I wish people could handle an idle mind, I expect we'd all be better off. But yeah, realistically most people when idle would do a lot of damage.
Its always possible that risk would be transitional. Anyone alive today, at least in western style societies, likely doesn't know a life without high levels of stress and distraction. It makes sense that change would cause people to lash out, maybe people growing up in that new system would handle it better (if they had the chance).
I think distraction is doing a lot of work here. Many people could play video games 24/7 with no issues. The urge to be productive and/or make personal progress is something a lot of people feel, (which is fantastic), but video games do a really good job of replacing those feelings along with other emotional experiences.
Many shows and movies can play a similar role.
I think we would/will see a lot more of that. Even in transitional periods where people can multitask more now as ai starts taking over moment to moment thinking.
I don’t think people would be idle. They’d just be concerned with different things, like social dynamics, games/competition/sports, raising family etc.
Oh sure, I didn't actually mean to describe it being idle as in sitting and literally doing nothing. I more meant idle in comparison to how much people work today and how much they think about or stress over work.
Take 7 hours out if the day because an LLM makes you that much more productive and I expect people wouldn't know what to do with themselves. That could be wrong, but I'd expect a lot more societal problems than we already have today if a year from now a large number of people only worked 4 or 5 hours a week.
That's not even getting to the Shopify CEOs ridiculous claim that employees will get 100x more work done [1].
What an absurd straw man. Moving the needle away from “large portions of the population are a few paychecks away from being homeless” does not constitute “the devil’s playground”.
Where’s all of the articles that HN loves about kids these days not being bored anymore? What about google’s famous 20% time?
To be clear I’m not saying we shouldn’t have this because people would lash out.
I’m saying I’m worried that it would be more likely that people would lash out, than everyone just passively sitting around.
But to respond to your google analogy, 20% time is complemented by 80% being busy. This scenario would be 100% time.
It would be better to look at a population that doesn’t have to work, like retirees. And see what the various issues they face. But also correct for age and biology of course. Or look at populations of places like Qatar where most of the native population don’t have to work much due to oil/gas revenues.
I worry more that an idle humanity will cause a lot more conflict. “An idle mind’s the devil’s playground” and all.