> But when everyone spends more, the effect is merely to raise the bar that defines special. The average American wedding now costs $30,000, roughly twice as much as in 1990. No one believes that couples who marry today are happier because weddings cost so much more than they used to.

It seems odd to claim this increase is due to keeping up with others' weddings when inflation between 1990 and 2015 was roughly the difference here. The weddings were/are more expensive because everything was/is more expensive. $15,000 in 1990 had the same purchasing power as ~$27,000 in 2015. So this hardly seems related to bigger, more extravgent weddings. People have had to spend more to maintain the same quality of wedding as the previous generation.

Freedom is not “doing anything you want”. It’s “not having to do the things you don’t want to do”.

AI may automate a white colar subset of those, but modern day society has for the longest time used wives, young people, immigrants from countries with bad currency devaluation, etc, to fill the gap above. The article talks about status and attention as the ultimate goal, but that may be a male-only perspective. Or even a him-like-perspective. The reality is humans chase many ladders since brains have may proclivities. For more than half of the population (wives and the poor) the goal may be freedom or time to do more.

I don’t think my concern is that AI is going to make everything too awesome for people to cope. The fact that I can now DoorDash lunch doesn’t really matter when I can’t afford a place to live or healthcare.

Beautiful piece, with a great closer (not reproduced here, you should go with it).

I do wonder if our society would be better if we had more honourifics and formality. China has instituted social media rules based on qualifications. Many indigenous societies have forms of secret and sacred knowledge.

I think too many people are concerned with the abuse of these sorts of social systems when we already live in a system of value that is rife with abuse.

I wish I had access to free, unlimited childcare so that I was free to pursue my dream of raising children.

> There is a running joke in the U.S. version of The Office where Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson), who is “Assistant to the Regional Manager” keeps insisting that he is “Assistant Regional Manager”, which sounds a bit better. When he is officially promoted to the title he prefers, he is delighted

As with so many of them, the joke is more subtly, brilliantly, and originally from The Office; not The Office (US).

It started off really interesting, but I had to stop once the "AI could lead to post-scarcity" bit came.

Sorry, no offence, but I wish that this was the "problem" with AI.

The "Problem" is actually that it turns known tractable problems into non-reproducible problems.

Giving the illusion of giving the right answer is significantly more dangerous than giving an obvious wrong answer. So we're not going to AI ourselves into post-scarcity, whitecollar work will just sleepwalk into even further absurdity. (because, the fact is, humans also suffer from this issue; the worst among us give the appearance of competence and fuck it up massively).

AI consumes resources like a motherfucker, to maybe replace white-collar work, but the bluecollar stuff isn't going anywhere. It's a harder problem so people (companies) avoid it the same way that they avoid writing native GUIs. Much more convenient to just focus on pretty things and in the digital realm, but farming? agriculture? textiles and everything that society actually relies upon?

AI isn't coming for those jobs, because it's harder and has more definite outcomes. You can't trick people into believing that a pig has been slaughtered, carved and cooked properly.

It's comparatively easy to trick people into thinking that the man behind the curtain is a wizard, however.

Peoples' takes on life can be so weird. The problems arent AI or any other tech, its human. This book seems like a waste of paper.