Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
"What's your unique contribution to the world" is a good question, and I've been thinking about it a lot. One framing I very much like is thinking about the priceable versus unpriceable contributions of a person. As an example, your software engineering ability is priceable (it's your labor). Your value to your parents isn't priceable. The problem is, right now the default assumed value of the latter is 0. Our society only tries to put a value on priceable facets of a person. There's reasons for that, wisdom of the crowds and whatnot, but of course it also means that if an AI can do that thing, economics drives society to adopt AI over employing people.

It's possible to set that latter value to be nonzero. You can't use free markets to set it because they necessarily cannot see what price to set, so you kinda have to guess, but IMO, it isn't zero, and I'd hazard to say it's positive.

Silly nitpick but the free market absolutely can, and has in the past, put a monetary (positive)value on your person.

We have of course abolished slavery since then.

Which is a weird way of saying I don't think we necessarily should put a monetary value to people. Instead we need to realize that money isn't everything in life. So much of life is unpriceable, and that's as it should be. Attempting to price the unpriceable necessarily makes a mockery of the unpriceable thing.

loading story #48910328
You guys have to look up where the concept of Dignity came from.