Quote from: Rassah on December 12, 2011, 03:21:53 PM

This whole RBE thing is still way too greatly dependent on the false assumption that we as a human species are not lazy. We are practically genetically programmed to collect as many resources as possible while doing as little as possible, since "doing" wears us out and makes us die faster.

This is incorrect. It's exactly this attribute in humans that has been one of the most important incentives driving our technological development. We are lazy therefore we are motivated in making our lives easier. Technology is all about making our lives easier. RBE does not change this, in fact it takes away the restrictions we have today. No longer is your free, creative time conflicting with the need to do some mundane job to get money. Not that all jobs are mundane, some of us are lucky to have a dream job, but that is not very common.

Even though we have a massive conflict between what we want to do and what we have to do, people still contribute massive amounts of time to voluntary work and things like open source software projects where they do not get any kind of monetary incentive. In fact they get a negative monetary incentive, they could be working a payed job instead of doing that.

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I am unconvinced that anyone would voluntarily go through the extremely grueling work of obtaining an advanced degree/education in any subject without knowing there will be a major payout at the end of it, which would give you an advantage over your peers. Why bother studying engineering, software development, biology, or resource allocation (economics), including all the parts you are guaranteed to have absolutely no interest in, but which are still essential in your field of interest, when you are already provided everything you need, and "someone else will just do that work for you"?

Maybe because it's interesting to learn new things? Maybe because I happen to like a certain field and thus would like to work on it in my free time? This is a prime example of what I call corrupted incentives. When people need a monetary payout at the end for doing something, it's a sad situation. The natural curiosity and creativity of a human being has all but died at that point. This is not in "human nature", it's something that happens when you grow in the kind of society we live in. It's not a coincidence that small children are very interested in everything and once they get a bit older they start (usually) hating school etc. One of the reasons for this is that our whole educational system is not feeding the intrinsic incentives people have, it's killing them.

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From personal experience, I can tell you that brilliant people would much more likely end up slacking of, spending their days playing videogames, reading random books, or just debating random things on forums for hours rather than do any inventing work for the rest of you. Or they would end up forming an exclusive community where they can competitively to compare their levels of brilliance, use it as reputation, and invent their own barter and money system, exchanging their ideas only amongst each other, as a sort of a game to see who can collect the most "smart" points. Brilliant people are quite arrogant and competitive after all. And then the rest of you would be screwed.

Well, I claim that the main reason why this happens is that there is nothing better to do. The creativity of these people is not being tapped which is why they spend their time doing something unproductive. This happens to me all the time, but the problem is not that I don't want to do something more productive, I just don't know what it could be. I've studied quite a lot of things completely voluntarily simply to find a profession that gives me high autonomy, the right kind of challenge, and does something that I find helpful to society. This has proven to be VERY HARD in a monetary system. To compensate for this I've been forced to do unproductive work to get money and use my free time as productively as I can.

People in general are not happy to just slack off. They do that if they are either tired or have nothing better to do. One prime example of this are people who work long hours doing mundane jobs and then they come home, can you really expect them to do anything but lay on the couch watching TV and eat? The fact that people slack off so much is not because of some fault in human nature, there are many things that can negatively affect this. For example corrupted incentives, lack of challenging activities or excess amount of tiring work.

One more thing, from my experience a lot of people do work in a field they are actually interested in. In this case the problem is usually with the job itself, not the work. It can be a number of things, no autonomy, crappy boss, too long hours etc. If people had more choice in what way they want to contribute to the field they like, I definitely see people wanting to work even without an extra monetary incentive.