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Aristotle would have been OK with that. Work simply is "non-leisure" and therefore shouldn't be aspired to per-se.

As per Josef Pieper – it's all about leisure.

School especially so:

"The Greek word for leisure (σχολή) is the origin of Latin scola, German Schule, English school. The names for the institutions of education and learning mean leisure."

In this potential world of abundant leisure we just need to get back to good old sharing – because sharing means caring!

4 comments

Never thought I'd see Pieper referenced on HN. Great point and reference.

For everyone else, Leisure the basis of culture is worth reading and relevant here.

But finding a realistic economic system where the benefits of automation don't just benefit the top x% and lead to a morlocks and Eloi society is HARD!

It's not so hard to find it, it just it sounds too much as socialism.

There are all kind of possible ideas. Just the other day I read about, instead of taxing corporations, make that a minority percentage is owned by the society. Not without its problems, but sounds like it would line up some bad incentives that we see now in action.

At the end of the day, we always go back to who owns the means of production.

As is always the case with humans, change it's not going to happen until we are in real trouble. Maybe not even then.

I doubt the multi billionares are going to be open to the idea of sharing.

because sharing means caring!

I thought sharing meant copyright infringement! ;-)

I'd say both, and that's why I think we need to loosen up on the copyrights a bit :). Too much "intellectual property" protection is harmful to society.

I'm not sure if we should be taking lessons from people who's leisure time was created from slavery. Arisotle was the ancient equialent of billionaires who's family can live forever off of interest/investments

Aristotle's contemporaries who claimed "nature has made nobody a slave" also held similar, if not the same, views on leisure. Of course, you could argue all Athenians really took others into slavery by virtue of war, or their unquestioned military superiority of the time. The question is, is hypocrisy actually contradictory to Aristotle's views?

I think not.