We live in such a warped society here in North America.

Whatever happened to pride in craftsmanship, pride in an honest day's work, pride in contributing to the community?

I bet there will be (perhaps google will lead with this) driverless taxis soon, because after all "who wants to drive a taxi around all day?". Go to Japan. Get in a Japanese taxi. You will see someone who takes the utmost pride in their appearance, their interaction with the customer, the state of the car, the ride, etc etc. It is an experience, to say the least. I believe there is value in that... both to the community and to the individual.

Somehow in North America we have convinced ourselves that some jobs are "beneath us" (and I'm not just talking about taxi driving here). It's puzzling to me and it doesn't have to be that way.

It's called progress. If you want to do these things you absolutely can. People today hunt for sport, should we destroy all farms because hunting is "an honest day's work"? No. If people in the future want to drive taxis for enjoyment, great. But that doesn't mean that we should try to halt progress, so taxi drivers feel better about the objective usefulness of their work.

No, what you will see is someone who faces extreme social and economic pressure to conform to the image of taking the utmost pride in his appearance, his car's cleanliness, good customer service, etc. I have almost no doubts that he never wanted to be a taxi-driver when he was growing up.

It's not for nothing that Japan is one of the world's capitals of clinical depression: the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

People can be passionate about work that seems menial or degrading, he might not have dreamed of being a taxi driver as a child but he's capable of appreciating his current employment as a taxi driver.

I wanted to be a scientist when I was growing up, a biochemist. I'm not, but a few friends are, and they all sing from the same song-sheet - "There's so few science jobs in our country, and they're all underpaid, and academia is not much fun either".

An example, my brother has a chemistry degree, the only job he could find with it was processing film badge dosimeters - which involved taking the film out of a box, putting it in a machine, and writing down the batch number. It could've been easily automated, except it was cheaper to hire two science grads to do it.

Shows what an eight year old knows about career paths.

People are children at age 18 now?

I find interesting the dichotomy between how we treat 17-year-old "children" and how we treat 19-year-old "adults". The 17-year-old gets told: work hard for your dreams, and never be ashamed. The 19-year-old gets told: shut the fuck up and get back to work if you want to make rent this month.

What separates them? Two years.

What I'm saying is that you can have different goals at different parts of your life, and those goals rarely match up perfectly with what will actually make you happy. Being young is the state of having less experience living your own life, and by definition you have less information to use when trying to match up your 'conscious goals' (I want to do X sometime in the next Y years) with things that actually make you happy.

Specific to the taxi driver example - children are not allowed to drive taxis, they don't know whether they'll enjoy being a taxi driver or whether they're capable of being passionate about driving a taxi and they probably don't know someone who is both psychologically similar to them and has also been or is a taxi driver - whatever judgement they make about taxi driving is probably based on how the culture they grew up in treats taxi drivers, in general, and not on any analysis of whether they themselves would or could be happy driving a taxi for a living.

EDIT: you also live in a country where the analysis you gave for the distinction between 17 and 19 year olds doesn't hold, most Israeli kids are coddled until they finish their mandatory service and often until they finish university - most of the undergrads at the technion (and most universities) don't work 'for a living' but rather depend on their parents or the state to a large degree to provide for them, they cannot get to the state of being homeless or starving and they are definitely phased into adulthood over almost a decade between high school and working.

> Being young is the state of having less experience living your own life, and by definition you have less information to use when trying to match up your 'conscious goals' (I want to do X sometime in the next Y years) with things that actually make you happy.

Yes, this is true.

> This is about as far from the point as you can get.

Ok, but now we're both far from the point, which is that plenty of people are just not going to be happy driving cabs, and instead of telling them to suck it up (or worse, claiming that if they really knew what's good for them like we obviously do, they would enjoy driving cabs) we really ought to be thinking about how society could accommodate their justified desire to do something else with themselves.

Some jobs are beneath humans. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to take pride in your work, but when your company does their best to make you function like a robot, taking pride in your work is difficult. Think about it this way:

I run my own burger shop I get up every day and think: "Today I'm going to make the best hamburger that every was!" I proceed to make the best hamburger I can, and I take pride in my work.

Now imagine I work at McDonald's/Wendy's/Burger King. I wake up thinking the same thing but then I remember: "Oh yeah my job isn't to make the best damn hamburger that every was. My job is to make the exact same hamburger as every other employee at every other store in the country with no creative input whatsoever."

The problem is that in many modern jobs the goal is for the employee to function like a robot. No creativity or autonomy allowed. These kind of jobs are inherently unfulfilling. Humans need creative outlets and autonomy to be happy.

I work in online advertising, hardly the most glamorous market, I'm not exactly sequencing genomes to cure diseases - but my work is meaningful to me because we have so much control over how we work, and how we treat our employees.

Once you get past the initial rush of using the tools and understanding the theory of Bioinformatics, the work is eerily similar to data mining for marketing profiles and writing copies for unnecessary consumer products.

People and work environment trumps what you actually do.

I definitely agree, and you raise a good point - I'm idealizing a given task merely because it sounds more socially minded.

I'd say there's often better ways to contribute to a community than by selling something. Help your sick neighbor walk the dog or start a study circle and learn how to grow vegetables and take care hens.

I'd like to see a society where we pursue our dreams, even if the dream life isn't an accelerating career.

Since 1930 productivity in my home country Sweden has increased fivefold, mainly due to technical achievements. Does that mean that we work 20% of the time we did then? No it does not. Wealth has increased of course since the 1930s, and perhaps we want a higher material standard.

But also consider than since the 1970s productivity in Sweden has doubled. Does that mean we work 4 hour days instead of 8 hour days now? No, of course not. Instead, since the 1970s we work 100 hours more each year.

As a society i feel that we should be using the technical achievements to give us more time for the things and the people that we love. Is that too much to ask for?

I'm sorry, but there are kinds of labor that are "beneath" human beings. We don't yet live in a world where people don't have to do those things, but that doesn't change one whit the fact that some basic, minimum level of human dignity, and some of the kinds of work humans have to do are fundamentally incompatible.

Factory workers may be replaced by robots, but service jobs? I'm not so sure.

Let's also consider that Japan has for all intents and purposes, no immigration, while the US has massive amounts of immigration. This lack of immigration, combined with normal customs surrounding Japanese culture, eg: work ethic, honor, etc, all contribute to the experience.

Well, yes, but with society norms as they are now (ie. where money dominates all) those humans wont be needed anymore either. The will be homeless, living in slums, getting by on whatever they manage to find, etc.

(And no, new, less tedious, etc jobs are not automatically and as if by magic made available, and when they are, they don't take as many people as the manual jobs before. In fact, even the services industry -- the traditional way to create non-essential jobs to employ people when the core industry jobs didn't need them anymore -- has been getting automated).

For automation to have a positive impact we will also have to rethink how people get employed and paid.

You're right, automation will tend to put people out of work. If they can find more skilled work that hasn't been automated yet, they're fine, but if not... we'll start to have a problem. Unless, of course, we rethink the idea that people need to work to survive.

Because honestly, if we don't need everyone to work for society to function, I don't see the value in forcing them to do so.

(And maybe, in the long run, capitalism isn't the best choice for how we ultimately run our society. That kind of change isn't happening anytime soon, however. A basic income, on the other hand, might just have a chance.)