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New RFS: One Million Jobs
- ch 12y agoCurious if there are any companies which currently create millions of jobs? I suppose one could create a new market which could have capacity for such jobs. That might still be in the best interest of a startup.
- morgante 12y agoWalmart employs 2 million people, but it's hard to imagine a venture-backed technology startup with plans for mass employment.
- rwmj 12y agoBe careful what you wish for. Microsoft have created many jobs in the industries that fix / work around / benefit from bugs in their software.
- spyder 12y agoOh true... So we should create a company that destroys things and creates jobs to rebuild them... :-O Edit: Looks like the "List of largest employers" in the other comments confirms this with the military companies as the top employers. :-(
- JoshTriplett 12y ago> I suppose one could create a new market which could have capacity for such jobs. That might still be in the best interest of a startup. Not that it precisely fills this need, but look at things like Mechanical Turk. That's one way to think about this problem: rather than being a direct employer of millions, find ways to connect millions with useful employment doing jobs that we can't easily automate.
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- polarix 12y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers Seems like walmart and the Chinese energy companies are the only private employers of >1m humans.
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- patio11 12y agoCurious if there are any companies which currently create millions of jobs? I'd be really surprised if Microsoft or Google didn't have this impact worldwide, though in Microsoft's case it might be tough to distinguish whether those are net jobs. (Though in fairness, in a very real sense, everyone at Google and Google's ecosystem owes their jobs to Bill Gates putting a computer on every desk and many homes.)
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- dllthomas 12y agoAs has been mentioned a few places here (and as the RFS now states), the goal is not "have a million employees", but "create a million jobs". As the people employed may or may not work for you, and as a lot of companies displace other companies, having a million employees is neither necessary nor sufficient.
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- jameshart 12y ago230,000 active application publishers creating apps for the Apple US AppStore [1]. Not sure how that maps to global appstores. Global app revenues are measured in the tens of billions. Could plausibly believe that the iOS app ecosystem globally employs of the order of a million people - effectively making Apple the creator of a million non-employee jobs. [1] http://www.pocketgamer.biz/metrics/app-store/ http://www.pocketgamer.biz/metrics/app-store/
- udfalkso 12y agoRFS?
- rwmj 12y agoRequest For Startups: http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/ http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/
- JoshTriplett 12y agohttp://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/ http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/
- tonydiv 12y agoI would also be looking for the opposite. Software that eliminates the need for people, especially consultants, can be huge opportunities too. That's what we're doing with MindOps–an easy-to-use OCR API. Currently humans transcribe receipts, we automate it.
- Siecje 12y agoWhat about YouTubers? Or people with Etsy stores. These businesses focus on letting people be able to make a living off their service.
- famousactress 12y agoYeah, I came here to ask this as well. I get really excited about shops that work hard to facilitate and lower the barrier of entry for people to make a living doing what they love (Etsy is a specific career-crush for me). Curious whether this is included in the sort of thing the RFS is talking about.
- muzz 12y agoAgreed, but how many people make enough for it to be their full-time jobs? 65% of Etsy sellers make less than $100/yr: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/11/08/etsy_economic_impact_report_etsy_crafters_generate_895_million_in_annual.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/11/08/etsy_economi...
- bfwi 12y agoList of companies/organisations on that scale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers
- Johnie 12y agoLooks like the RFS is looking to build an army.
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- noobermin 12y agoDreaming big is good, but may be that goal is off by an order of magnitude or two? For comparison, just look at [1]. I'm not discouraging, but what startup even has the potential to hope to employ even 100000 individuals within the next 10 years? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers_in_th...
- chubot 12y agoedit: To answer my own question, I guess it has to be a "job platform" like EBay or Uber, and not a company (as sama is saying). Otherwise the economics are quite challenging. There is the distinction that EBay sellers get most of the revenue; EBay just takes a cut and thus doesn't have to have a huge amount of revenue itself. ----- Doesn't this mean the company has to make more than $50 billion in revenue? Assuming a $50K wages a year, 1M jobs takes $50B to pay for. Do the jobs have to be in the US? Seems like an interesting idea, but my first thought is that you would want to find some way NOT to pay $50B a year... that would be a lot of profits. More profits than the vast majority of companies make. It seems risky because it's hard to imagine getting to 1M jobs in less than 10 or 20 years. But in 10 or 20 years, computers will have gotten a lot better at the things that they are currently poor at. It's very hard to predict, but it will change rapidly. Did EBay create 1M jobs? i.e. a significant number of people have made their entire living on Ebay. I think it might have been on the order of 1M, but not sure. edit: http://investor.ebay.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=170073 http://investor.ebay.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=170073 Ebay in 2005 claims 724K as primary or secondary source of income. If I had to guess it would be more like 72K "jobs", as 1/10th of those people might have Ebay as their primary source. That was 2005, but I don't think the order of magnitude has changed in the last 9 years.
- GBiT 12y agoI live in Europe, baltic country. you can get a lot of workers to work for 10k/year. for 20 it can be almost top level workers.
- _delirium 12y agoDid EBay create 1M jobs? This is pretty difficult to determine, if you want net jobs created, not merely people who currently make a living selling via eBay. For example, when a consignment store closes and that business moves to eBay, those are jobs shifting from one location to another, not really net-created jobs. Figuring out how to net that out is pretty complex, and I'm not sure solid enough data is available to determine to what portion of eBay's business are new transactions, versus existing merchants shifting sales channels. This is perhaps even more clear with Amazon Marketplace, which has a number of booksellers making a living selling used books full-time there, but probably a number actually amounting to fewer employees than have been displaced by the same Amazon's impact on brick-and-mortar used book stores. Many of the full-time sellers are even direct continuations of such used-book stores, which have laid off most of their staff and "gone virtual", transitioning from meatspace to online storefronts. (This isn't to say that Amazon Marketplace doesn't produce other advantages, but creating net new jobs in the used-book sector is probably not one of them.)
- ironchief 12y agoI'm reading this as "one million indirect jobs" as opposed to "one million directly employed jobs". I'm not sure that a corporation with one million direct employees is currently a desirable end goal due to large organizational overhead, political infighting and large inertia. Of course redefining what "jobs" are, would help.
- goodcanadian 12y agoI am reading it as several companies that create an aggregate of 1 million jobs rather than one absurdly large corporation.
- bstpierre 12y agoI am reading it as the creation of an entirely new industry which will spawn sub-industries, hundreds or thousands of firms, and a million jobs over the course of the next 20 years.
- dllthomas 12y agoThe way I read it, they don't care how many companies would employ the workers. It's about discovering new demand and a way to fill it that involves people. This is interesting precisely because most start-ups are trying to displace people with technology. Note that this isn't a negative judgement on either side: having people work on things they don't need to be working on can be bad at the same time that finding new things to work on can be good.
- 4k 12y agoInteresting. Thinking about what computers can't do now or in any foreseeable future, I wouldn't be surprised if spending time with people in need of human interaction becomes a huge industry in coming years. I first laughed at ideas like Awesomeness Reminders etc, but I can see there's a future in that direction!
- nawitus 12y agoCreating jobs is a strange goal. The effective, simplest and most probable solution is working inefficiently. Working efficiently, on the other hand, typically eliminates jobs. All politicians talk about creating jobs. 99% of the time it leads to bad regulation that creates jobs through incentivizing inefficiency. People of course will vote for politicians that advocate job creation because people want jobs. The extreme form of this is ludditism. People miss the whole point of companies. The goal should never be providing jobs but creating value. If a company could be made automatic and all it's employees jobless, then that would obviously be positive. The company would still create the same value to society, but would require less people. The main counter-argument is that those who advocate job creation only advocate "necessary jobs or "meaningful jobs". In practise that doesn't pan out. It's simply a backwards way of trying to create more products and services.
- bdcs 12y agoIt is a very strange goal, indeed. I'm reminded of David Graeber's idea of "Bullshit jobs:" When I talk about bullshit jobs, I mean, the kind of jobs that even those who work them feel do not really need to exist. A lot of them are made-up middle management, you know, I’m the “East Coast strategic vision coordinator” for some big firm, which basically means you spend all your time at meetings or forming teams that then send reports to one another. Or someone who works in an industry that they feel doesn’t need to exist, like most of the corporate lawyers I know, or telemarketers, or lobbyists…. Just think of when you walk into a hospital, how half the employees never seem to do anything for sick people, but are just filling out insurance forms and sending information to each other. Some of that work obviously does need to be done, but for the most part, everyone working there knows what really needs to get done and that the remaining 90 percent of what they do is bullshit. http://www.salon.com/2014/06/01/help_us_thomas_piketty_the_1s_sick_and_twisted_new_scheme/ http://www.salon.com/2014/06/01/help_us_thomas_piketty_the_1...
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- rayiner 12y agoIts not a strange goal at all. We have a social structure and economic structure centered on work. Its the key basis for how the production of our society is distributed. Increasing overall production doesn't necessarily do anything for the lot of the median person. In a democracy, where the interests of the majority are paramount, a policy that reduces overall production but leaves the median person better off could be rational.
- nostromo 12y agoCommenters aren't realizing you can create jobs without hiring people. Uber has created many jobs. Airbnb too.
- AndrewKemendo 12y agoCreated or moved? I would argue that the Uber/AirBnB jobs have just taken market share from existing jobs. That's not to criticize or make it less worthwhile, I just don't think that is the intention of the RFS - though its brevity leaves it quite open.
- forrestthewoods 12y agoUber has definitely created. Typically speaking there's a hard cap on the number of taxi drivers. For example Seattle hasn't issued a new taxi license since 1990 [1]. That's insane! The area has grown dramatically in that time. That said there is some amount that are moved rather than created. It's definitely something that should be considered. [1] http://www.change.org/petitions/seattle-city-council-break-the-taxi-monopoly-and-level-the-playing-field http://www.change.org/petitions/seattle-city-council-break-t...
- motyar 12y agoGreat "Jobs can be created without hiring people"
- Shivetya 12y agoso no limits of quality of the job, number of hours per week to qualify, or such? Such requirements are service oriented at best, if not then off shore for others. to give a sense of scale, Wal Mart has 1.4 million or so workers in the US. You cited taxi type services, but would not work at home call center work be similar? The in home medical care many receive qualifies, are there are other in home opportunities out there? Education perhaps, remote teaching and the like? Honestly this "one million" number just comes off as a feel good statement, it reminds me of politician speak way way too much
- jiggy2011 12y ago
- mhoad 12y agoJust for some context Google have ~50,000 employees according to this https://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html https://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html
- webwright 12y agoAnd has created/expanded jobs in SEO, SEM, android development, etc. How many, do you think?
- AndrewKemendo 12y agoThat's just under the size of the Active duty US military or major industries! Quite a task.
- sama 12y agomost people seemed to have picked up on this, but we aren't looking for a company that wants to have one million _employees_. i can envision a future where a million people drive for uber, or where someone creates a healthcare platform that lets individuals find people who need care, or an education platform that matches up people who want to learn with people who want to each, or...
- smacktoward 12y agoSo it's "a million jobs with no healthcare or retirement benefits," then.
- dllthomas 12y agoEven with a cynical reading, that would seem to be permitted but not required.
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- jbigelow76 12y agoYou just described Fiverr
- jleader 12y agoHow about a company that figures out how to provide _very_ affordable high-quality health care to large numbers of people, so they aren't dependent on an employer for their healthcare? That would allow many more people to become free-lancers, or to work for companies too small to get good health insurance prices. Such affordable healthcare might make it possible for a million more people to work for startups. Such a company might not be feasible in the current regulatory climate, but some people say the same about Uber.
- jiggy2011 12y agoYou mean like the NHS?
- bryanlarsen 12y agoCan we use Tim Hudak math?[1] context: in the recent election for the province of Ontario in Canada, Tim Hudak promised 1 million new jobs if he got elected. There were several questionable ways he arrived at that number, one of which was counting 8 years of a single new job as a new job. 1: https://www.google.ca/search?q=tim+hudak+math https://www.google.ca/search?q=tim+hudak+math
- bdcs 12y ago"I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work." Bertrand Russell http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
- SupremumLimit 12y agoGreat quote! Job creation is such a short-sighted goal, when we should really be looking at an organised transition to less and less work. Things are going that way anyway, but in an entirely uncontrolled fashion which will lead (perhaps is leading already?) to a lot of social problems. Instead of attempting to go down that path, Y Combinator just wants to prop up the existing system it seems?
- vehementi 12y agoA lot of posts being downvoted in this thread. This one clearly contributes whether you agree or not. What is going on?
- prawn 12y agoThe RFS talks about sparking a million jobs, not necessarily a million full-time, long-commute, high-stress jobs. They could be the sorts of opportunities where the takers can get a fairly painless way to cover some bills for 15-20 hours a week from home. Or a way of handling job sharing so that a million full-time jobs are just as easily managed by two million people who'd prefer to reduce their hours. (People going on maternity/paternity leave would love an opportunity like this.)
- dkyc 12y agoI dislike the new, hyper-ambitious side of YC (also in the other new RFSs: AI, HealthCare...). Have any of the truly revolutionary inventions (like steam engine, automobile, microcomputer, internet) started out as something developed to have such an incredibly big scale, or did they merely turn out to have big implications? It's the latter, and I think it's not just a correlation, but a causation: To make something truly disruptive, it needs to be new, and it is very unlikely to come up with something that is new while at the same time aiming to solve a problem that everybody can agree on (like let's build one million jobs, let's build AI, let's fix healthcare etc). That's usually the reason government projects fail, and the reason startups succeed, and having YC now focusing on stuff with the "could-this-be-a-big-company"-shaded glasses is a 180° turn from their original heritage.
- sama 12y agoyou will be happy to hear that 90% of the companies we fund still get mocked on HN and elsewhere for "being small". certainly agree that's usually the way to get huge. and even the "hyper-ambitious" companies we fund have to start with going after a very small market--in fact, their first products mostly sound like toys, and that's a feature not a bug. it's a mistake to build a startup that looks like a huge government project. it's also a mistake to not think about how to be a huge company one day. in fact, i remember one of the first meetings i ever had with airbnb. i told them how i thought that this silly-seeming thing they were doing could one day change the way most people travel. i think it seemed crazy even to them at the time.
- dkyc 12y agoIndeed, most of the yc-funded startups still focus on building practical stuff. But isn't the airbnb example showing that it works to "not think about how to be a huge company one day"? I mean, if the size of their idea (changing the way most people travel) was not clear to them at the time, and yet they've succeeded (or are on their way to do so), it obviously worked out.
- gone35 12y agoHave any of the truly revolutionary inventions (like steam engine, automobile, microcomputer, internet) started out as something developed to have such an incredibly big scale, or did they merely turn out to have big implications? Apparently, yes. Economic historians today argue that, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Enlightment-era notions such as "useful knowledge" and the Baconian concern with the "big scale" societal impact of scientific and technological work played a crucial role in "re-focusing" Europe's intellectual capital, as Joel Mokyr puts it [1]. In the twentieth century, seminal institutions like the OSRD, Bell Labs or (the old) DARPA --which as you know were behind most of the "truly revolutionary" inventions of the century-- had quite explicit utilitarian, "hyper-ambitious" mandates in their charters as directives --see for instance the writings of Vannevar Bush [2]. The development of modern organic chemistry and pharmacology was also quite explicitly motivated by tackling big societal problems, with many X-prize style prestigious awards for novel syntheses of crucial interest. And even the development of the internal combustion engine automobile by Benz [3] was quite explicitly motivated by his obsession to make it reliable and practical enough to fully supersede horse carriages and liberate cities from the iniquities of manure, which at the time was as "big scale thinking" as it gets. Once you expand your perspective beyond the common troupes and political biases of the past 20-30 years, things start looking a bit different. [1] http://www.crei.cat/conferences/RandD_and_Innovation_in_the_Development_Process/activities/sc_conferences/23/papers/mokyr.pdf http://www.crei.cat/conferences/RandD_and_Innovation_in_the_... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Benz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Benz
- GraffitiTim 12y agoMobileWorks is an example of an existing YC (S11) company that has the potential to do this.
- yannis 12y agoThe toughest part of this is the idea needs to help expand the economy that is how real jobs are created. There are many ways folks! From the absurd, such as moving money from inefficient areas of the economy (i.e. taxation to efficient areas of the economy, private individuals, or from banks to small businesses.) If there is a legal way for example for an employee that pays $10,000 in tax to employ someone at $10,000 and save that money then for each tax-payer a new job is being created. This can be for example be channeled via a non-profit (which scales via software) which would legally employ the individuals assign tasks to the individuals, provide training (which can employ trainers) help in seed money etc., basic health care and other similar services. Another counter-intuitive idea, is to target high worth individuals, rather than low end individuals. Thousands of people are in jobs and interested in getting out of them to start a business. A Job + investment scheme in businesses that need financing might or might not work, but worth thinking. This keeps the individual employed and if the business expands would probably create another 2-5 jobs easily. Franchising as a co-op rather than sending money to the mother ship, can easily scale in many sectors. I think this is the greatest RFS ever and wish it success from the bottom of my heart. If no single scheme can achieve it, maybe 100 schemes can. It is not impossible.
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- johnrob 12y agoPerhaps a better phrase than "jobs" is "earn income". The former comes with a lot of assumptions.
- hansy 12y agoDoes "job" refer to the traditional sense of a primary source of income? I guess what I'm asking is, do services like TaskRabbit and Airbnb also fall in this category?
- hyperion2010 12y agoI really like this perspective. Computers are tools that can enormously increase the power of a single individual. There are huge opportunities to increase both human productivity and computing productivity if we can figure out how to create tools that foster more symbiotic interactions between humans and computers.
- danielweber 12y agoWhat does RFS stand for?
- vram22 12y agoRequest For Startups. Was first posted by PG some years ago: http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/ http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/ Might have been a play on the acronym RFC (Request For Comments).
- patcon 12y agoI know "jobs" are a goal with good intentions, but I have to disagree. While it's political suicide to claim otherwise, aiming for job creation simply plays into the idea that more jobs are the things we desire, when what we really want is a comfortable existence and a sense of fulfilment. What new consensus might we converge on if we continue to automate away jobs quicker than retraining can reasonably be expected? Personally, I'm excited when technology can expose the lie that 40-hour-per-week paying jobs are required to be a contributing member of society. Unfortunately, exposing that lie likely involves some period of high unemployment before a critical mass of people start to reject the premise that holding a job equates to worthiness in society. I've recently come across the term "accelerationism" on HN, and it seems to at least partially describe the above position: > Accelerationism is the name of a contemporary political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, critique, or détourne it, but to accelerate and exacerbate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies.
- owenversteeg 12y agoI know it's not what sama meant, but these are the only employers that have 1MM+ employees (excluding the DOD, the PLA, the NHS, and the Indian armed forces): Walmart 2.1 million (United States) McDonald's 1.9 million (including franchises) (United States) China National Petroleum Corporation 1.6 million (People's Republic of China) State Grid Corporation of China 1.5 million (People's Republic of China) Indian Railways 1.4 million (India) Hon Hai Precision Industry (Foxconn) 1.2 million (Taiwan) Note that Indian Railways, the State Grid Corporation of China and the China National Petroleum Corporation are state-owned.
- 001sky 12y agoFinally some data. Most of the big companies with "real jobs" top out around 300K. Of course its easy to create "mc-jobs" or the equivalent.
- dreamdu5t 12y agoThis demonstrates a severe lack of understanding about basic economics. Jobs are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. Paying someone $1 to dig a ditch and refill it is a job. What we need is not jobs. What we need is the ability for everyone to make a living they deem acceptable (TV, heat/AC, car, electricity, plumbing, internet). That's the real issue here...
- dllthomas 12y agoA lot of people are treating this like a genie wish, or an unreflective prize awarded to the first team to accomplish this by any means, or something... This is a request for startups with a particular feature. Funding them still needs to seem like a sufficiently good idea. Somehow, I don't imagine Sam leaping to fund slave labor(!), or even less-obviously-absurd things that only technically meet the requirement while not actually doing so in a meaningful way or having any chance at a profit.
- ISL 12y agoAn interesting request -- it's asking the question "what can people do that computers and mechanization absolutely cannot?" Care for one another?
- morenoh149 12y agoI'd venture to say, anything creative. That is, until we get strong AI.
- mbesto 12y agoSooo...marketplaces?
- tomasien 12y agoSeems like Uber is such a company - I can see how "this could potentially create 1 million jobs" would be a conduit for "this could potentially be a win on a scale yet unknown"
- hooande 12y agoThis is moving the wrong direction. We want to use automation to reduce the number of jobs, not to create makework for it's own sake. This is the key statement: There are a lot of areas where it makes sense to divide labor between humans and computers—we are very good at some things computers are terrible at and vice versa—and some of these require huge amounts of human resources. As entrepreneurs it's our task to make computers better at the things that they aren't good at. It will require groundbreaking technology, a lot of work and incredible amounts of risk...but if not us, then who? We're blessed with the ability to make tools that make lives easier, we should be doing everything we can do make machines do more work so that humans can do less. If Adam Smith was right and land, labor, capital is the relevant equation, then automation is a way to create nearly unlimited amounts of labor. Human brains are probably the most powerful computers to ever exist, it's unlikely that busy work is the best way to utilize them. A focus on creating jobs just exacerbates the social problems of capitalism. When people mention basic income, they usually also mention automation as a way to mitigate the loss in the labor force. If we push for more jobs instead of automating away jobs, we're just delaying the best outcome. The most important question of the 21st century is "What can be automated?". Reducing the number of jobs is our great calling. Paradoxically, we'll have to employ at lot of smart people to make progress toward that goal. I think that's the real challenge, and it's one that we can rise to.
- braindead_in 12y agoWe have managed to create around 4000 jobs for audio transcribers. Around 10% are regulars on our platform. Long way to go for a million.
- lifeisstillgood 12y agoI would not like to use Uber as an example of creating jobs. I see them as KFC in the egg farming world - pushing all the capital expenditure and risk onto smallest individuals whilst then aggregating what should be a distributed market. I think any company capable of directly claiming to create one million jobs will be this abusive on a massive global scale - not something I would want to invest in personally. I can imagine plenty of ways to create a million jobs - invent fusion power, invent a foldaway surgery theatre, but they are not things that capture the value back to the originator (that is the genuine use for patents). So this seems like "build a market platform, make sure it is not interoperable, find a business model that makes individuals dependant on you, while pretending they are businesses". I think I understand what YC is reaching for here - there is a coming hollowing out of jobs, somehow we need to create new jobs. I agree - but a business model that creates new jobs and captures that surplus seems to me abusive - or it is a marketplace open to competition from other marketplaces and that's rarely a way to make money. So far. Edit: clarify as much as I can this early before coffee
- cryptophile 12y agoUber is actually a good example of how existing regulations can be a formidable barrier to startups; or even any kind of innovation. You are not just free to offer a new product or service that competes with existing ones. The incumbents will have the existing regulations on their side and use them to shut you down.
- pron 12y ago> The incumbents will have the existing regulations on their side and use them to shut you down. Absolutely, but you must consider the possibility that in addition to turf protection, those regulations actually serve a social purpose. Not every innovation is good and every regulation is bad. Sometimes regulation is formalized valuable lessons learned over many years. As someone who sees Uber as an exploitative venture (I may be wrong), I actually find those regulations the last wall slowing down the huns.
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- derpherperderp 12y agoThere are only two types of things which can be produced: information and material. Most people aren't very good at working with information beyond basic pattern recognition/recall and to some extent, human interaction. Most of the people who are good at either or both of these things are already gainfully employed. In the material realm, we already produce enough food, clothing, housing, and computers to suit the needs of the public. We have more empty residences than homeless people. As technology advances in the imminent years we will become less reliant on people for producing these things--not more. Most significant material advances will come from knowledge work discoveries (e.g. larger capacity batteries), not from material work (assembling batteries by hand more quickly or using more people). Dolphins do not derive their self-worth, happiness, or other aspects of their life from a "job." Perhaps humans are poised to become as advanced as they are? Imagine if a million people had the freedom to experiment in whatever way they chose: to make music and art, to enjoy their lives without the approval of others as expressed by dollars of consumption. How much would the culture they create be worth?
- justincormack 12y agoIts not a million, but the Pathak's[1] created around 100,000 jobs by effectively creating the British curry house, supplying ingredients and recipes to largely Indian-Ugandan refugees after they were forced out by Idi Amin. Thats why most have the same menus. [1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/finance-obituaries/8222809/Shanta-Pathak.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/finance-obituarie...
- MrQuincle 12y agoFind another planet, or the moon. Populate it. There are jobs here, there will be jobs there. A million will not be sufficient.
- esseti 12y agoHow the RFS works? i see that there are different "calls", but if i click to "apply" the deadline was in march. so, what should one do to apply?