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 extravagant weddings. People have had to spend more to maintain the same quality of wedding as the previous generation.
In fact, weddings decreased in inflation-adjusted cost between 1990 and 2023: https://ktvz.com/stacker-lifestyle/2024/03/01/how-us-wedding...
I would assume that downward trend has continued as inflation has spiked in the past few years and people had to spend more of their money in other areas.
As did I.
90s weddings remind me of the Friends episode where Monica was scoping out her wedding. Chandler revealed how much money he had by writing it on a price of paper (that is, the audience never saw the dollar value), and Monica said something like "oh, we can go with best one, plan A" and Chandler said he didn't want to spend that much money "on one party". I've always wondered what amount of money that was.
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.
living in the third world i have seen absurd stuff: early 20s women living in slums that own the latest iphone pro max on a 5 year term loan is a common theme
in london the children of the UHNW (net worth >EUR100m) compete for scholarships and academic achievements, or to create unicorn startups, because the only way they can differentiate themselves from UHNW peers is the academic arena where money doesnt matter. they also tend to make shitty films or own vineyards, or try to become authors, or try to make scientific discoveries, and get sucked in to Mystical Gurus like Mr Epstein and Elizabeth Holmes/Thanos
It’s no different than a national geographic video where the loudest frog signals it can be bold enough to broadcast its location, even though it can be eaten. Wearing gold chains and bragging you have crypto is akin to yelling “come and rob me” in a less safe world.
The reality is that status is just a way to “encourage/compel” voluntary submission of services from other people, who may think they will benefit from your status rubbing on them in some way.
Strangers don’t support you for what you do, but for what you can do for them in the future.
They take a taxi to the airport, oh to live a life of such extravagance.
They get their newspaper delivered to their door every Sunday? The aristocrats.
There's actual wealthy people in the world, no need to be a crab in a bucket.
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.
In the US we administer a test at age 16 that determines lifetime "qualifications" and access to "secret and sacred knowledge". How much further is there to even go on that front? Back to inherited nobility?
As with so many of them, the joke is more subtly, brilliantly, and originally from The Office; not The Office (US).
*In that the US show made him rich.
What would happen if you just had children?
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.
> Before making this argument, I want to defend the topic. Utopia is not around the corner; these issues don't have any practical urgency. But I agree with Bostrom that thinking about utopia “can serve as kind of philosophical particle accelerator, in which extreme conditions are created that allow us to study the elementary constituents of our values.” Reflecting on utopia might tell us something interesting about human nature more generally.
The 1700s called, regular mechinization already came for that.
And non-LLM AI has been moving into more blue collar stuff for years already, now with LLM logic they are becoming far more capable too.
You must be thinking of the more blue collar service industry, which may not go anywhere, but the time it takes to train, and the number of people that will go into it will ensure earning a living is difficult.
Oh man sometimes I'm like "actually what I just said is wrong"... I have to remind myself to slow down/think over everything before saying something is done.
a lot of agriculture is either about owning a bunch of land and machines, or owning access to a bunch of slave-ish labour. sure the slave-ish labour side isnt all that automated yet, but the up side to automating isnt very high either
> But I think this won’t be a problem with a post-scarcity world. So many of the difficulties we face in life stem from our interactions with other people, and these won’t go away even with infinite material resources. So long as we remain human, we can never be fully satisfied. On the bright side, our lives will continue to have meaning in a post-scarcity world. We might be miserable, but we won’t be bored.