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For more than 20 years I have advocated and pursued the idea that society should abolish work. I am astonished that in 2020 most of our production is not automa

by Iv 6y ago

For more than 20 years I have advocated and pursued the idea that society should abolish work. I am astonished that in 2020 most of our production is not automated. We have had the ability to automate most work for two decades. Food, clothes, furniture, electronic devices, all of these could be produced with close to zero human labor. Why don't we? After exploring a market (agriculture) in order to launch my own automation company, I have come to the conclusion that it is not the tech that we lack, it is the will. A culture change is needed in order to make people realize that a work-less society is: - possible - desirable - is not going to make them poorer

jackyinger 6y ago
The fact of the matter is that automation is far from perfect. There are many tasks that are simple for a human, but fiendishly hard for a machine due to their unpredictable nature. Take driving a car or cooking in a restaurant. How is a machine supposed to know if the meat is a bit too old to be palatable? Would it really be worth it to implement an elaborate apparatus to determine meat freshness, and deploy it in every restaurant? I believe such a thing is firmly in the realm is science fiction, where effort and energy are free, unlike the real physical world we inhabit. Now consider this, can joy not be had in cooking? I can certainly tell you that I find cooking good food to be a very fulfilling task. Unlike engineering projects I can go from start to finish in under an hour. And it fulfills an immediate and visceral need. I think that the argument for play is a good one. In engineering I encounter many people who engineer, not for the joy of it (which is spread very thin in many jobs anyway), but for the money. Now imagine if there was no quantitative social status (money) associated with engineering. You would see engineers self select purely on a basis of authentic interest rather than financial status seeking. Would that not bring more promising talent to the table? Let me now attack the idea of automation from another angle; to claim that we should be able to automate all product is as outrageous as claiming that Atlas holds the earth up. How could we automate everything? Who makes the machine, and perhaps more importantly, who fixes them when they break. You cannot possibly convince me that you could make a machine to fix machines. Again, such a device would be in the realm of science fiction. In reality, even in the relatively controlled environments of factories things inevitably break in unpredictable ways, and there you are, back to needing humans to clean up the mess. Now, automation does have a place; doing repetitive tasks. But I’d rather order a meal from an expert chef than a robot.
- Iv 6y ago
  First, the disagreements: no, driving and cooking are not hard tasks to automate. They are stupidly easy if you decide to create the infrastructure for that. You have industrially cooked food, mostly through automated process, in supermarkets, sold as "prepared food". and actually, many cheap restaurants will have several microwaved prepared food in their menu items. Automatic driving is a very easy task in roads and cities that are designed for it. Instrument all bus lines with ground wires, put a radio beacon on each crossing and sign, a front radar/lidar to detect obstacles and 90s tech is enough to automate a whole city. If it was desired, we would already be there. Now, like you point out, there are many tasks that bring joy and people would do voluntarily. Said otherwise, there is a non-null amount of volunteer productive work. Ergo, the goal of automating a society is not to automate 100% of the work, but to automate (100-V)% where V is the amount of voluntary work available. "But I’d rather order a meal from an expert chef than a robot." It would be interesting to make a Turing test for cooking. I am sure that there are many robot-made meals that are undistinguishable from chef's preparation.
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    > They are stupidly easy if you decide to create the infrastructure for that. You have industrially cooked food, mostly through automated process, in supermarkets, sold as "prepared food". and actually, many cheap restaurants will have several microwaved prepared food in their menu items. Everyone agrees these products are inferior in quality to the comparable manually produced offerings. > Automatic driving is a very easy task in roads and cities that are designed for it. Instrument all bus lines with ground wires, put a radio beacon on each crossing and sign, a front radar/lidar to detect obstacles and 90s tech is enough to automate a whole city. If it was desired, we would already be there. It's not that easy to redesign an entire city to accommodate a second transportation network. A lot of buildings would have to be modified. Its probably better to approach this task incrementally using the existing road system. > It would be interesting to make a Turing test for cooking. I am sure that there are many robot-made meals that are undistinguishable from chef's preparation. I'd like to see a cooking Turing test as well because I disagree with you and this is in fact testable, one of us is mistaken.
  - 6y ago
didericis 6y ago
Many things we consider "automatic" require complex maintenance and upkeep, and inappropriate automation can actually increase the net amount of work needed to be done. It often coincides with a loss of ownership. If you can't make your own value, and you're letting something else make it for you, you might save yourself labor, but you're giving up your ability to create that value. Yes, the system as a whole will produce more, which is good, but the loss of leverage is an important factor to consider. There's also a wasting and dependency effect that occurs when too much of a system is automated. If people aren't needing to work on or maintain a system, they don't need to know how it works to use it, pretty much by definition. It's doing the work for them. That creates a dangerous situation where essential systems aren't really understood, and fewer and fewer people end up knowing how to fix things because there isn't the same need to distribute the knowledge of upkeep/understand the work it's doing personally by doing it yourself. Automation is extremely beneficial, and I'm often frustrated by what seem to be clear cases of not taking advantage of it, but I think what you're saying here over simplifies things. I think the solution is for more people to learn how to set up their own automation and to automate things without making them too centralized.
- Iv 6y ago
  I am trying to not delve into a 20 pages presentation, but I have gone though and through these themes for most of my professional life. The question whether we can really go to 100% of automation is moot if we can go to 99%. Either way it means that full employment is unnecessary and leads to the creation of bullshit jobs. > I think the solution is for more people to learn how to set up their own automation and to automate things without making them too centralized. That's my sad conclusion as well. We could get to an automated society with far less pain and much faster if it was decided collectively though. Look at car automation: if a city wanted to make automated cars a reality in their streets, there are tons of accommodations they could do: from radio beacons to official maps, standards on how to signal construction work, purposefully designed roads... Instead, we are trying to design automated cars with the assumption that zero efforts will be made to promote them. Worse: we assume they are going to be so criticized that they have to perform better by a magnitude on day 1. That's making us waste 40 years.
rayiner 6y ago
> We have had the ability to automate most work for two decades. Food, clothes, furniture, electronic devices, all of these could be produced with close to zero human labor. Why don't we? Because we actually can’t do those things?
- d1amonds 6y ago
  We do a lot of things that we couldn't before. A lot of it produced loud laughter 100 years before. If I understand it properly the author suggests we should find the time to play with these things. Who knows what might happen? It will no doubt be interesting. Our indevidual performance is certainly mind blowing in a play settings. I see "players" do what seems impossible to me every day.
nradov 6y ago
The agriculture market already spends billions on automation. For example row crop tractors are mostly self driving. Machines milk cattle with no humans involved. Etc. If you failed in that market then it's not due to a lack of will by customers. It's because you're not a competent businessperson or engineer and failed to achieve product/market fit.
avz 6y ago
Returns on investment in automation increase with the scale of the system being automated. Therefore, automation promotes centralization of control. Be careful what you wish for.
abyssin 6y ago
In rich societies with strong social safety nets, it is possible to live as if work had been abolished. One only needs a fraction of the ressources consumed by a normal Westerner to live a materially comfortable life. But what you realize when you try reaping the benefits of our already largely automated economy, is that work is about ideology. You'll be materially comfortable, but a social outcast. People don't like to work, but they hate non-working people even more.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  > People don't like to work, but they hate non-working people even more. Probably because they wonder how those people are figuring out how to eat without contributing to the economy.
  - abyssin 6y ago
    I agree with you in the sense that's how they rationalize their reaction, although I think they don't actually wonder about it and you made a figure of speech, and instead they don't feel it's fair that some stop working until everything is completely automated. But I see an inconsistency in their feeling of injustice, because some people have to work a lot to get comparatively very little benefits from our largely automated economy. Anyone who works should feel like they live a luxurious life. Instead we see a lot of addiction and despair, despite lifestyles that consume huge amounts of energy.
chordalkeyboard 6y ago
Is your automation company still active?
burntoutfire 6y ago
> Food, clothes, furniture, electronic devices, all of these could be produced with close to zero human labor. Why don't we? For a large subsets of those categories, they already are. That's why, if you mostly buy food that's handled by automation (combines etc.) you can sustain yourself on a $50/month food budget. Similarly for furniture, check out IKEA factory videos to see the degree of automation employed in making cheap furniture. Electronics are mostly also produced by machines, humans do the last stage assembly only (and it's mostly because labor in Asia is just cheaper than sophisticated robots required to perform assembly). Clothes are more difficult from a robotics standpoint (mostly because, unlike wood, cloth is not rigid/does not retain shape, which makes it insanely tricky to manipulate), so we're not there yet. But, on the other hand, making of the cloth itself, which previously required an insane amount of labor, has been fully automated for a long time. Basically, once you own a place to live in, you can easily sustain yourself with a very part-time minimum wage job. Make the job pay more and you'd need to work maybe a month in year. Most people don't do that because they want the comforts and pleasures brought by market enough to work extra hours for them (usually up to a full-time job).
- neuronic 6y ago
  Sustain yourself just means not die in your text. But there's more to it than that. Most people won't do the $50/month food unless forced. The Soylent-junkies maybe, so if you're some robotic Western software dev whose sole purpose in life is placed in its optimization to be "productive" in a corporatist society. Food is a central cultural part of billions of people's lives, provides joy and is a critical component in socializing. Food is more than just plain sustenance unless forced by natural or artificial circumstances.
  - burntoutfire 6y ago
    Fair enough, but even including all those extras that stil puts the cost at maybe $150/month? That assumes cooking for oneself, not buying a lot of meat or other expensive products etc. On that budget, you will probably not eat worse that a median human.

by Iv 6y ago

jackyinger 6y ago

The fact of the matter is that automation is far from perfect. There are many tasks that are simple for a human, but fiendishly hard for a machine due to their unpredictable nature. Take driving a car or cooking in a restaurant. How is a machine supposed to know if the meat is a bit too old to be palatable? Would it really be worth it to implement an elaborate apparatus to determine meat freshness, and deploy it in every restaurant? I believe such a thing is firmly in the realm is science fiction, where effort and energy are free, unlike the real physical world we inhabit. Now consider this, can joy not be had in cooking? I can certainly tell you that I find cooking good food to be a very fulfilling task. Unlike engineering projects I can go from start to finish in under an hour. And it fulfills an immediate and visceral need. I think that the argument for play is a good one. In engineering I encounter many people who engineer, not for the joy of it (which is spread very thin in many jobs anyway), but for the money. Now imagine if there was no quantitative social status (money) associated with engineering. You would see engineers self select purely on a basis of authentic interest rather than financial status seeking. Would that not bring more promising talent to the table? Let me now attack the idea of automation from another angle; to claim that we should be able to automate all product is as outrageous as claiming that Atlas holds the earth up. How could we automate everything? Who makes the machine, and perhaps more importantly, who fixes them when they break. You cannot possibly convince me that you could make a machine to fix machines. Again, such a device would be in the realm of science fiction. In reality, even in the relatively controlled environments of factories things inevitably break in unpredictable ways, and there you are, back to needing humans to clean up the mess. Now, automation does have a place; doing repetitive tasks. But I’d rather order a meal from an expert chef than a robot.

Iv 6y ago
First, the disagreements: no, driving and cooking are not hard tasks to automate. They are stupidly easy if you decide to create the infrastructure for that. You have industrially cooked food, mostly through automated process, in supermarkets, sold as "prepared food". and actually, many cheap restaurants will have several microwaved prepared food in their menu items. Automatic driving is a very easy task in roads and cities that are designed for it. Instrument all bus lines with ground wires, put a radio beacon on each crossing and sign, a front radar/lidar to detect obstacles and 90s tech is enough to automate a whole city. If it was desired, we would already be there. Now, like you point out, there are many tasks that bring joy and people would do voluntarily. Said otherwise, there is a non-null amount of volunteer productive work. Ergo, the goal of automating a society is not to automate 100% of the work, but to automate (100-V)% where V is the amount of voluntary work available. "But I’d rather order a meal from an expert chef than a robot." It would be interesting to make a Turing test for cooking. I am sure that there are many robot-made meals that are undistinguishable from chef's preparation.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  > They are stupidly easy if you decide to create the infrastructure for that. You have industrially cooked food, mostly through automated process, in supermarkets, sold as "prepared food". and actually, many cheap restaurants will have several microwaved prepared food in their menu items. Everyone agrees these products are inferior in quality to the comparable manually produced offerings. > Automatic driving is a very easy task in roads and cities that are designed for it. Instrument all bus lines with ground wires, put a radio beacon on each crossing and sign, a front radar/lidar to detect obstacles and 90s tech is enough to automate a whole city. If it was desired, we would already be there. It's not that easy to redesign an entire city to accommodate a second transportation network. A lot of buildings would have to be modified. Its probably better to approach this task incrementally using the existing road system. > It would be interesting to make a Turing test for cooking. I am sure that there are many robot-made meals that are undistinguishable from chef's preparation. I'd like to see a cooking Turing test as well because I disagree with you and this is in fact testable, one of us is mistaken.
- 6y ago

didericis 6y ago

Many things we consider "automatic" require complex maintenance and upkeep, and inappropriate automation can actually increase the net amount of work needed to be done. It often coincides with a loss of ownership. If you can't make your own value, and you're letting something else make it for you, you might save yourself labor, but you're giving up your ability to create that value. Yes, the system as a whole will produce more, which is good, but the loss of leverage is an important factor to consider. There's also a wasting and dependency effect that occurs when too much of a system is automated. If people aren't needing to work on or maintain a system, they don't need to know how it works to use it, pretty much by definition. It's doing the work for them. That creates a dangerous situation where essential systems aren't really understood, and fewer and fewer people end up knowing how to fix things because there isn't the same need to distribute the knowledge of upkeep/understand the work it's doing personally by doing it yourself. Automation is extremely beneficial, and I'm often frustrated by what seem to be clear cases of not taking advantage of it, but I think what you're saying here over simplifies things. I think the solution is for more people to learn how to set up their own automation and to automate things without making them too centralized.

Iv 6y ago
I am trying to not delve into a 20 pages presentation, but I have gone though and through these themes for most of my professional life. The question whether we can really go to 100% of automation is moot if we can go to 99%. Either way it means that full employment is unnecessary and leads to the creation of bullshit jobs. > I think the solution is for more people to learn how to set up their own automation and to automate things without making them too centralized. That's my sad conclusion as well. We could get to an automated society with far less pain and much faster if it was decided collectively though. Look at car automation: if a city wanted to make automated cars a reality in their streets, there are tons of accommodations they could do: from radio beacons to official maps, standards on how to signal construction work, purposefully designed roads... Instead, we are trying to design automated cars with the assumption that zero efforts will be made to promote them. Worse: we assume they are going to be so criticized that they have to perform better by a magnitude on day 1. That's making us waste 40 years.

rayiner 6y ago

> We have had the ability to automate most work for two decades. Food, clothes, furniture, electronic devices, all of these could be produced with close to zero human labor. Why don't we? Because we actually can’t do those things?

d1amonds 6y ago
We do a lot of things that we couldn't before. A lot of it produced loud laughter 100 years before. If I understand it properly the author suggests we should find the time to play with these things. Who knows what might happen? It will no doubt be interesting. Our indevidual performance is certainly mind blowing in a play settings. I see "players" do what seems impossible to me every day.

nradov 6y ago

The agriculture market already spends billions on automation. For example row crop tractors are mostly self driving. Machines milk cattle with no humans involved. Etc. If you failed in that market then it's not due to a lack of will by customers. It's because you're not a competent businessperson or engineer and failed to achieve product/market fit.

avz 6y ago

Returns on investment in automation increase with the scale of the system being automated. Therefore, automation promotes centralization of control. Be careful what you wish for.

abyssin 6y ago

In rich societies with strong social safety nets, it is possible to live as if work had been abolished. One only needs a fraction of the ressources consumed by a normal Westerner to live a materially comfortable life. But what you realize when you try reaping the benefits of our already largely automated economy, is that work is about ideology. You'll be materially comfortable, but a social outcast. People don't like to work, but they hate non-working people even more.

chordalkeyboard 6y ago
> People don't like to work, but they hate non-working people even more. Probably because they wonder how those people are figuring out how to eat without contributing to the economy.
- abyssin 6y ago
  I agree with you in the sense that's how they rationalize their reaction, although I think they don't actually wonder about it and you made a figure of speech, and instead they don't feel it's fair that some stop working until everything is completely automated. But I see an inconsistency in their feeling of injustice, because some people have to work a lot to get comparatively very little benefits from our largely automated economy. Anyone who works should feel like they live a luxurious life. Instead we see a lot of addiction and despair, despite lifestyles that consume huge amounts of energy.

chordalkeyboard 6y ago

Is your automation company still active?

burntoutfire 6y ago

> Food, clothes, furniture, electronic devices, all of these could be produced with close to zero human labor. Why don't we? For a large subsets of those categories, they already are. That's why, if you mostly buy food that's handled by automation (combines etc.) you can sustain yourself on a $50/month food budget. Similarly for furniture, check out IKEA factory videos to see the degree of automation employed in making cheap furniture. Electronics are mostly also produced by machines, humans do the last stage assembly only (and it's mostly because labor in Asia is just cheaper than sophisticated robots required to perform assembly). Clothes are more difficult from a robotics standpoint (mostly because, unlike wood, cloth is not rigid/does not retain shape, which makes it insanely tricky to manipulate), so we're not there yet. But, on the other hand, making of the cloth itself, which previously required an insane amount of labor, has been fully automated for a long time. Basically, once you own a place to live in, you can easily sustain yourself with a very part-time minimum wage job. Make the job pay more and you'd need to work maybe a month in year. Most people don't do that because they want the comforts and pleasures brought by market enough to work extra hours for them (usually up to a full-time job).

neuronic 6y ago
Sustain yourself just means not die in your text. But there's more to it than that. Most people won't do the $50/month food unless forced. The Soylent-junkies maybe, so if you're some robotic Western software dev whose sole purpose in life is placed in its optimization to be "productive" in a corporatist society. Food is a central cultural part of billions of people's lives, provides joy and is a critical component in socializing. Food is more than just plain sustenance unless forced by natural or artificial circumstances.
- burntoutfire 6y ago
  Fair enough, but even including all those extras that stil puts the cost at maybe $150/month? That assumes cooking for oneself, not buying a lot of meat or other expensive products etc. On that budget, you will probably not eat worse that a median human.