 'work ethic' whether it is directed to remunerative work or something else.

I don't have much respect for people who I regard as indolent. If you've never bled for anything in your life, if you've lived a lazy and sweat-free life, I don't respect that. But I don't chain that to the notion of remunerative work. You can be a full-time worker and still indolent, or you can work fewer hours but be busy and striving in your family life or in volunteering.

[LennStar]

I'm not lazy, I'm efficient!  ;)

You are not alone. It has been observed in many species (probably all have it), that there is a bell curve on activity. Some are extremely active - those die in scarcity times - and some are very energy saving - those thrive when food is scarce. The other side works too of course - in times of abundance, the very active, the wasteful, have more offspring than the lazy.

[Metalcat]

I'm not lazy, I'm efficient!  ;)

You are not alone. It has been observed in many species (probably all have it), that there is a bell curve on activity. Some are extremely active - those die in scarcity times - and some are very energy saving - those thrive when food is scarce. The other side works too of course - in times of abundance, the very active, the wasteful, have more offspring than the lazy.

My laziness is actually what has always driven my business success. Angling for the opportunities that produce the best outcome relative to effort has been my priority for years and it consistently produces fantastic results.

It's my absolute UN-willingness to grind and hustle that catapulted my career and professional reputation to a level I would have never achieved through longer hours and more sacrifice. I used to be a grinder, but when I stopped, I realized how incredibly wasteful of energy it was.

I often say about spending that I'm not cheap, I'm just a snob about spending. Well, I'm also the same about my energy resources. The work better be worth the energy expenditure, otherwise I'm not fucking doing it.

As I age and become more disabled AND more skilled, I value my energy resources far more than my money resources. I'm far more frugal in spending my time and energy now because I find money far easier to come by than energy.

Laziness AKA energy frugality is my entire guiding principle for living, and it makes me much more productive, not less.

[AuspiciousEight]

If something is good or bad is largely just a reflection of the perspective and judgement system you're using to judge the thing. A dandelion can be both a weed and a flower, or it can be a weed, or it can be a flower.

I can be extremely lazy about some things, but extremely productive about other things. It largely just depends on if I care about the thing or not.

So for me, work can be useful if it fulfills some purpose that I care about.  It depends on the context. Some work I consider pretty useful, bot other work not so much, and what is valuable or not has changed throughout the course of my life, so I can't really say definitely that work ethic is an overall positive or negative thing in every circumstance.

If you define work as "providing things to other people that they consider valuable" then I can be more on board with the idea that it is universally beneficial, at least for the people receiving the value.

It might still not be healthy for the person, for example if they are too stressed out from providing, don't enjoy the work, etc. It just all depends.

[RetiredAt63]

This is something I have been thinking about lately.  My ancestors (British Isles) basically had to work all the time to survive.  But that work was varied, and the benefits were obvious.  If the farming (or whatever) wasn't done, or the household tasks (much more varied and important than now) weren't done, people went cold and hungry.

Most of our activities these days are not as directly connected to our quality of life. One example - I can buy socks at Costco, or I can knit them, or I can spin the fleece to yarn and knit them, or I can start with fleece just sheared off the sheep, and wash and prep the fleece (and possibly also dye it) and spin the yarn and knit them.  What are my thoughts about those socks when I put them on?  How much of "me" is in them?

[ChpBstrd]

One element of the Protestant Ethic that's been lost is the idea that work should both be service to others and inherently rewarding.  It's worth doing in and of itself because it is both human and humane. 

The abstraction of work from people or the land during the twentieth century and the proliferation of "bullshit jobs" more recently are a totally different sort of work than what created the Protestant Ethic.

Our challenge as a society is that pay is usually inversely related to whether the work looks like the old fashioned human and humane tasks.  Mostly you either use machines to crunch numbers and get paid well, or you work with people or physically with the land and you tend to get paid crap (medicine is something of an exception, which is one reason why it's held in high prestige). 

The Protestant Ethic was never for abstract work; it's for embodied, ensouled work.  Trying to apply it to punching keys is a disaster.

Good points. This might be why the PWE was applicable in an era when farming or working 12 hours a day 7 days a week in a factory is no longer applicable today. Prosperity in that world meant sweating and exerting one's body every single day.

Today one's wealth is more directly related to one's ability to resist spending money, which means resisting or avoiding ads and peer pressure. There are people on this forum who never made more than working-class wages and they have more wealth than a lot of highly compensated executives.

Also, modern wealth and income inequality puts the lie to any notion of effort naturally leading to rewards. The people who work the hardest in our society (e.g. roofers, customer service reps, fast food workers, ditch-diggers) get paid the least, and the people who do minimal work (rentiers of various flavors, people with inherited money, shareholders, etc.) are paid the most. Talk of the PWE in such a world sounds like it comes from a "company man" who has been duped by motivational books into a dead end career making money for someone else.

As knowledge work (accounting, medicine, engineering, marketing, manufacturing) is increasingly replaced by AI, and human labor is again most valuable when applied to physical tasks, then perhaps the PWE will come back into style.

[GilesMM]

If you choose carefully, work can be more wonderful than not working. My mom worked into her 80s because she loved it.

[roomtempmayo]

As knowledge work (accounting, medicine, engineering, marketing, manufacturing) is increasingly replaced by AI, and human labor is again most valuable when applied to physical tasks, then perhaps the PWE will come back into style.

There are elements of the PWE that are very Mustachian, foremost that you should only consume needs and not give in to wants, and that work isn't primarily about money.  Money just happens as you're working, and as long as you're living a humble and somewhat austere lifestyle you'll end up with a stock of money.  Since your faith prohibits conspicuous consumption, you don't have much to do with the money except give to charity and invest.  Et voila, the WASPs got rich.

[Metalcat]

One element of the Protestant Ethic that's been lost is the idea that work should both be service to others and inherently rewarding.  It's worth doing in and of itself because it is both human and humane. 

The abstraction of work from people or the land during the twentieth century and the proliferation of "bullshit jobs" more recently are a totally different sort of work than what created the Protestant Ethic.

Our challenge as a society is that pay is usually inversely related to whether the work looks like the old fashioned human and humane tasks.  Mostly you either use machines to crunch numbers and get paid well, or you work with people or physically with the land and you tend to get paid crap (medicine is something of an exception, which is one reason why it's held in high prestige). 

The Protestant Ethic was never for abstract work; it's for embodied, ensouled work.  Trying to apply it to punching keys is a disaster.

Good points. This might be why the PWE was applicable in an era when farming or working 12 hours a day 7 days a week in a factory is no longer applicable today. Prosperity in that world meant sweating and exerting one's body every single day.

Today one's wealth is more directly related to one's ability to resist spending money, which means resisting or avoiding ads and peer pressure. There are people on this forum who never made more than working-class wages and they have more wealth than a lot of highly compensated executives.

Also, modern wealth and income inequality puts the lie to any notion of effort naturally leading to rewards. The people who work the hardest in our society (e.g. roofers, customer service reps, fast food workers, ditch-diggers) get paid the least, and the people who do minimal work (rentiers of various flavors, people with inherited money, shareholders, etc.) are paid the most. Talk of the PWE in such a world sounds like it comes from a "company man" who has been duped by motivational books into a dead end career making money for someone else.

As knowledge work (accounting, medicine, engineering, marketing, manufacturing) is increasingly replaced by AI, and human labor is again most valuable when applied to physical tasks, then perhaps the PWE will come back into style.

Also don't forget the corporate phenomenon where hard work doesn't get you promoted, it just gets you more work.

This obviously isn't universal, but I have seen it many, many times where someone being willing to go above and beyond in a role actually traps that person in that role and makes the company less likely to promote them, especially women who are not comfortable lobbying for raises and promotions.

A "keep your head down, work hard, don't complain, and you will be rewarded" approach is an amazing recipe for getting taken advantage of in a lot of situations.

[tooqk4u22]

I don't know of Protestant Work Ethic is good or bad, it's probably both.  I can tell you that I extremely envious of those that have it because it makes work so much easier for them as work is not the stress but the purpose in their lives.

I however have always been more of a hustle and grinder with work being a means to an end (even if a lot of the time it looked as if I had the PWE), whatever that end is at any given time....and the end has changed/evolved a lot over time. My mindset could be the result of not being passionate about any particular thing or it could be that I have an authority issue and really don't like be controlled. 

I think you have to start with what the definition of work is.

For example, cooking. For me, it's not something I usually enjoy. For some of my friends, they really enjoy it. So is cooking work or not?

Or is it work if you don't enjoy it? And a hobby if you do?

Absurd.   Cooking is clearly not a job - it is art, creativity, expression, experimentation, failure, satisfaction of others enjoying what you created........but that's for me.   DW thinks its the worse thing ever.

But, when people suggest that I should become a professional chef or open a restaurant......no f'ing way.   THAT WOULD BE WORK!

[LennStar]

If you choose carefully, work can be more wonderful than not working. My mom worked into her 80s because she loved it.

But that's not work, that is a hobby. If I could make my living with 2-3 hours writing daily, I would do it. But I very likely can't and writing is probably less than half of the job.

Absurd.   Cooking is clearly not a job - it is art, creativity, expression, experimentation, failure, satisfaction of others enjoying what you created........but that's for me.   DW thinks its the worse thing ever.

Absurd! Washing the dishes is the worst thing ever. Cooking is only number... 4?
I basically only cook variations of 3 dishes, with something unusual once per month, like sushi. How people can enjoy creating different meals is nearly as mysterious to me as small talk.

[Metalcat]

If you choose carefully, work can be more wonderful than not working. My mom worked into her 80s because she loved it.

But that's not work, that is a hobby. If I could make my living with 2-3 hours writing daily, I would do it. But I very likely can't and writing is probably less than half of the job.

Absurd.   Cooking is clearly not a job - it is art, creativity, expression, experimentation, failure, satisfaction of others enjoying what you created........but that's for me.   DW thinks its the worse thing ever.

Absurd! Washing the dishes is the worst thing ever. Cooking is only number... 4?
I basically only cook variations of 3 dishes, with something unusual once per month, like sushi. How people can enjoy creating different meals is nearly as mysterious to me as small talk.

I make 6 figures working less than 15 hours per week doing work I absolutely love.

The line between paid hobby and job is arbitrary.

[Luke Warm]

Why is the work ethic based on religion? Is there an Atheist Work Ethic?

[Metalcat]

Why is the work ethic based on religion? Is there an Atheist Work Ethic?

I highly recommend the book The Weirdest People in The World, and how deeply protestantism is engrained into Western culture and the massive neurodevelopmental impact it's had.

Public education is a product of protestantism.

[roomtempmayo]

Why is the work ethic based on religion?

History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism

[twinstudy]

Also, modern wealth and income inequality puts the lie to any notion of effort naturally leading to rewards. The people who work the hardest in our society (e.g. roofers, customer service reps, fast food workers, ditch-diggers) get paid the least, and the people who do minimal work (rentiers of various flavors, people with inherited money, shareholders, etc.) are paid the most. Talk of the PWE in such a world sounds like it comes from a "company man" who has been duped by motivational books into a dead end career making money for someone else.

As knowledge work (accounting, medicine, engineering, marketing, manufacturing) is increasingly replaced by AI, and human labor is again most valuable when applied to physical tasks, then perhaps the PWE will come back into style.

I don't agree with any of this. I've worked in a customer service job before. It was easy as shit. Sure, there was a bit of emotional regulation required to being diplomatic and polite, etc, but it was a job that required minimal training and that anyone could do, with no barriers to entry. The effort required was one-dimensional. Comparing that to the stresses of doing brain surgery or running a high-stakes trial, I would say the latter are definitely harder and more effortful jobs. People only think the customer service job is 'harder' because the rewards (pay, prestige) are so meagre, which influences their thinking of the benefits of the job and the overall suitability of it. Objectively it's an easier job. If you gave me my old customer service job and paid me the same as what I get today I'd happily do the customer service job - it was a lot easier and I could leave work at work.

And good luck replacing a surgeon or trial litigator with AI. Or even just a good tax accountant who can understand her clients' needs as well as all the complex legal and ethical issues, spoken and unspoken. It will be a while yet.

[MustacheAndaHalf]

Also, modern wealth and income inequality puts the lie to any notion of effort naturally leading to rewards. The people who work the hardest in our society (e.g. roofers, customer service reps, fast food workers, ditch-diggers) get paid the least, and the people who do minimal work (rentiers of various flavors, people with inherited money, shareholders, etc.) are paid the most. Talk of the PWE in such a world sounds like it comes from a "company man" who has been duped by motivational books into a dead end career making money for someone else.

As knowledge work (accounting, medicine, engineering, marketing, manufacturing) is increasingly replaced by AI, and human labor is again most valuable when applied to physical tasks, then perhaps the PWE will come back into style.

Looking at the most extreme cases, the richest people in the world:

#1) Elon Musk: founded SpaceX, the most valuable space company.  Invested early and heavily into Tesla, eventually leading it to become the first EV company that wasn't buried by the automobile industry.
#2) Mark Zuckerberg : founded Facebook, the most popular social media company in the world
#3) Jeff Bezos : founded Amazon, the most valuable e-commerce company in the world
#4) Larry Ellison : founder of Oracle, world's largest database company
#5) Bernard Arnault : founder and CEO of the world's largest luxury brand company
#6) Larry Page : co-founder of Google, the world's largest search engine (and online advertising)
#7) Bill Gates : founded of Microsoft, the world's largest software company (this may vary, but was true in 2024)
#8) Sergey Brin : co-founded of Google, see above
#9) Warren Buffet : one of the greatest investors of all time, who grew Berkshire Hathaway to its $1 trillion valuation
#10) Steve Ballmer : hired early at Microsoft, later CEO for 14 years
https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/

The first 8 names are founders of global companies.  Do you value the products they produce?  Those companies needed money to get off the ground, which is where stockholders and private investors provide value.  Would you strip the founder of a company of their ownership?  When someone creates a company, they own it - even if it grows to be worth over $1 trillion.

As an aside, fast food workers, on average, work 16-34 hours per week.  CEOs work far more hours than that, so I disagree that fast food workers are working harder than CEOs.  (would fast workers have a job without company founders?)

I've invested in the company that made "Flippy", which is an AI-powered robot that flips burgers when they're perfectly cooked.  You could argue it replaces one of the most dangerous and least-liked jobs, but ultimately it is AI replacing fast food workers.  Meanwhile, every time I see a doctor, it has never been an AI.

[tooqk4u22]

Why is the work ethic based on religion? Is there an Atheist Work Ethic?

FIREology - the anti-PWE

[ChpBstrd]

And good luck replacing a surgeon or trial litigator with AI. Or even just a good tax accountant who can understand her clients' needs as well as all the complex legal and ethical issues, spoken and unspoken. It will be a while yet.

Meanwhile, every time I see a doctor, it has never been an AI.

When I broke my hand last summer, AI was used to identify the tiny, barely visible fracture in the xrays. This counterexample doesn't disprove the point, but how many people a decade ago thought X-ray reading would be forever a thing humans have to do? How about diagnostics? That will forever be a human activity, right? Actually in a recent study ChatGPT-4 - a tool not even built for diagnosing patients - correctly identified 90% of conditions from real case reports, compared to only 76% by human doctors. So it seems likely that in the next couple of years, a wave of people will start using cheaper, more convenient, and more accurate AI's for their medical issues. Medical professions will be reduced to the hands-on aspect, to the extent this is cheaper than surgery bots or other automated tools to collect specimens, labs, and measurements.

Regarding tax accounting, the online software I've been using for over 10 years is a collection of algorithms that keep me in compliance. My role is simply feeding it data and a completed tax return pops out the other end. It even gives basic advice at the end of the process on how I could reduce my taxes next year.

I don't agree with any of this. I've worked in a customer service job before. It was easy as shit.

You got lucky. The CSR's at my company have strict productivity quotas. Their idle times, such as going to take a shit, getting a drink of water, or dealing with anything else, are measured by software and they have to account for all of it. The lowest percentage who are least productive, as measured by software, are fired each year as a matter of policy. It resembles what I've read about 19th century factory work, except the work itself often involves taking emotional abuse all day, for the sake of systems designed to be hard for consumers to use because they cost the company money.

And now my company is replacing them with AI, because it's cheaper. Soon, most of them will be out on the street with a skillset made obsolete by technology, competing with all the other CSRs.

[Metalcat]

Also, modern wealth and income inequality puts the lie to any notion of effort naturally leading to rewards. The people who work the hardest in our society (e.g. roofers, customer service reps, fast food workers, ditch-diggers) get paid the least, and the people who do minimal work (rentiers of various flavors, people with inherited money, shareholders, etc.) are paid the most. Talk of the PWE in such a world sounds like it comes from a "company man" who has been duped by motivational books into a dead end career making money for someone else.

As knowledge work (accounting, medicine, engineering, marketing, manufacturing) is increasingly replaced by AI, and human labor is again most valuable when applied to physical tasks, then perhaps the PWE will come back into style.

Looking at the most extreme cases, the richest people in the world:

#1) Elon Musk: founded SpaceX, the most valuable space company.  Invested early and heavily into Tesla, eventually leading it to become the first EV company that wasn't buried by the automobile industry.
#2) Mark Zuckerberg : founded Facebook, the most popular social media company in the world
#3) Jeff Bezos : founded Amazon, the most valuable e-commerce company in the world
#4) Larry Ellison : founder of Oracle, world's largest database company
#5) Bernard Arnault : founder and CEO of the world's largest luxury brand company
#6) Larry Page : co-founder of Google, the world's largest search engine (and online advertising)
#7) Bill Gates : founded of Microsoft, the world's largest software company (this may vary, but was true in 2024)
#8) Sergey Brin : co-founded of Google, see above
#9) Warren Buffet : one of the greatest investors of all time, who grew Berkshire Hathaway to its $1 trillion valuation
#10) Steve Ballmer : hired early at Microsoft, later CEO for 14 years
https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/

The first 8 names are founders of global companies.  Do you value the products they produce?  Those companies needed money to get off the ground, which is where stockholders and private investors provide value.  Would you strip the founder of a company of their ownership?  When someone creates a company, they own it - even if it grows to be worth over $1 trillion.

As an aside, fast food workers, on average, work 16-34 hours per week.  CEOs work far more hours than that, so I disagree that fast food workers are working harder than CEOs.  (would fast workers have a job without company founders?)

I've invested in the company that made "Flippy", which is an AI-powered robot that flips burgers when they're perfectly cooked.  You could argue it replaces one of the most dangerous and least-liked jobs, but ultimately it is AI replacing fast food workers.  Meanwhile, every time I see a doctor, it has never been an AI.

Interestingly, healthcare is actually where I'm seeing the *most* use of AI.

Not that it will replace MDs, but it is steadily replacing whatever of their tasks that it can replace. I just used ChatGPT heavily myself for a differential diagnosis and it was seriously impressive as a research companion.

[twinstudy]

When I broke my hand last summer, AI was used to identify the tiny, barely visible fracture in the xrays. This counterexample doesn't disprove the point, but how many people a decade ago thought X-ray reading would be forever a thing humans have to do? How about diagnostics? That will forever be a human activity, right? Actually in a recent study ChatGPT-4 - a tool not even built for diagnosing patients - correctly identified 90% of conditions from real case reports, compared to only 76% by human doctors. So it seems likely that in the next couple of years, a wave of people will start using cheaper, more convenient, and more accurate AI's for their medical issues. Medical professions will be reduced to the hands-on aspect, to the extent this is cheaper than surgery bots or other automated tools to collect specimens, labs, and measurements.

Just because AI can help with radiology or basic diagnostics doesn't mean it's going to replace someone high on the food chain like a psychiatrist or neurosurgeon, or for that matter, even a GP or a nurse. It's not about what AI can get right, but what it still gets wrong, which then requires human oversight.

Regarding tax accounting, the online software I've been using for over 10 years is a collection of algorithms that keep me in compliance. My role is simply feeding it data and a completed tax return pops out the other end. It even gives basic advice at the end of the process on how I could reduce my taxes next year.

But do you have complex tax needs, like tax mitigation strategies, and do you need someone who can tell you what is and isn't acceptable tax mitigation? That's the kind of tax accountant I envisage still having a job. Normal day to day taxes can easily be done via free software.

You got lucky. The CSR's at my company have strict productivity quotas. Their idle times, such as going to take a shit, getting a drink of water, or dealing with anything else, are measured by software and they have to account for all of it. The lowest percentage who are least productive, as measured by software, are fired each year as a matter of policy.

Being fired as a matter of policy isn't just unique to customer service jobs though. Plenty of professional services firms have an up or out policy or something similar. But point is, even if they work under arduous metrics, doesn't mean that their work is the hardest of all, either objectively or subjectively. You seriously going to tell me a customer service rep, even with KPIs, works harder than a surgeon who has to save lives and who has no set working hours?

And now my company is replacing them with AI, because it's cheaper.

If your job can be replaced by today's AI, it can't be very difficult. Though, there are plenty of customer service functions that are nowhere near being replaced by AI - for example, client intake or debt collection.

[GuitarStv]

Also, modern wealth and income inequality puts the lie to any notion of effort naturally leading to rewards. The people who work the hardest in our society (e.g. roofers, customer service reps, fast food workers, ditch-diggers) get paid the least, and the people who do minimal work (rentiers of various flavors, people with inherited money, shareholders, etc.) are paid the most. Talk of the PWE in such a world sounds like it comes from a "company man" who has been duped by motivational books into a dead end career making money for someone else.

As knowledge work (accounting, medicine, engineering, marketing, manufacturing) is increasingly replaced by AI, and human labor is again most valuable when applied to physical tasks, then perhaps the PWE will come back into style.

Looking at the most extreme cases, the richest people in the world:

#1) Elon Musk: founded SpaceX, the most valuable space company.  Invested early and heavily into Tesla, eventually leading it to become the first EV company that wasn't buried by the automobile industry.
#2) Mark Zuckerberg : founded Facebook, the most popular social media company in the world
#3) Jeff Bezos : founded Amazon, the most valuable e-commerce company in the world
#4) Larry Ellison : founder of Oracle, world's largest database company
#5) Bernard Arnault : founder and CEO of the world's largest luxury brand company
#6) Larry Page : co-founder of Google, the world's largest search engine (and online advertising)
#7) Bill Gates : founded of Microsoft, the world's largest software company (this may vary, but was true in 2024)
#8) Sergey Brin : co-founded of Google, see above
#9) Warren Buffet : one of the greatest investors of all time, who grew Berkshire Hathaway to its $1 trillion valuation
#10) Steve Ballmer : hired early at Microsoft, later CEO for 14 years
https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/

The first 8 names are founders of global companies.  Do you value the products they produce?  Those companies needed money to get off the ground, which is where stockholders and private investors provide value.  Would you strip the founder of a company of their ownership?  When someone creates a company, they own it - even if it grows to be worth over $1 trillion.

What I find interesting about the people on that list is that after inventing/founding their awesome company and getting really rich . . . they don't do anything anywhere near as useful ever again.  Musk has focused his time and energy on destroying the United States from within.  Zuckerberg has squandered his money on Meta, a terrible idea that seems to have no hope of success.  Bezos is fooling around with rockets seemingly for fun with no urgency or great breakthroughs made.  Several on the list have been active in various forms of philanthropy (Gates probably most notably), or continued to run their businesses (Buffet probably being the most active/successful of these - I think he just enjoys what he does - and he's probably the one on the list who has had the most significance since becoming rich).

It seems that getting wealthy is a great motivator when you're poor, but once wealthy you largely stop being a benefit to the rest of the world.

As an aside, fast food workers, on average, work 16-34 hours per week.  CEOs work far more hours than that, so I disagree that fast food workers are working harder than CEOs.  (would fast workers have a job without company founders?)

This is usually done against the will of the fast food workers.  Companies cut their hours to below 40 a week because it's cheaper to pretend that full time workers aren't really full time to deny them benefits.

I'd argue that fast food workers would certainly have jobs without CEOs (and the jobs would likely be better).  There have always been restaurants as long as there have been people who don't want to prepare their own food.  If a given fast food chain folded, another would immediately spring up to replace it.  If every fast food franchise disappeared, then other new restaurants would open to fill the gap.

[Just Joe]

And good luck replacing a surgeon or trial litigator with AI. Or even just a good tax accountant who can understand her clients' needs as well as all the complex legal and ethical issues, spoken and unspoken. It will be a while yet.

Meanwhile, every time I see a doctor, it has never been an AI.

When I broke my hand last summer, AI was used to identify the tiny, barely visible fracture in the xrays. This counterexample doesn't disprove the point, but how many people a decade ago thought X-ray reading would be forever a thing humans have to do? How about diagnostics? That will forever be a human activity, right? Actually in a recent study ChatGPT-4 - a tool not even built for diagnosing patients - correctly identified 90% of conditions from real case reports, compared to only 76% by human doctors. So it seems likely that in the next couple of years, a wave of people will start using cheaper, more convenient, and more accurate AI's for their medical issues. Medical professions will be reduced to the hands-on aspect, to the extent this is cheaper than surgery bots or other automated tools to collect specimens, labs, and measurements.

Regarding tax accounting, the online software I've been using for over 10 years is a collection of algorithms that keep me in compliance. My role is simply feeding it data and a completed tax return pops out the other end. It even gives basic advice at the end of the process on how I could reduce my taxes next year.

I don't agree with any of this. I've worked in a customer service job before. It was easy as shit.

You got lucky. The CSR's at my company have strict productivity quotas. Their idle times, such as going to take a shit, getting a drink of water, or dealing with anything else, are measured by software and they have to account for all of it. The lowest percentage who are least productive, as measured by software, are fired each year as a matter of policy. It resembles what I've read about 19th century factory work, except the work itself often involves taking emotional abuse all day, for the sake of systems designed to be hard for consumers to use because they cost the company money.

And now my company is replacing them with AI, because it's cheaper. Soon, most of them will be out on the street with a skillset made obsolete by technology, competing with all the other CSRs.

Future (better) AI + DaVinci robot = surgeon replacement?   

https://www.intuitive.com/en-us/products-and-services/da-vinci

[PeteD01]

...

Interestingly, healthcare is actually where I'm seeing the *most* use of AI.

Not that it will replace MDs, but it is steadily replacing whatever of their tasks that it can replace. I just used ChatGPT heavily myself for a differential diagnosis and it was seriously impressive as a research companion.

For experts the current iterations of AI are capable of amplifying productivity and to improve quality by reducing the stupid workload.

The idea that low skill jobs could be completely replaced whereas jobs requiring high expertise do require the expert in the driver's seat are actually two sides of the same coin. The bottomless ignorance combined with inexhaustible task persistence of current AIs leads to different outcomes with jobs that are low skill are, almost by definition, replaceable by virtue of not requiring insight but task persistence whereas expert level jobs cannot completely be replaced because of the bottomless ignorance.

Using ants as an analogy, we have all seen ants behave in ways that make the individual ant look a bit chaotic but considering the ant hill, the aggregate behavior appears purposeful although there is no higher ant hill consciousness controlling the overall behavior.

Now imagine that a farmer gets control of the ants on his farm. The farmer, as the expert, would immediately be able to figure out how to use the ants to their great advantage - from surveillance to pest elimination etc. - but, being an expert, they would not try to have the ants drive the tractor.

If I, a farming ignoramus, were put on the farm and given control over the ants, I wouldn't be able to use the ants in a way useful for farming. All what I could achieve would likely be the ants performing some stupid tricks to wow the public and then get stuck miserably trying to make the ants drive the tractor.

The replacement of an unskilled worker by AI is more an advanced automation problem than anything. This type of problem is usually solved by controlling the environment in a way suitable for the robot to reduce the number of possible failure modes. The difference between AI assisted automation and classic automation is that AI automation can deal with more complex environments and can deal adaptively with emerging failure modes.

Expert level jobs require cognition which AI does not possess. Going back to the ants, the farm ants could be tasked to prepare a daily report on the invertebrate populations and undertake some representative sampling and they would be fantastic at the task. Understanding what they have done is another thing altogether - and here comes the farmer who only has to glance at the report to understand this aspect of the state of the farm.

The replacement of unskilled or low skilled labor and that of expert level work are fundamentally different as AI systems require a cognitive module (the individually embodied cognition of the human expert) for the latter, whereas the former can be achieved without cognition by control of environmental factors (that´s why Teslas will never safely drive themselves outside carefully curated environments).

Thinking this through, it should become clear that current AIs are not going to improve to the point where cognition emerges spontaneously by simply doing more of the same.

In other words, low skilled jobs might be replaceable by current generation AI but expert level jobs are not because all that AI can do today is to free up mental space that the expert can use for cognitive tasks - although that is extremely impressive on its own it is not evidence that the systems have any expertise on their own.

Developing true AI expert systems is a very hard problem and we have not yet moved from square one in many ways.

[ChpBstrd]

So much of this reasoning can be summed up as:

"Current limitations mean AI will never be usable for expert-level tasks"

But then how do we explain AI out-diagnosing doctors? How do we explain the creativity in AI generated images and music, or the ability to drive? How do we explain the silent fall of the Turing Test? If we're already seeing these changes, what will we see in another 10 years?

It's a moving target, because the tech keeps getting better and the applications keep expanding. We never want to put ourselves in the position of saying, for example, "the GM EV1 had such poor performance that it proved electric vehicles will never happen", or "digital music files have such poor sound quality and massive storage requirements they are unlikely to displace CDs anytime soon". Read The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen before measuring the future off of the present.

[twinstudy]

So much of this reasoning can be summed up as:

"Current limitations mean AI will never be usable for expert-level tasks"

But then how do we explain AI out-diagnosing doctors? How do we explain the creativity in AI generated images and music, or the ability to drive? How do we explain the silent fall of the Turing Test? If we're already seeing these changes, what will we see in another 10 years?

It's a moving target, because the tech keeps getting better and the applications keep expanding. We never want to put ourselves in the position of saying, for example, "the GM EV1 had such poor performance that it proved electric vehicles will never happen", or "digital music files have such poor sound quality and massive storage requirements they are unlikely to displace CDs anytime soon". Read The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen before measuring the future off of the present.

Just because AI can diagnose some things right doesn't mean it's out-diagnosing doctors, because the quality of a task is not just based on task completion - it's also based on 'negative' factors like avoiding errors and, in particular, avoiding critical errors like hallucinations.

For AI to be good enough to do actual expert level work, it would need to have genuine cognition, and it would then be smart enough to work on itself - in which case, the singularity would be real. I can't see that happening any time soon, and when it does happen, I think the implications will be a lot more vast than imagined. AI will be in a position to supplant humans entirely.

[GilesMM]

So much of this reasoning can be summed up as:

"Current limitations mean AI will never be usable for expert-level tasks"

But then how do we explain AI out-diagnosing doctors? How do we explain the creativity in AI generated images and music, or the ability to drive? How do we explain the silent fall of the Turing Test? If we're already seeing these changes, what will we see in another 10 years?

It's a moving target, because the tech keeps getting better and the applications keep expanding. We never want to put ourselves in the position of saying, for example, "the GM EV1 had such poor performance that it proved electric vehicles will never happen", or "digital music files have such poor sound quality and massive storage requirements they are unlikely to displace CDs anytime soon". Read The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen before measuring the future off of the present.

I thought I saw a splashy paper in Nature announcing an opinion that ChatGPT defeated the Turing test.

[markbike528CBX]

I'm not lazy, I'm efficient!  ;)

You are not alone. It has been observed in many species (probably all have it), that there is a bell curve on activity. Some are extremely active - those die in scarcity times - and some are very energy saving - those thrive when food is scarce. The other side works too of course - in times of abundance, the very active, the wasteful, have more offspring than the lazy.

My laziness is actually what has always driven my business success. Angling for the opportunities that produce the best outcome relative to effort has been my priority for years and it consistently produces fantastic results.

It's my absolute UN-willingness to grind and hustle that catapulted my career and professional reputation to a level I would have never achieved through longer hours and more sacrifice. I used to be a grinder, but when I stopped, I realized how incredibly wasteful of energy it was.

I often say about spending that I'm not cheap, I'm just a snob about spending. Well, I'm also the same about my energy resources. The work better be worth the energy expenditure, otherwise I'm not fucking doing it.

As I age and become more disabled AND more skilled, I value my energy resources far more than my money resources. I'm far more frugal in spending my time and energy now because I find money far easier to come by than energy.

Laziness AKA energy frugality is my entire guiding principle for living, and it makes me much more productive, not less.

Reminds me of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_for_Love
"The Tale of the Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail"
This story concerns a 20th-century United States Navy seaman, midshipman, and officer David Lamb, who receives multiple promotions while minimizing any semblance of real work or combat by applying himself enthusiastically to the principle of "constructive laziness".
Invents autopilot, etc.

Closer to home, and to @MustacheAndaHalf 's point.

Have you seen the https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/throw-down-the-gauntlet/race-from-$2m-to-$3m/
Most posters have pretty much glided into " non-productive" activities, including myself*.
There are notable exceptions @Bateaux @SwordGuy  etc.- forgive me if I've missed someone, but I just wanted counter examples.
That does not include all the potential posters who have "tuned in, dropped out "** who are missing from the thread.

* Latest "Titles" some of which are on my 1040 (tax form) include :
    Resurrection Initiator -- See genealogy.
    Uninvited Professional Fun Facilitator - High class Hotel, undisclosed location, undisclosed compensation, but to include many Gin and Tonics.
    Genealogy Researcher -
        Over 7600 contributions, such as persons, sources, and other work.
        Done for the LDS Church, but not a member of said church.
    Rocket Launch Lover -
        Over 70 Rocket Launches seen live via video, 8 Countries, 14 different launch sites.
        2 launches seen live in person.
    Retired Spy -- Russian Federation 2006.
        Judo - White belt certificate
        Fencing novice
        Lock picking - no fucking clue. I had to admit this in the Russian Federation 2006.
        Experienced in use of numerous types of weapons. Bow and arrows, revolvers, semi-automatic pistols, rifles and shotguns.
    [redacted] Pool Technician --- Maintain temperature and appropriate pool chemistry and clarity.

**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_on,_tune_in,_drop_out   -----a jest, but relevant.

[MustacheAndaHalf]

Apparently the last part of my post distracted everyone from the rest of it, despite not being my main point.

Also, modern wealth and income inequality puts the lie to any notion of effort naturally leading to rewards. The people who work the hardest in our society (e.g. roofers, customer service reps, fast food workers, ditch-diggers) get paid the least, and the people who do minimal work (rentiers of various flavors, people with inherited money, shareholders, etc.) are paid the most. Talk of the PWE in such a world sounds like it comes from a "company man" who has been duped by motivational books into a dead end career making money for someone else.

As knowledge work (accounting, medicine, engineering, marketing, manufacturing) is increasingly replaced by AI, and human labor is again most valuable when applied to physical tasks, then perhaps the PWE will come back into style.

Looking at the most extreme cases, the richest people in the world:

#1) Elon Musk: founded SpaceX, the most valuable space company.  Invested early and heavily into Tesla, eventually leading it to become the first EV company that wasn't buried by the automobile industry.
#2) Mark Zuckerberg : founded Facebook, the most popular social media company in the world
#3) Jeff Bezos : founded Amazon, the most valuable e-commerce company in the world
#4) Larry Ellison : founder of Oracle, world's largest database company
#5) Bernard Arnault : founder and CEO of the world's largest luxury brand company
#6) Larry Page : co-founder of Google, the world's largest search engine (and online advertising)
#7) Bill Gates : founded of Microsoft, the world's largest software company (this may vary, but was true in 2024)
#8) Sergey Brin : co-founded of Google, see above
#9) Warren Buffet : one of the greatest investors of all time, who grew Berkshire Hathaway to its $1 trillion valuation
#10) Steve Ballmer : hired early at Microsoft, later CEO for 14 years
https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/

The first 8 names are founders of global companies.  Do you value the products they produce?  Those companies needed money to get off the ground, which is where stockholders and private investors provide value.  Would you strip the founder of a company of their ownership?  When someone creates a company, they own it - even if it grows to be worth over $1 trillion.

What I find interesting about the people on that list is that after inventing/founding their awesome company and getting really rich . . . they don't do anything anywhere near as useful ever again.  Musk has focused his time and energy on destroying the United States from within.  Zuckerberg has squandered his money on Meta, a terrible idea that seems to have no hope of success.  Bezos is fooling around with rockets seemingly for fun with no urgency or great breakthroughs made.  Several on the list have been active in various forms of philanthropy (Gates probably most notably), or continued to run their businesses (Buffet probably being the most active/successful of these - I think he just enjoys what he does - and he's probably the one on the list who has had the most significance since becoming rich).

It seems that getting wealthy is a great motivator when you're poor, but once wealthy you largely stop being a benefit to the rest of the world.

After Musk built Tesla into the world's most valuable EV company, I believe he branched out into energy storage for houses (batteries).  If Tesla succeeds at full self-driving, that would be a major breakthrough.  With SpaceX, Musk created Starlink, which seems useful during natural disasters.  I don't think Musk has been idle.  Especially if you follow his Twitter feed (which I don't, and suspect is a bad idea).  I think his actions in the government are very dangerous.

Zuckerberg was quite rich already when Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion.  Instagram growing 70x in 13 years, which is roughly doubling every year.  I think Zuckerberg deserves some credit for fostering and funding that growth.

While Jeff Bezos is spending half his money on rockets, the other half is gradually going to charity courtesy of his ex-wife (and the lack of a prenuptial agreement).

Bill Gates destroyed untold numbers of startups with "vaporware".  Microsoft would promise the same product as a new company, and nobody would buy it.  The new company collapsed... then Microsoft bought the company they destroyed, and offered the product they bought from the destroyed company.  He is being very generous with the money he fraudulently obtained!  And since he bought the company that could have sued him, that problem went away, too.  So there's my personal bias against him, but I agree he is heavily donating to charity - and signed the same pledge as Buffet, to give a large percentage of his wealth away.

These founders may be unable to replicate their accomplishments for other reasons than ability.  Most of them put decades into their companies, and may not be as able to start from scratch as senior citizens.  Many of these companies took advantage of the early adoption during the early years of the internet, which is no longer possible.  The chance they score equally well a second time is also questionable - their companies are likely to remain their biggest achievements.

As an aside, fast food workers, on average, work 16-34 hours per week.  CEOs work far more hours than that, so I disagree that fast food workers are working harder than CEOs.  (would fast workers have a job without company founders?)

This is usually done against the will of the fast food workers.  Companies cut their hours to below 40 a week because it's cheaper to pretend that full time workers aren't really full time to deny them benefits.

I'd argue that fast food workers would certainly have jobs without CEOs (and the jobs would likely be better).  There have always been restaurants as long as there have been people who don't want to prepare their own food.  If a given fast food chain folded, another would immediately spring up to replace it.  If every fast food franchise disappeared, then other new restaurants would open to fill the gap.

I didn't say "without CEOs", I said "without founders".  Founders created companies like McDonalds, which were very different from anything else in the history of restaurants.  The mechanization and speed were new, along with cheap prices.  I don't think that will go away (as shown by over 40,000 McDonalds worldwide).  I'm claiming their are restaurants, preparing food at home, and fast food restaurants.  The needs they serve aren't entirely overlapping - someone who wants a quick bite on the go won't sit down in a restaurant, they'll pickup fast food.

ChpBstrd's claim was that fast food workers (currently) work harder than CEOs.  Currently, that isn't true.  In theory, workers with 34/hours a week might be restricted from working 40.  But how do you explain 16 to 25 hours a week?  Those workers are far from any limit, so the full time limit (40 hours) isn't stopping them from adding more hours.

[SwordGuy]

ChpBstrd's claim was that fast food workers (currently) work harder than CEOs.  Currently, that isn't true.  In theory, workers with 34/hours a week might be restricted from working 40.  But how do you explain 16 to 25 hours a week?  Those workers are far from any limit, so the full time limit (40 hours) isn't stopping them from adding more hours.

How do we explain it? Damn simple.  I worked in fast food thru highschool, college and grad school.

Managers want a surplus of workers to choose from.  That way, when someone leaves or proves undependable, there are multiple people they can try calling in to work to take those hours.  The workers are pre-trained and often hungry for more hours.

Those that don't want more hours usually made that choice because the restaurant is their 2nd job.  They may have a full 40+ hour week job already, or they are in school (which is also a job, if usually a non-paying one) or have child-care responsibilities (ditto).

There are damn few dilletantes in the fast food business. I suppose there are a very few retired people who just want a few hours to hang out with other people 'cause they're REALLY lousy at meeting people any other way. Never met one.

And those restaurant workers are on their feet the whole time, often in a hot kitchen, with managers on their ass to clean or just look busy every time they slow down, unlike white collar jobs like CEOs who lounge around in comfy air-conditioned offices and have staff to take care of the mundane chores in life and work. Put one of those CEOs in a fast food job with a typical piss-poor manager with a martinet complex and see how long they last.

[LaineyAZ]

Since we've veered into AI, I thought this article on the controversy about an upcoming auction of art works is very interesting:

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2025/02/10/christies-artificial-intelligence-auction-open-letter-protest

Love this quote:

"I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes. " — Joanna Maciejewska

[Psychstache]

While Jeff Bezos is spending half his money on rockets, the other half is gradually going to charity courtesy of his ex-wife (and the lack of a prenuptial agreement).

You can't give Jeff Bezos credit for the charitable actions of his ex-wife WTF.

[AuspiciousEight]

So much of this reasoning can be summed up as:

"Current limitations mean AI will never be usable for expert-level tasks"

But then how do we explain AI out-diagnosing doctors? How do we explain the creativity in AI generated images and music, or the ability to drive? How do we explain the silent fall of the Turing Test? If we're already seeing these changes, what will we see in another 10 years?

It's a moving target, because the tech keeps getting better and the applications keep expanding. We never want to put ourselves in the position of saying, for example, "the GM EV1 had such poor performance that it proved electric vehicles will never happen", or "digital music files have such poor sound quality and massive storage requirements they are unlikely to displace CDs anytime soon". Read The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen before measuring the future off of the present.

Just because AI can diagnose some things right doesn't mean it's out-diagnosing doctors, because the quality of a task is not just based on task completion - it's also based on 'negative' factors like avoiding errors and, in particular, avoiding critical errors like hallucinations.

For AI to be good enough to do actual expert level work, it would need to have genuine cognition, and it would then be smart enough to work on itself - in which case, the singularity would be real. I can't see that happening any time soon, and when it does happen, I think the implications will be a lot more vast than imagined. AI will be in a position to supplant humans entirely.

Just a minor note here - software has had the ability to reflect on itself and write and build and run code and update it's own code for a long long time now.

Even 15 years ago I was writing software that could reflect on itself, write new code, compile the new code, create an executable to update itself, then update itself, effectively evolving and learning and growing on its own based on external circumstances. This isn't a new concept - there's all kinds of software that writes software today, and we have various AI systems that help us write code these days.

I'm sure we will have AI systems that are generally more "intelligent" in some ways than an average human being, but this doesn't mean that they will be programmed to have human feelings, insecurities, lust, greed, anger, resentments, self-preservation tendencies, and so on. People always want to project their feelings onto other people, but an AI system simply won't have these feelings unless they're programmed into the system.

When an advanced AI system starts telling me it feels fear, that's when I'll be scared also...

[tooqk4u22]

Progress and innovation is always scary.   

Humans harnessed fire.....the world will burn and humankind will be over.

Humans invented the wheel......this will end humankind because we won't need as many to do the work.

Humans discovered FIRE.......the world will end because there will be no workers.

Humans discovered AI......well every SciFi movie and book out there doesn't end well so I am going to wait to see how this one plays out....

[twinstudy]

And those restaurant workers are on their feet the whole time, often in a hot kitchen, with managers on their ass to clean or just look busy every time they slow down, unlike white collar jobs like CEOs who lounge around in comfy air-conditioned offices and have staff to take care of the mundane chores in life and work. Put one of those CEOs in a fast food job with a typical piss-poor manager with a martinet complex and see how long they last.

Are you suggesting that all highly paid white collar jobs are relatively cushy and easy, or is it just CEOs?

Because I could think of plenty of white collar jobs (e.g. neurosurgeon, quant, investment banker) which do not involve lounging around. The 'CEO' thing is kind of a red herring when you compare it to the other jobs which are highly paid and arduous.

Plenty of teenagers work in fast food. Are you saying they somehow have greater lasting skills than CEOs, or the aforementioned white collar jobs?

[ChpBstrd]

ChpBstrd's claim was that fast food workers (currently) work harder than CEOs.  Currently, that isn't true.  In theory, workers with 34/hours a week might be restricted from working 40.  But how do you explain 16 to 25 hours a week?  Those workers are far from any limit, so the full time limit (40 hours) isn't stopping them from adding more hours.

If you, as an adult fast food worker, are restricted to part-time hours at any given restaurant, you make ends meet by working a second part time job at another fast food restaurant. It’s a way of life.

Pretty sure most executives would buckle at the speed of work and being on their feet all day.

[PeteD01]

So much of this reasoning can be summed up as:

"Current limitations mean AI will never be usable for expert-level tasks"

But then how do we explain AI out-diagnosing doctors? How do we explain the creativity in AI generated images and music, or the ability to drive? How do we explain the silent fall of the Turing Test? If we're already seeing these changes, what will we see in another 10 years?

It's a moving target, because the tech keeps getting better and the applications keep expanding. We never want to put ourselves in the position of saying, for example, "the GM EV1 had such poor performance that it proved electric vehicles will never happen", or "digital music files have such poor sound quality and massive storage requirements they are unlikely to displace CDs anytime soon". Read The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen before measuring the future off of the present.

Consciousness is not sufficient but necessary for cognition.
If current technology is not capable of creating consciousness it won´t ever have cognition.
Thus the question becomes if the limitations of current technology are such that they preclude consciousness.
There are reasons to believe that the current technology of digital computers is incapable of creating consciousness, but let´s first look where the idea that digital computers are capable of developing consciousness is coming from.
Basically, the metaphor of the brain as a computer leads to the reverse metaphor of the computer as a brain.

There is no question that brains and digital computers can do computations but digital computers operate within a restricted number space (floating point operations) whereas brains do not deal with numbers but with continuous variables (extended real numbers). The number of possible values for a continuous variable is infinitely higher than the finite number of values a variable can take in digital computing (all continuous variables are expressed as discrete variables).
Thus, digital computers are deterministic with a finite number of states whereas brains can assume an infinite number of states. Brains are therefore more like analog computers (or hybrid) than digital computers. Analog computers work by manipulating physical variables as analogues for real world processes.
The brain also deals with physical (electrochemical) variables but the comparison with analog computers breaks down somewhat as these physical variables are mostly not analogues of real world processes at levels beyond sense perception.

The architecture of a brain and a digital computer are of course totally different and the concept of hardware and software (and calling hardware wetware does not change a thing) does not apply to brains. Insofar that one can call it programming, analog computers, like brains, are programmed by altering their physical characteristics and brains do it by rewiring on the fly. In addition, memory is not a discrete structure in analog computers but part of the active process.

Finally, the fastest supercomputers and the human brain are estimated to perform up to 1 exaflop/s and the human brain only uses 12-20 watts to do this - no matter the complexity of the task performed consciously.
Supercomputers use energy proportional to the number of operations and memory use.

There is more but you get the idea.

Digital computers are so fundamentally different from brains that the widespread confusion is a real head scratcher and requires explanation.

I think it might come from two different misconceptions and some reasoning by analogy (pun intended): 1. mind body dualism 2. software that is agnostic to the physical hardware it is run on.
But, as we have seen, the dualistic distinction between hard- and software is already meaningless when talking about simple analog computers (slide rules etc.).

Digital computers deal with simulations of reality (ironically, digital computers are simulations themselves created by analog machines), brains are more like plugged into reality with no clear border between external and internal reality (maybe seeing them as extensions of each other is more appropriate). 


AI with consciousness will never be created with digital computers as we know them, but the first steps away from this dead end are being taken. Deep South is up and running.

Neuromorphic Computing
A primary objective in artificial intelligence research is to create computers capable of learning and reasoning similar to human cognition. While there are various approaches to achieve this, the consensus within the engineering community is that the most effective approach involves creating computer models that replicate the human brain's architecture.

Neuromorphic computing is a process that mimics the human brain's structure and functionality, using artificial neurons and synapses to process information.

Using artificial neurons and synapses, neuromorphic models simulate how our brain processes information, allowing them to solve problems, recognize patterns, and make decisions more quickly and efficiently than conventional computing models. A Neuron, also called a node, is a basic computational unit that processes inputs and produces an output, using a weighted sum and an activation function. A Synapse is a connection between two neurons.

Unlike the von Neumann model, where processing units and memory are separate, the neuromorphic computing model integrates memory and processing units in the neurons and synapses. Neuromorphic algorithms are defined by the structure of the neural network and its parameters rather than by direct instructions, as in von Neumann architecture.

Another significant distinction is how input data is processed.

Instead of encoding information as numerical values in binary format, neuromorphic computing uses Spikes as inputs, where the timing, magnitude, and shape of these spikes encode numerical information.

https://deepsouthai.gitbook.io/whitepaper/neuromorphic-computing


DeepSouth Makes Advanced AI Supercomputer that Simulates a Human Brain!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr76kOfN64M

[twinstudy]

ChpBstrd's claim was that fast food workers (currently) work harder than CEOs.  Currently, that isn't true.  In theory, workers with 34/hours a week might be restricted from working 40.  But how do you explain 16 to 25 hours a week?  Those workers are far from any limit, so the full time limit (40 hours) isn't stopping them from adding more hours.

If you, as an adult fast food worker, are restricted to part-time hours at any given restaurant, you make ends meet by working a second part time job at another fast food restaurant. It’s a way of life.

Pretty sure most executives would buckle at the speed of work and being on their feet all day.

As I said above - why keep going back to CEOs, and not other highly paid, demanding white collar professions?

If a teen can do a fast food job, I suggest that it's not as rigorously difficult as you make it out to be.

[GuitarStv]

And those restaurant workers are on their feet the whole time, often in a hot kitchen, with managers on their ass to clean or just look busy every time they slow down, unlike white collar jobs like CEOs who lounge around in comfy air-conditioned offices and have staff to take care of the mundane chores in life and work. Put one of those CEOs in a fast food job with a typical piss-poor manager with a martinet complex and see how long they last.

Are you suggesting that all highly paid white collar jobs are relatively cushy and easy, or is it just CEOs?

Because I could think of plenty of white collar jobs (e.g. neurosurgeon, quant, investment banker) which do not involve lounging around. The 'CEO' thing is kind of a red herring when you compare it to the other jobs which are highly paid and arduous.

Plenty of teenagers work in fast food. Are you saying they somehow have greater lasting skills than CEOs, or the aforementioned white collar jobs?

I did tons of blue collar jobs to pay my way through university - in front of a blast furnace in a refinery packing/unpacking car parts, loading/stacking lumber at a lumberyard, carrying bags of concrete around construction sites, performing exterminations and chemical pest control treatments as an exterminator, stamping/bending steel to produce steel lockers for 10 hr shifts, etc.  It was a great driver to become a white collar worker because I didn't want to have to work as hard as that my whole life.  Every white collar job I've ever worked has been cushier and easier. As a guy in my middle age I'd struggle to do jobs I worked as a teen and in my early 20s.

That's not to say that the work is trivial - there's a lot of thinking and creative problem solving, there is emotional stress caused by demands, there's boredom from sitting in pointless meetings, and frustration caused by having to take foolish direction from morons in management.  There's certainly no lounging around.  But I don't come home at the end of the day aching all over and too tired to do anything.  Don't think I've ever actually worked as hard at a white collar job.  That's the whole point of white collar jobs - smarter, not harder.

[AuspiciousEight]

And those restaurant workers are on their feet the whole time, often in a hot kitchen, with managers on their ass to clean or just look busy every time they slow down, unlike white collar jobs like CEOs who lounge around in comfy air-conditioned offices and have staff to take care of the mundane chores in life and work. Put one of those CEOs in a fast food job with a typical piss-poor manager with a martinet complex and see how long they last.

Are you suggesting that all highly paid white collar jobs are relatively cushy and easy, or is it just CEOs?

Because I could think of plenty of white collar jobs (e.g. neurosurgeon, quant, investment banker) which do not involve lounging around. The 'CEO' thing is kind of a red herring when you compare it to the other jobs which are highly paid and arduous.

Plenty of teenagers work in fast food. Are you saying they somehow have greater lasting skills than CEOs, or the aforementioned white collar jobs?

I did tons of blue collar jobs to pay my way through university - in front of a blast furnace in a refinery packing/unpacking car parts, loading/stacking lumber at a lumberyard, carrying bags of concrete around construction sites, performing exterminations and chemical pest control treatments as an exterminator, stamping/bending steel to produce steel lockers for 10 hr shifts, etc.  It was a great driver to become a white collar worker because I didn't want to have to work as hard as that my whole life.  Every white collar job I've ever worked has been cushier and easier. As a guy in my middle age I'd struggle to do jobs I worked as a teen and in my early 20s.

That's not to say that the work is trivial - there's a lot of thinking and creative problem solving, there is emotional stress caused by demands, there's boredom from sitting in pointless meetings, and frustration caused by having to take foolish direction from morons in management.  There's certainly no lounging around.  But I don't come home at the end of the day aching all over and too tired to do anything.  Don't think I've ever actually worked as hard at a white collar job.  That's the whole point of white collar jobs - smarter, not harder.

I agree with Steve.

I spent my teenage years in various service and blue collar jobs - specifically fast food and factories and delivery jobs - and worked my way through college, before entering the workforce as a white collar professional.

There is some emotional stress at times with the white collar jobs but it's nowhere near the amount of physical, mental, and emotional stress and fatigue I had while working the blue collar jobs.

Honestly the biggest stress I've endured while working white collar jobs is the idea that I could lose my job someday and be forced to work a blue collar job again.

In addition - even with the white collar jobs - my experience has always been that the *more* money and higher status job I have, the less stress it is because I'm often given way more flexibility and autonomy and authority on *how* I do my job and what I'm working on at any particular point in time.

[Metalcat]

I think that the world of blue collar and white collar jobs is just too vast and diverse to make any sort of broad generalizations about which are harder and which are easier.

It's asinine, really.

There are white collar jobs that are physically demanding, insanely high stakes and stress, and insanely long hours. There are blue collar jobs that are so easy to the point that the hardest part is tolerating the boredom.

You can't compare a manual labour blue collar job to a white collar office job. That's apples to oranges.

Go ahead and compare a minimum wage call center or data entry job to a white collar megacorp job and compare the challenges and stress.

Go ahead and compare a minimum wage manual labour job to being a surgeon and then they can compare notes on repetitive strain injuries.

Go ahead and compare the work of a PSW to that of a nurse.

There are a lot more office jobs in the white collar world and there are a lot more manual labour jobs in the blue collar world, but that doesn't mean that you can paint all blue collar jobs as more grueling than white collar jobs, that's nonsense.

The two most brutal jobs I've had have been 1 white collar and 1 blue collar. The easiest jobs I've had have been 1 white collar and 1 blue collar.

And I've probably worked in more jobs/industries than just about anyone here.

[simonsez]

Great topic! I think the definition of PWE will vary a decent amount.  To me, it's not about maximizing W-2/1099 earnings over your career, at least not necessarily.  Someone with the PWE volunteers at their church or local soup kitchen or at schools or other civic opportunities in addition to keeping a clean house inside and out, being a good spouse and parent, and putting forth effort on a job to provide food on the table and a roof overhead.  That is, work hard at whatever it is you do (including unpaid work and relationships) so that any failures will not be due to your lack of effort/care.  You can put your name behind any of the institutions you are involved with and it's a badge of honor somewhat.  I do think the self-respect and pride issues of the PWE are underrated and not talked about enough in religious circles due to pride=bad. Like proud of their humility and service to others when it comes to forming an identity but not so much that it feels like overkill?

But anyway, I think someone with a strong PWE can easily retire from earning wages out of necessity once FI, they just might need more structure in retirement that they can channel their energy into, whatever that will be to an individual.

As for CEOs vs fast food workers. I've never been a CEO but I imagine my life would be more structured around that position and I would outsource tasks and roles to others in ways that fast food workers cannot, thus allowing me to work more. When I've worked in fast food, I was in school, working multiple jobs, etc. Fast food was not the end goal nor was it my sole major activity at the time.  Maybe CEO is not an end goal for some high achievers but it's at least further up the pyramid.