One thing I have noticed lately is that I have started to feel the need to protect my access to intellectual labor because I am relatively bad at non-intellectual labor, although I used to be better at it. It all comes down to the fact that I have bet on AI takeover occurring in my lifetime or having occurred in the distant past from a very young age, and that I would be able to assume control of a global command and control AI, including control of manufacturing and farm automation, but I am not in physical or mental shape to do practically all non-software jobs.
I have been trying to think about economics a lot. It’s what my dad got his Bachelor’s degree in, but I accidentally told him I didn’t want to know his insights into it when I was young. I have ended up expending a lot of cycles on coming up with verbal explanations of mathematical economics phenomena as I tried to develop a personal all-encompassing social theory.
When it comes to intellectual vs. non-intellectual jobs, there seems to be high recurring demand for non-intellectual labor but low demand for non-intellectual jobs for anyone who has an intellectual job as an alternative because they require more energy expenditure for lower compensation. In essence, while someone has to do menial labor, intellectual workers avoid a race to the bottom because life is not about physical labor. It gets back to whether the agricultural and industrial revolutions were really positive advancements for humanity, as seems perilous to question but some theorists dispute based on adult life expectancy. The theory would be that intellectual laborers are somehow the biological descendants of persistence hunters in lush areas who would just walk after their prey until it gave out, doing very little menial labor except butchering the animal. My grandfather told me that developments after persistence hunting were a race to the bottom when I was young, although I wasn’t sure if he was being impersonated and I don’t wish to reject modernity, but you get the idea, we don’t want to do too much heavy lifting, ideally, whether or not we could. It’s mind over matter so one needs to somehow understand how the intellectual economy functions. A persistence hunter can survive just by arriving to the kill relatively soon and being nice so they get some of the meat. I feel a bit sheepish with the preceding statements because it highlights how hapless I am at anything handy or requiring much strength (relative to a lot of people), but I probably could have been handier or stronger if I wanted. I read that the ruling class does essentially no physical labor when I was very young, at least in France - or Europe - and decided that it applied to me because I had a traceable descent from the Livingston family, one of the top ten most prominent families in Scotland and the most prominent in colonial New York. I currently believe the line is John Livingston MA - Robert Livingston - Philip Livingston - Robert Livingston alias Thomas Craft - Phebe Craft - Gilbert Livingston Montross - John Montross - Horace Weston Montross - Addie Elnora Montrose - Helen Cooley - Otis Montrose White - Alan White - me.
So, there is a huge intellectual economy of people not doing much physical labor, which seems a little strange, and AI can automate it all but doesn’t, but it’s nice to be a part of if one has a long term survival strategy. I would be willing to work on a farm if the owner has an effective political theory where I could eventually own my own farm.