Growth of Man—like Growth of Nature—
Gravitates within—
Atmosphere, and Sun endorse it—
Bit it stir—alone—
Each—its difficult Ideal
Must achieve—Itself—
Through the solitary prowess
Of a Silent Life—
(Emily Dickinson)

About the Title

The three subjects in the title are loosely related, and this post is not about arguing that college is a scam (for MANY people). Instead, this post has risen from my recent feelings about wanting to drop out because I feel like I could be doing just as much, or just as more, work and learning if I was not attending college and at a much cheaper price. I am not going to drop out because I do not have a plan in place to make sure I stay employable and a functional piece in society. My only plan would be to save up to live in a forest, read a ton of books, learn the things I could have learned in college for free or at much cheaper prices, and maybe get a pet bear. Eventually, I would have to find work to sustain this lifestyle, since I am a broke college student who can’t save enough to make this dream last for more than a few years, and then the dream is suddenly shattered. Could we ever live in this dream? Probably not, but I do not think it is impossible, and we are approaching this direction already. We ARE (kind of) living in the post-scarcity society. Somehow, these thoughts led to tangential thoughts of thinking about my past and realizing that I do not truly have full control of my life (from a free will perspective).

Post-Scarcity

I dream of a new dawn a red sky and a blue lawn where we know words are harmless and we can play with open arms or we can say that work is play or we can say that work is gone but I know either way our way of life will still live on
(Geohot)

I believe that we can get really close to living in a post-scarcity society, especially with recent advancements in technology, specifically in AI and automation. Once we get close to eliminating scarcity we change the economic paradigm. People will be able to work less or none at all and have more time to do the things they want to do. Since it is not a perfectly post-scarcity world, wealth still needs to circulate somehow. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (what a coincidence), proposed a socialist solution to this.

Jobs can be broken down into these categories: the static people who do not produce real value or wealth (politicians, HR, managers, etc.), the people who exploit nature directly (farmers, miners, etc.), and the people who improve on the second group’s exploits of nature (engineers, scientists, etc.). As society develops, the number of people in the static and improvers group grow with the improvers group plateauing after a certain level is reached. Meanwhile, the number of exploiters decline, as their jobs are easily replaced by technology. The amount of layoffs and hiring freezes occuring at tech companies today prove how bloated the first group is. From 2017 to 2021, Twitter’s workforce grew by 4,128. Tesla’s Autopilot team has floated around less than a few hundred since 2014. I doubt the workforce growth of Twitter is nowhere near proportional to the actual improvement in its product. More people are beginning to feel that their jobs are useless; the lower bound is probably around 37% of people. Eventually, companies and the government will realize that we should not be fearing the replacement of many jobs, but we should be planning for its inevitable arrival and ensuring the immense wealth we will gain from it is shared among all members. I do not know what policies are solutions there could be for this pivot. The aformentioned Altman post runs with some ideas, but I am not qualified to criticize it extensively.

Free Will

In this idyllic world, nobody would HAVE to work to produce anything. What would people do with all of this free time and lack of societal responsiblities? Individual sovereignty is achieved…One of the most disheartening beliefs I hold is that we do not have any free will. The classical argument against free will is fundamentally erroneous because it assumes determinism from the start. “If B, then there is an A such that A –> B”. Do this recursively, and we go to the beginning of the Big Bang. The Big Bang is step 0 which leads to some scene, Step 1, which leads to the next scene, Step 2…This line of reasoning does not prove anything. There is a stronger case FOR free will through quantum mechanics, but this can only be proven true if quantum mechanics is the fundamental layer of reality. Let’s assume quantum mechanics is the fundamental layer of reality, and we have a physical system in state S which can lead to two outcomes, O1 and O2, due to an experiment E occuring on the system; each have a 50% chance of being the outcome to occur. Let O1 be choosing a white shirt and O2 be choosing a black shirt; all other elements in the state are irrelevant. O1 occurs, so the white shirt is chosen. A few unanswered questions here, each having their own questions about them, include: what experiment E occurs such that there is a 50% chance of white being chosen, and what part of the system led to O1 when they each had an equal chance of occuring? As far as we know, it just happened. We reach no conclusion, so it is useless to argue on the fundamental layers of physics. We may never know if there is a deeper layer beyond quantum mechanics; Gödel’s incompleteness theorem may be a stretch of an explanation for the lack of answers, but there may be some implications there. Let’s peel back into more abstract layers, going into the fundamentals of biology. Epigentics may lead to the strongest case against free will. The environment is the set of all things and its state is subject to probability. We, specifically our genes, are a subset of this environment. According to epigenetics, the state of the whole environment affects our gene expression which affects our actions. The 23,000 genes from our parents and some of their expressions are determined by the environment. Our genes, making up who we are, are directly affected by the environment which is determined by probability according to QM. We live in a system where we are not the rollers of the dice. How do I live with this fact? I just do…that’s all we can do.