12 ms·

A world without work

192 points by npalli 11y ago

Einstalbert 11y ago
I've had friends lose jobs in Amazon warehouses over their aggressive research and development of an all-machine packaging line. They do work now that requires the precision of a human hand and eye, but that job may also go the way of the assembly line. His only hope is that custom carpentry's demand by rich celebrities wanting the "premium" afforded by the work of a Human over the static of a machine. When I look back at people who invested their lives in the future of mankind, and their predictions in something like the year 1960, it's interesting to note just how incorrect they were. Communication boomed over transportation, for example. Knowing that, I try to think of the ways the future will be so impossibly different than my present. A world without work is one of those, and I hope it angers and confuses every currently living generation enough that we wish we would have made it a reality sooner.
- notahacker 11y ago
  A world without work was a pretty common vision in the 1960s. And the 1860s But humanity has a remarkable capacity to invent new outlets to fill our waking hours as we redeploy resources used to make stuff to make other stuff or sell stuff. We didn't have (or foresee!) social media managers or video game designers in the 1960s. And software doesn't just make our production efforts scale, it makes our consumption scale. You can fit far more lifestyle apps on your phone than chairs around your table, and a couple of decades back few people would have foreseen mobile phone apps as a category of product that needed people to make, still less an industry reportedly topping up the paycheques of a million Europeans. I'm not seeing the developed world's desire for more stuff reach satiation point, and if anything desire to subsidise unemployment is trending in the opposite direction.
  - zzalpha 11y ago
    Hell, modern theory has it that the pyramids were in essence a type of stimulus program to keep folks busy and fed (and no, they were not in fact slaves)!
    - Einstalbert 11y ago
      This is amusing to me, since a good number of people believe it was definitely slaves, and 'definitely' the Jewish slaves mentioned in the bible. I would have been overjoyed to learn that the pyramids were a stimulus program when I was a child.
    - daodedickinson 11y ago
      People theorize that all of life is busy work. No one should care that they thus theorize.
    - stock_toaster 11y ago
      I would love to see a return to investing in and updating some of the physical infrastructure that has degraded over time. In the USA there are a huge amounts of bridges that need updating/repairing, dams needing repair (or removal), roads needing repair, dilapidated school buildings needing updating (as well as energy efficiency updates), etc. There seems like TONS of work to be done to refresh our aging physical infrastructure.
      - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
        Not just the US. And not just maintenance. Creating good infrastructure is one of the best of all possible investments. The problem isn't that there's no useful work; it's that the genius of the current economic system - the one where it's every individual for themselves, and there's no such thing as society - is incredibly bad at deciding what needs to be done to make the future better for everyone. So education at all levels is mediocre, infrastructure is deliberately crippled for profit, there's no systematic planning for the future at all - and people in work are still spending huge amounts of time on essentially pointless activities. It's an organisational and political problem, not a technological one. Actually it's more of a psychological problem. Getting humans to learn deferred gratification as a species turns out to be exceptionally hard.
  - lkrubner 11y ago
    In the USA, male participating in the wage economy has been in the decline since the 1940s: https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/LNS11300001 https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/LNS11300001 For women, the peak was in 2000: https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USALFPWNA https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USALFPWNA Wages for men have been in decline since 1973, which demonstrates one of the obvious ways people deal with declining opportunities: lower wages. In the 1800s Western nations conquered the world, and were thus able to export their unemployment to other countries, thus creating what we now call The Third World. As late as 1820, India was still producing more steel than Europe, but all such industries were eventually closed in India and moved to Europe, leaving India in a bad situation from which it is yet to fully recover. It's unlikely that Western nations will have an easy time exporting their unemployment in the 2020s or 2030s. Among other things, they lack the military power that is necessary to do so.
    - marcoperaza 11y ago
      Exported unemployment? Created the third world? The world wasn't kumbaya before colonialism.
    - notahacker 11y ago
      The labour force participation rates look rather different if you adjust them for the changing age profiles of the population, to account for there being a lot more old people and a lot more scope for them to afford to retire. If you look at this example, it'll show overall labour force participation actually rose between 1960 and 2000 for employees of every age under 60 http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/09/art3full.pdf http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/09/art3full.pdf Admittedly that trend is unlikely to have continued through the last recession, but it's pretty hard evidence against the doom-mongers of the 1960s at least. And it's remained resilient against a number of trends other than automation, not least a marked tendency to export jobs rather than unemployment to the developing world. Manchester cotton might not have been welcomed by India's textile manufacturers, but I'm baffled by the suggestion that the British decimated the Indian steel industry (I mean, quite apart from everything I've ever read on the subject suggesting Indian steel production vastly increased in the 19th century - railways being more steel-intensive than ceremonial sword production - an Indian family conglomerate now owns the British steel industry!)
  - VLM 11y ago
    "But humanity has a remarkable capacity to invent new outlets to fill our waking hours as we redeploy resources used to make stuff to make other stuff or sell stuff." Mere coincidence combined with survivorship bias. Ask the Easter Islanders or Mayans about how people always find new employment. By definition a developed economy is a country that was historically lucky, therefore its members hold very strange beliefs about cause and effect, like the collapse of employment in one industry magically results in employment in another industry because if it hadn't coincidentally happened, our ancestors economy would have collapsed and we'd be dead or owned by some other economy. Bad car analogy is I've crossed many a street on foot, and I've never been hit, therefore there is a magic dead hand of social science that pushes cars out of my way, and I'll never get hit and nobody ever gets hit and its going to be eternally safe into the future. After all, if someone had run over my g-g-g-g-grandfather with an ox cart in the street, I wouldn't be here, therefore fatal car-pedestrian accidents don't happen.
  - baddox 11y ago
    Comparative advantage.
  - digikata 11y ago
    On the other hand, I strongly suspect that we've long hit the point where we could apply our productivity to reducing working hours with little appreciable end effect in output of stuff (and a huge increase in quality of life).
- notNow 11y ago
  Unfortunately, work esp in these current adverse conditions prepares people and teaches them invaluable survival skills that a vision of world without work could produce as an unintended consequence good-for-nothing slobs like in "Idiocracy" where they can't find their butt with both hands. We need to teach people survival skills without working them to death.
drzaiusapelord 11y ago
Machines create value, if we socialized that value, we could easily implement a minimum income for everyone and have work be strictly a part time or hobbyist thing. Or "work" will become a strange mix of fighting for social or knowledge capital and other non-monetary value while machines do all the crap work we used to do before. I'd rather be judged at a co-op poetry slam where my social capital gets hurt if I lose than losing my home/car/savings/income if I lose at my job. Capitalism has a built-in end game: extremely efficient automation. We're walking this path now and have been since steam power. Smart, cheap, and general purpose robots are probably where this all ends.
- rcarrigan87 11y ago
  Does capitalism have an ending? Maybe we can envision some kind of ending on earth. But what about when we start colonizing other planets? What new jobs begin to be created as we step outside earth.
  - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
    A general purpose AI/Robot will just do what it does here, there, and much cheaper and better than some guy stuffed into a pressurized suit who can only work x amount of hours per day and is easily injured and in constant need of food/air/medical. If space migration happens it will be with an army or robots per person because of how hostile conditions are for delicate mammals outside of earth. I don't think the futurist visions we imagine happen without a general robotics revolution, the same way we couldn't get to the moon without computers.
    - VLM 11y ago
      "hostile conditions ... for delicate mammals ... outside of earth" Lets try a test of the general principle. Cross off the last three words and see if Canada, Australia, the western half of the USA, are all uninhabited. If they are, then no one will live in space. If people live in the desert in Nevada, then its highly likely people will (eventually) live in space.
falcolas 11y ago
Some interesting points - I would have the following questions for the author (I didn't see them answered) How many of the ills observed in non-working adults are due (at least in part) to the culture of "your value is based on the job you hold"? How many people sit around watching TV because that's what they can afford to do, or because their peers are unavailable at the same times? How many teens revert to crime because they need money, or don't have other affordable opportunities for entertainment available to them? 1977 is a time very different than today; what differences in attitudes and activities can be attributed to the climate of 1977? What can we learn from these examples to make the coming change in employment levels work out better now than it did 40 years ago?
- waxymonkeyfrog 11y ago
  Hi Falcolas, this is Derek Thompson, the author of the piece. 1. The quick answer is that we don't know how much of the misery of not working is from the financial shortfall of unemployment, vs the failure to meet a cultural expectation to work, vs some inherent need to feel productive, because it's just very hard to tease out the difference in reliable studies. How, eg, would you test this for prime-age adults at a time when income is tied to work and there is a cultural expectation that everybody work? That said, my best guess is that about half of the psychological misery of losing a job and being unemployed comes from the non-money stuff, like being bored and failing to meet a cultural expectation to work. (This is distinct from people who choose to stay home with kids, who have chosen to immerse themselves in an essential activity and often feel great pride -- and stress! -- in these jobs, even though they're not compensated with income). As I said in the piece: "The post-workists argue that Americans work so hard because their culture has conditioned them to feel guilty when they are not being productive, and that this guilt will fade as work ceases to be the norm. This might prove true, but it’s an untestable hypothesis. When I asked Hunnicutt what sort of modern community most resembles his ideal of a post-work society, he admitted, “I’m not sure that such a place exists.”" 2. The fact that unemployed men seem to be less social overall suggests to me that their rise in leisure is about more than the daytime unavailability of peers. Because otherwise, wouldn't they just go drinking with buddies every night? This suggests, to me, some shame of being unemployed that leads to self-imposed isolation. In any case, the misery of unemployment suggests that we're just not very good, as a culture (and particularly men), at finding non-screen-based things to do with our time when work goes away. 3. Crime has fallen by A LOT in the last few decades so I didn't want to go too deep into predicting a rise in crime at a time when violent crime seems to be in structural decline. That said, for young, less educated black men, there are a variety of barriers to their participation in the labor force including racist bosses not wanting to hire them, an abundance of low-paying service sector jobs that seem feminine (they're in health care, government, and education), and the cultural and economic allure of the black market and gangs in some areas. This is a really short summary, but I think the allure of gangs and crime is very complicated. 4. One of the biggest differences between 1977 and today is certainly the decline in crime. Crime didn't spike during the Great Recession, surprisingly. 5. I thought that's what the piece was about! :) But seriously, the section labeled Government: The Visible Hand tries to address this question (or at least this question as I understand it) head on.
woodchuck64 11y ago
The best kind of work is flow: immersed in an activity with energized focus and involvement, seeing progress, learning and achieving goals. That just isn't a concept that machines or automation can take away. But, yes, it does seem like virtual reality will step in to offer this if actual reality has no more to offer.
CapitalistCartr 11y ago
What if the new capital is creativity? The new model for "work" is OSS? Replace money with creativity in the definitions of capitalism. Material possessions are socially discounted; creating new designs, new originals the new currency to excel. If so, the first classes we now cut in schools: advanced mathematics, chorus, art, music, etc. are the areas we need to emphasize the most.
- SapphireSun 11y ago
  This still doesn't sound fair. It's still an economy based on luck (those fortunate enough to be creative types) in a land of abundance. In a land of scarcity, prioritizing efficiency and rewarding based on getting things done (even or especially creative things) makes sense, but not if robots are producing all the necessities of life. It makes sense that creative work will continue to be rewarded, but something more fair (in terms of human dignity, not in terms of meritocracy) will be needed.
- nkozyra 11y ago
  Creativity may be good for human satisfaction and happiness, but it, too, will likely fall to automation. More and more I'm convinced that computational creativity will be able to better and more finely translate resonant emotion into consumable art than humans.
- rezistik 11y ago
  In high school I read a book about this idea, "The Creative Economy", solidified my decision to go into a creative and knowledge based industry.
- s73v3r 11y ago
  Are you trying to suggest that I could pay my rent with a song?
  - ZenoArrow 11y ago
    What if you could live without paying rent? What if all your basic needs were met without needing to earn money? What would you do with your time then?
VLM 11y ago
Cultural observations: Lots of people currently believe in the idea of go to school, get degree, get great job, and work hard, get ahead or at least don't get downsized. Today we laugh at people in my grandfather's generation who had weird employment ideas like lifetime employment at one firm, college isn't necessary, and no women allowed (well, we laugh at dinosaurs like that outside silicon valley where its still prevalent, etc). Cultural analysis and conclusion: Generation AJSKGJ, or whatever the marketing people will call tomorrows kids, are highly likely to laugh at our ideas like the previously mentioned "school/degree/job" or "work hard get reward or at least not punished" axis of evil. We have other weird cultural hangups that'll likely look weird in the future, its hard for us to understand how nationalistic foreign cultures (nazis, communists, etc) in the early 20th century were all into promoting the nation ahead of their citizens, yet today we see corporations as the only important members of our culture and we're mere resources to be thrown away at their whim, this is likely to look equally weird in the future. Or how about endlessly describing boring old corruption as holy capitalism, thats going to look totally weird to people in the future.
- frandroid 11y ago
  > no women allowed (well, we laugh at dinosaurs like that outside silicon valley where its still prevalent, etc). The Valley has its own social obstacles to women's employment...
zzalpha 11y ago
I find it presumptuous that the authors lay depression and so forth at the feet of unemployment and not the obvious: poverty. If folks could live, unemployed, receiving mincome that supported a reasonable quality of life, is there a reason to believe these various effects would still be a major issue?
- waxymonkeyfrog 11y ago
  Sorry I didn't mean to suggest that at all. When I wrote "the ills of unemployment go well beyond the loss of income" that was my way of saying loss of income is the first-order outcome of losing a job, but there are more complicated effects to consider. The reason I focus on the other effects is that, in deciding how government/culture might rearrange itself to replace work, I think it's critical to see that work is about more than money--and the benefit of work is about more than a paycheck. It is about esteem, flow, purpose, community, a sense of meaningfulness in life, and it's not clear to me that all of those things comes with a monthly government check; so it's useful to think of ways we could replace these values in the future.
  - zzalpha 11y ago
    The article flat out assumes that "If John Russo is right, then saving work is more important than saving any particular job. Industriousness has served as America’s unofficial religion since its founding. The sanctity and preeminence of work lie at the heart of the country’s politics, economics, and social interactions.", and that "Most people want to work, and are miserable when they cannot." Put succinctly, the article poses as its fundamental thesis that unemployment itself leads to social degradation. But I could find no actual supporting evidence for that claim. The Youngstown example is just as likely a posterchild for the alternative theory: the dangers of unmitigated poverty. Now, I grant you, social pressures likely lead people to feel shame and so forth in the face of unemployment. But that just means a cultural shift away from the idolization of work is necessary, not that we must find some way to employ those folks who might truly be unemployable.
    - waxymonkeyfrog 11y ago
anon4 11y ago
Weird how the article keeps reusing the word "paradox". I don't think it means what they want it to mean. The paradox of work is that many people hate their jobs, but they are considerably more miserable doing nothing. - if you haven't found out how to live your life without the framework of work, then yes - you will feel miserable. The work routine is pretty useful in that way - it fills up your time and you don't have to define what you want to do yourself. Kind of like the difference between someone serving you bland food, but food you can rely on to feed you to some degree vs. you having to cook for yourself from raw ingredients you chose. Whether or not one has artistic ambitions as Schubert does, it is arguably growing easier to find short-term gigs or spot employment. Paradoxically, technology is the reason. - this is still not a paradox. You could insert "ironically" in there and it would be about as good a choice. And their choice of just "technology" sort of reminds me of this short segment https://youtu.be/VGj5EffwnDg?t=6m3s https://youtu.be/VGj5EffwnDg?t=6m3s
ilaksh 11y ago
"Work" connotes a class distinction. Class is part of this. Subjugation of workers and caste are the origin of the current system. Who owns the machines? Who owns the land? Does a human being have a natural right to live? To own his own small plot of land? Are humans just like common animals, to be yoked or corralled? Fundamentally the intellectual framework is driven by patronage of the highest caste which cannot help but maintain elitist, regressive, Darwnian, Malthusian worldviews to rationalize the inequality. The life-giving moneyflow is primitive and its volume arbitrary and should be replaced by something more sophisticated, but there is no actual reason it could not be returned to its previous high rate if we make the right psychological adjustments. Sustainability doesn't require halting development, it just needs smarter systems, like putting real science into economics or better adoption of common operational data exchange.
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  I'm interested in your view concerning one of the axioms that I infer underlies your political thinking. What do you consider equality, and what do you consider the reasoning behind considering it a desirable goal?
  - ilaksh 11y ago
    A human has a natural right to the minimum necessities of life. Owning a small plot of land to provide for oneself should be one option. Owning a huge plot of land or controlling access to another person's minimum necessities is unequal. The alternative is the default, primitive, animal that must fight to survive. Until this supposition that we must prove our right to exist falls from popularity, civilization is a myth. The underlying assumption is the understanding that human is greater than base animal, starting with comprehension of the noosphere and what that entails.
kavehkh7 11y ago
it may be way in the future or it may not ... but combination of advance robotic, AI, nano-Tech and BioTech can easily eliminate the need of 99.9% of the workforce. But, the journey and social unrest may be so bumpy that could push the human race backward ... or it may reach to 99.9% point in which there is really nothing for billions of people to do. In that case either a small number of people will rule the world and the rest will be in poverty and misery and pain; or it will be a golden age and all will focus more on science and spirituality - not religion but true spirituality to expand human consciousness ... for sure until then the road will be very bumpy.
roneesh 11y ago
Can the author expound upon his encounters with universal basic income and his decisions on how to include it in the piece? I see that it's mentioned in the piece as something that can assuage the financial loss of work, but not the loss of civic cohesion or meaning in people's lives. However I feel that this idea was not an alternative the author seriously investigated, if you're still commenting can you confirm? Did you encounter any deep exploration of what even a basic $1000/mo. guaranteed income might mean for people lacking work? What guided your thinking in how to approach this aspect of dealing with a post-work future, did it just feel too different, or another topic entirely? Thanks for commenting here and thanks for the great piece!
mirimir 11y ago
While this is a very interesting and insightful article, it might be useful to add a broader historical/anthropological perspective. I'm not qualified to do that. But it's my understanding that development of agriculture and animal husbandry, and much later industrialization, drove huge increases in human population. In part, of course, that was driven by the abundance of food and so on. But there was also the need for workers. So as machines displace workers, one might expect human population to gradually decrease, perhaps back to neolithic levels. The challenge, then, would be to have that occur as humanely as possible.
- notNow 11y ago
  Are you a eugenicist and human depopulation advocate?
  - mirimir 11y ago
    Nope, I'm an anarchist and transhumanist :) I am concerned that the human population may crash after nuking too many ecosystem services. However, I'm not a biodiversity freak, but rather take a broader evolutionary perspective.
    - notNow 11y ago
      Your admission of being a transhumanist and social darwininst should dissipate any fears I have after reading your comment. The good thing you are not one of those Gaia nutjobs still better than nothing.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  Also increase in comfort and development is correlated with smaller children number, so an hyper modern world may have smaller population "momentum". There's a statistician with a TED talk about that. Maybe that one http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_y... I cant recall.
  - 11y ago
ianstallings 11y ago
I honestly don't think this will be much of a problem because frankly most of the work we do today is not essential for living. We busy ourselves with busy work. Ideas have become the product. And since we are so unhappy when we're not working towards something, we'll simply invent something new.
cfonger 11y ago
For years we've claimed that we're on the brink of a world without work. However I believe that this claim is fundamentally flawed because it goes against Parkinson's law, which we've seen to be consistently true. We naturally try to gather more material wealth, and this involves having a system where we give bigger rewards to those who work harder and smarter. No matter how much we eliminate menial tasks, we will always find more ways to spend our energy to reward those willing to do so.
- x5n1 11y ago
  Has little to do with work and a lot to do with sociology and economics. If you are paying someone, make them do shit. That's what good managers do. And then when this happens the expectations go way up alongside that... and now everyone is a whiny baby that wants things RIGHT NOW!
- wvenable 11y ago
  Parkinson's law doesn't apply to this situation. We are in a situation where the same amount (or more) work is being done, just with fewer humans. This might lead to bigger rewards to people who work harder and smarter but that will be an ever smaller group.
methodover 11y ago
I really enjoyed reading this article. I've been thinking quite a bit about work recently. I'm just about to turn 29, and by all accounts I'm fairly successful: I graduated college with a worthless liberal arts degree just as the Great Recession was beginning. After an unsuccessful attempt at copywriting for a couple years, I managed to learn programming. A few years after that and I'm the leader of the engineering team at 12-person startup that looks to be pretty successful. And yet I'm as unhappy now as I've ever been. And it sucks. Why can't I just be happy with what I have? I've got a steady job, I've got a pretty good income. Why do I feel so awful about my own life? I've suspected for some time now that work itself is the problem. I'm trading in the best years of my life, my focus, my attention, my time, my life for money. That's the nature of this transaction. I'm trading in this short life I get for cash. I feel like a prostitute. Honestly I'm sitting here with tears in my eyes thinking about it. And apparently I'm not alone in how I feel about work. From the article: "A 2014 Gallup report of worker satisfaction found that as many as 70 percent of Americans don’t feel engaged by their current job." I think the truth is that work is an ocean of human misery, unfulfilled dreams and wasted lives. I think a vast majority of us waste our youth, our time, our energy in fields that we don't give a shit about, when in a better society we'd be able to work on the things we do care about.
- deleted 11y ago
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- oliveira12345 11y ago
  This. Basic income would pay for basic needs, and let people devote "free time" to more personally-satisfacting-activities: open-source programming, studiyng new interesting fields, etc... The mere fact that in today's professional career there is little oportunity for a 40-50years to work on a completely-new-unexperienced-field is an clear example. There is a point in time after which a job converts from ilusion-and-motivation into delusion-and-economic-compromise. And that's blocking people from growing and fully apply their capabilities to reach higher achivements
  - daodedickinson 11y ago
    Look, I think the robots are gonna take over, but you have to be REALLY ignorant to not realize that there are far too many jobs we need humans to do, going on right now, for us to subsidize even the highly technically skilled to go off and follow their whims without any sort of economic integration whatsoever. The value of the denomination of the "minimum income" will fall immediately, lowering that supposed minimum, because no one will want to produce the boring things everyone wants to consume on the other end. Therefore, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER agitate for a basic income in terms of whatever brand-name of money (dollar, euro, nyancoin or some abstract non-existent Platonic form of "money"), but instead say something like "Everyone will be given a X by Y square foot dwelling, allowed Z gallons of water a year, given 20 fresh tomatoes, etc." and THEN reason about how those can be provided (do we force [enslave] people to provide this to others? what do we do if no one coughs up the goods?). If you agitate for a minimum wage or minimum income, it will always be worthless at the whim of the currency's authority(ies). More realistically, just reason instead what the least you need as an individual is, work to get it from within whatever economy you find yourself in, and then begin the REAL work of life, developing your happiness for and from what you have. See: Tolstoy's "How Much Land Does A Man Need?"
crimsonalucard 11y ago
What's the alternative to this world? A world where 99% of us work and 1% don't?
Sideloader 11y ago
"The paradox of work is that many people hate their jobs, but they are considerably more miserable doing nothing." This is true in *today's culture of work. Unemployment, even if a person was laid off due to their employer going bankrupt, is still seen as a personal failing. And unemployment for most people means a race against the clock before savings dwindle (if they are lucky enough to have been able to save for such an emergency). And prolonged unemployment and the uncertainty and drop in status that comes with it can be demoralizing and depressing, especially for people who have little prospect of finding a satisfying or at least decent paying job. The people that sleep and watch TV are likely doing so because they are under psychological stress. Our culture fetishes work to a degree that would make a Marxist blush and unemployment and not working is punished by society on many levels. But if the culture of work changes over time and not working in the traditional sense no longer means destitution, stigma and loss of status, well, who can say for sure not working at an unsatisfying job will result in misery and lazing around doing nothing.
wehadfun 11y ago
Only read very small part but author talks about Youngtown and says that when the local steel industry went bust suicide and assumingly criminal behavior increased. To me this is because of loss of income not so much the loss of having to report to work. Does the article talk about why loss of income was not pointed to as the reason for the problems?
nosuchthing 11y ago
It seems like the mass amount of money dumped into alternative advertising models is increasingly pushing the 'Attention Economy'[1]. Video games designed by behavioral psychologists to be addicting, compulsive, and time consuming [2]. Advertising IS attention economics, but now it's being said we're reaching peak advertising and that the attention of the masses is saturated. Amazon recently begin experimenting with paying writers based upon feedback of single pages being viewed long enough. [4] I could only hope for the money previously allocated to garner everyone's attention for brand recognition may now be channeled into further product development and research, as it's becoming harder to rely solely on brand name identity with easier access to information on alternative products and review websites like anandtech or thewirecutter. Although I have a hunch much of that development will be into building more invasive advertising and attention economy games - [5] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Economy [2] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/21/candy-crush-angry-birds-psychology-compulsive-casual-games-mobile-flappy-birds http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/21/candy-crus... [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/magazine/angry-birds-farmville-and-other-hyperaddictive-stupid-games.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/magazine/angry-birds-farmv... [4] https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A156OS90J7RDN https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A156OS90J7RDN [5] https://vimeo.com/14533403 https://vimeo.com/14533403 [6] http://pastebin.com/jJZVxfRm http://pastebin.com/jJZVxfRm
orionblastar 11y ago
When I worked I would automate reports using Visual BASIC and Crystal Reports. I would create an MS-Access database at first to prototype the app, and then migrate it to MS-SQL Server later on when it went to production. I even made an ASP 3.0 based web app that could export the report to RTF, PDF, or TXT format for review on a mobile device. That was 1997, and people who did the reports by hand ended up being fired. I felt sorry that I wrote a series of apps that cost people their jobs. My coworkers struggled with Crystal Reports because all they knew was Visual BASIC and Crystal Reports has a scripting language based on Ada. Something I learned in college as I attempted to learn as many programming languages as possible. None of the apps I wrote used AI or were using robots, but they got the job done faster and more accurate than a human being would get them done. At most I called it business intelligence because I used accounting and statistics and other things a business would use to make decisions. But I worked too hard and the stress was too much and developed a mental illness in 2001. Ended up on disability in 2003. Been in a hole and trying to get out of it so I can one day go back to work. I'm in my 40s now, have a huge gap in my resume, and basically I am unemployable because I am old and mentally ill. Over the Opal CoC debate I got contacted by a woman who seems to be in the same area but she is a former sex slave that was trafficked at a young age and escaped and fought to clear her record so she could work and now she is in her 40s and learned how to program and freelances to earn money to keep a roof over her head. When managers and HR pull resumes, they throw away the ones with gaps in them, they want to hire people in their 20s, they don't want a person with a mental illness or in her case was part of some past human trafficking in the sex slave market. There are some people who are unemployable until the IT market is reformed. When most of the jobs are gone, I expect there to be some sort of social program like a basic income that is paid for by taxing the companies who use robots and AI and automation instead of people to do work. There are a class of poor people who cannot afford a used PC and an Internet connection to learn how to program to be able to apply for the jobs. They cannot even afford good clothes for an interview. I wanted to form my own company that helps out people who are unemployable and see what they can do. Provide on the job training and mentorship to get them up to date with modern technology and programming. I think there is a key need to provide jobs for people who normally wouldn't get hired due to gaps in their resume, their age, a mental illness, exploited in human trafficking and overcame it, etc.
Hoasi 11y ago
This is reminiscent of David Graeber’s essay “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ and its commentary on the Economist http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/08/labour-markets-0/ http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/08/labour-m...
hamoid 11y ago
"many people hate their jobs, but they are considerably more miserable doing nothing" Why assume we can either work or do nothing? Of course doing nothing sucks! What about doing something instead? Could the problem be that most people have been trained to do what they're told, instead of being creative?
ScottBurson 11y ago
Here's an interesting counterpoint, arguing from economic evidence that at least in the last decade or two, downward pressure on wages doesn't appear to be primarily the result of automation: http://prospect.org/article/it%E2%80%99s-not-skills-gap-that%E2%80%99s-holding-wages-down-its-weak-economy-among-other-things http://prospect.org/article/it%E2%80%99s-not-skills-gap-that...
ChuckMcM 11y ago
Nicely written[1] and not as hyperbolic as others but to buy in you have to get past this: The job market defied doomsayers in those earlier times, and according to the most frequently reported jobs numbers, it has so far done the same in our own time. Unemployment is currently just over 5 percent, and 2014 was this century’s best year for job growth. One could be forgiven for saying that recent predictions about technological job displacement are merely forming the latest chapter in a long story called The Boys Who Cried Robot—one in which the robot, unlike the wolf, never arrives in the end. This paragraph does an interesting double switch and it is that switch that is important. It is demonstrably true that throughout history, displaced workers have cried the warning to other that soon, their jobs would be on the block and what would they do then? And through out history that doesn't happen. To understand why that doesn't happen you have to understand the causal relationship between work and spending. People spend money, how they get that money to spend, whether it is waiting tables at a restaurant or Daddy's trust fund doesn't really matter, it gets spent for "goods and services" (which we'll just call goods). And other people figure out ways to provide desirable goods in order to attract someone to give them money in exchange for that. But no where in that transaction is there a specific "job" there is only money and goods. Take for example blacksmiths and auto mechanics. In the 1850's there were lots of blacksmiths and perhaps a handful of auto mechanics. In the 1950's there were lots of auto mechanics and a handful of blacksmiths. So what happened? People started driving cars, stopped riding horses, they spent money to get goods and services for cars, stopped spending money to get goods and services related to horses or wagons. Conceptually, people spent part of their money on transporting themselves and their stuff around. Other people provided goods and services around transportation technology in support of those people. As the technology for transportation evolved, people who provided goods for the previous technology found fewer and fewer customers, people who provided goods for the new technology found more and more customers. Net of everything else, same "number" of employed people, but the way in which they were employed changed. They important bit is that not spending, that kills jobs for everyone, changing technology just moves around who can find employment and who can't but the number of jobs stays about the same. The third vector is productivity, which is to say when it took 10 people to do X units of work toward producing a good or service, and now it only takes 1 person, that is a productivity gain. You can pay that one person[2] twice as much as any of the other 10 people and come out ahead. So more productive implementations win over less productive ones. But even with productivity gains, when you're now spending perhaps 20% for the same goods, you now have the 80% you are not spending on those goods available for still other goods and services. So 9 "jobs" get eliminated in one market and 9 more different jobs get created to supply the other stuff the now freed up money can be applied toward. The key here is eliminating certain jobs does not lead to unemployment in the large, but eliminating spending does. You lose jobs in a recession because people spend less, you gain them back more slowly if technology change has created dislocations (like it did in the Steel Mills.) But if a robot takes away your current job, it doesn't mean there doesn't exist another job you could do. So economics aside, there are very real social justice issues around retraining and making available resources when conditions cause problems, but the luddite view that there won't be any way to earn a living, or that we won't want to or have to, is not well supported by the evidence. [1] Not something I often say of stories in the Atlantic [2] Remember, it is money seeking goods not "jobs"
metasean 11y ago
Obligatory link to Manna by Marshall Brain - http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm (different chapters explore different possible outcomes)
sktrdie 11y ago
I strongly believe in universal basic income and that being forced to work is a form of slavery. I also believe that if you let people do whatever they want, sure you'll have 90% or more just doing nothing all day, but you'll have those 10% doing something great. Also, capitalism is really not that great! Builds societies that nurture exclusion, self-interest and survival of the fittest. In 100 years, when robotics has automated pretty much everything (this is inevitable), we'll look back at these days and laugh about how we used to build societies where people worked most of the day, rather than just lived most of the day.
nothing 11y ago
When I was a kid, I instinctively felt (did not have any kind of intellectual ability at that age) that I was in a trap. I can NOW supply language to my instincts. That instinct gradually grew into a concept - or a non-concept - and at 35 while still not sure what IT was - started saving, saving and more saving. In a country with high interest rates - that helped. I finally quit in 2010 at 50 - exactly 50. I spent the last 5 years doing absolutely no work for money. I never felt that I was missing out on anything at all. And I am sure I will never ever have to ask for help outside my family - unless of course any one of us is struck by an expensive disease. But then what that mostly would mean is physical pain. So we are now getting mentally ready for pain. Preparing to endure unendurable physical pain, which I personally have never experienced before. I do not feel like I am prostituting myself. That takes a lot of misery out of my system. I never ever switch on the TV, but spend a lot of time reading random stuff off the net.

192 points by npalli 11y ago

I've had friends lose jobs in Amazon warehouses over their aggressive research and development of an all-machine packaging line. They do work now that requires the precision of a human hand and eye, but that job may also go the way of the assembly line. His only hope is that custom carpentry's demand by rich celebrities wanting the "premium" afforded by the work of a Human over the static of a machine. When I look back at people who invested their lives in the future of mankind, and their predictions in something like the year 1960, it's interesting to note just how incorrect they were. Communication boomed over transportation, for example. Knowing that, I try to think of the ways the future will be so impossibly different than my present. A world without work is one of those, and I hope it angers and confuses every currently living generation enough that we wish we would have made it a reality sooner.

notahacker 11y ago
A world without work was a pretty common vision in the 1960s. And the 1860s But humanity has a remarkable capacity to invent new outlets to fill our waking hours as we redeploy resources used to make stuff to make other stuff or sell stuff. We didn't have (or foresee!) social media managers or video game designers in the 1960s. And software doesn't just make our production efforts scale, it makes our consumption scale. You can fit far more lifestyle apps on your phone than chairs around your table, and a couple of decades back few people would have foreseen mobile phone apps as a category of product that needed people to make, still less an industry reportedly topping up the paycheques of a million Europeans. I'm not seeing the developed world's desire for more stuff reach satiation point, and if anything desire to subsidise unemployment is trending in the opposite direction.
- zzalpha 11y ago
  Hell, modern theory has it that the pyramids were in essence a type of stimulus program to keep folks busy and fed (and no, they were not in fact slaves)!
  - Einstalbert 11y ago
    This is amusing to me, since a good number of people believe it was definitely slaves, and 'definitely' the Jewish slaves mentioned in the bible. I would have been overjoyed to learn that the pyramids were a stimulus program when I was a child.
  - daodedickinson 11y ago
    People theorize that all of life is busy work. No one should care that they thus theorize.
  - stock_toaster 11y ago
    I would love to see a return to investing in and updating some of the physical infrastructure that has degraded over time. In the USA there are a huge amounts of bridges that need updating/repairing, dams needing repair (or removal), roads needing repair, dilapidated school buildings needing updating (as well as energy efficiency updates), etc. There seems like TONS of work to be done to refresh our aging physical infrastructure.
    - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
      Not just the US. And not just maintenance. Creating good infrastructure is one of the best of all possible investments. The problem isn't that there's no useful work; it's that the genius of the current economic system - the one where it's every individual for themselves, and there's no such thing as society - is incredibly bad at deciding what needs to be done to make the future better for everyone. So education at all levels is mediocre, infrastructure is deliberately crippled for profit, there's no systematic planning for the future at all - and people in work are still spending huge amounts of time on essentially pointless activities. It's an organisational and political problem, not a technological one. Actually it's more of a psychological problem. Getting humans to learn deferred gratification as a species turns out to be exceptionally hard.
- lkrubner 11y ago
  In the USA, male participating in the wage economy has been in the decline since the 1940s: https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/LNS11300001 https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/LNS11300001 For women, the peak was in 2000: https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USALFPWNA https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USALFPWNA Wages for men have been in decline since 1973, which demonstrates one of the obvious ways people deal with declining opportunities: lower wages. In the 1800s Western nations conquered the world, and were thus able to export their unemployment to other countries, thus creating what we now call The Third World. As late as 1820, India was still producing more steel than Europe, but all such industries were eventually closed in India and moved to Europe, leaving India in a bad situation from which it is yet to fully recover. It's unlikely that Western nations will have an easy time exporting their unemployment in the 2020s or 2030s. Among other things, they lack the military power that is necessary to do so.
  - marcoperaza 11y ago
    Exported unemployment? Created the third world? The world wasn't kumbaya before colonialism.
  - notahacker 11y ago
    The labour force participation rates look rather different if you adjust them for the changing age profiles of the population, to account for there being a lot more old people and a lot more scope for them to afford to retire. If you look at this example, it'll show overall labour force participation actually rose between 1960 and 2000 for employees of every age under 60 http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/09/art3full.pdf http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/09/art3full.pdf Admittedly that trend is unlikely to have continued through the last recession, but it's pretty hard evidence against the doom-mongers of the 1960s at least. And it's remained resilient against a number of trends other than automation, not least a marked tendency to export jobs rather than unemployment to the developing world. Manchester cotton might not have been welcomed by India's textile manufacturers, but I'm baffled by the suggestion that the British decimated the Indian steel industry (I mean, quite apart from everything I've ever read on the subject suggesting Indian steel production vastly increased in the 19th century - railways being more steel-intensive than ceremonial sword production - an Indian family conglomerate now owns the British steel industry!)
- VLM 11y ago
  "But humanity has a remarkable capacity to invent new outlets to fill our waking hours as we redeploy resources used to make stuff to make other stuff or sell stuff." Mere coincidence combined with survivorship bias. Ask the Easter Islanders or Mayans about how people always find new employment. By definition a developed economy is a country that was historically lucky, therefore its members hold very strange beliefs about cause and effect, like the collapse of employment in one industry magically results in employment in another industry because if it hadn't coincidentally happened, our ancestors economy would have collapsed and we'd be dead or owned by some other economy. Bad car analogy is I've crossed many a street on foot, and I've never been hit, therefore there is a magic dead hand of social science that pushes cars out of my way, and I'll never get hit and nobody ever gets hit and its going to be eternally safe into the future. After all, if someone had run over my g-g-g-g-grandfather with an ox cart in the street, I wouldn't be here, therefore fatal car-pedestrian accidents don't happen.
- baddox 11y ago
  Comparative advantage.
- digikata 11y ago
  On the other hand, I strongly suspect that we've long hit the point where we could apply our productivity to reducing working hours with little appreciable end effect in output of stuff (and a huge increase in quality of life).
notNow 11y ago
Unfortunately, work esp in these current adverse conditions prepares people and teaches them invaluable survival skills that a vision of world without work could produce as an unintended consequence good-for-nothing slobs like in "Idiocracy" where they can't find their butt with both hands. We need to teach people survival skills without working them to death.

drzaiusapelord 11y ago

Machines create value, if we socialized that value, we could easily implement a minimum income for everyone and have work be strictly a part time or hobbyist thing. Or "work" will become a strange mix of fighting for social or knowledge capital and other non-monetary value while machines do all the crap work we used to do before. I'd rather be judged at a co-op poetry slam where my social capital gets hurt if I lose than losing my home/car/savings/income if I lose at my job. Capitalism has a built-in end game: extremely efficient automation. We're walking this path now and have been since steam power. Smart, cheap, and general purpose robots are probably where this all ends.

rcarrigan87 11y ago
Does capitalism have an ending? Maybe we can envision some kind of ending on earth. But what about when we start colonizing other planets? What new jobs begin to be created as we step outside earth.
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  A general purpose AI/Robot will just do what it does here, there, and much cheaper and better than some guy stuffed into a pressurized suit who can only work x amount of hours per day and is easily injured and in constant need of food/air/medical. If space migration happens it will be with an army or robots per person because of how hostile conditions are for delicate mammals outside of earth. I don't think the futurist visions we imagine happen without a general robotics revolution, the same way we couldn't get to the moon without computers.
  - VLM 11y ago
    "hostile conditions ... for delicate mammals ... outside of earth" Lets try a test of the general principle. Cross off the last three words and see if Canada, Australia, the western half of the USA, are all uninhabited. If they are, then no one will live in space. If people live in the desert in Nevada, then its highly likely people will (eventually) live in space.

falcolas 11y ago

Some interesting points - I would have the following questions for the author (I didn't see them answered) How many of the ills observed in non-working adults are due (at least in part) to the culture of "your value is based on the job you hold"? How many people sit around watching TV because that's what they can afford to do, or because their peers are unavailable at the same times? How many teens revert to crime because they need money, or don't have other affordable opportunities for entertainment available to them? 1977 is a time very different than today; what differences in attitudes and activities can be attributed to the climate of 1977? What can we learn from these examples to make the coming change in employment levels work out better now than it did 40 years ago?

waxymonkeyfrog 11y ago
Hi Falcolas, this is Derek Thompson, the author of the piece. 1. The quick answer is that we don't know how much of the misery of not working is from the financial shortfall of unemployment, vs the failure to meet a cultural expectation to work, vs some inherent need to feel productive, because it's just very hard to tease out the difference in reliable studies. How, eg, would you test this for prime-age adults at a time when income is tied to work and there is a cultural expectation that everybody work? That said, my best guess is that about half of the psychological misery of losing a job and being unemployed comes from the non-money stuff, like being bored and failing to meet a cultural expectation to work. (This is distinct from people who choose to stay home with kids, who have chosen to immerse themselves in an essential activity and often feel great pride -- and stress! -- in these jobs, even though they're not compensated with income). As I said in the piece: "The post-workists argue that Americans work so hard because their culture has conditioned them to feel guilty when they are not being productive, and that this guilt will fade as work ceases to be the norm. This might prove true, but it’s an untestable hypothesis. When I asked Hunnicutt what sort of modern community most resembles his ideal of a post-work society, he admitted, “I’m not sure that such a place exists.”" 2. The fact that unemployed men seem to be less social overall suggests to me that their rise in leisure is about more than the daytime unavailability of peers. Because otherwise, wouldn't they just go drinking with buddies every night? This suggests, to me, some shame of being unemployed that leads to self-imposed isolation. In any case, the misery of unemployment suggests that we're just not very good, as a culture (and particularly men), at finding non-screen-based things to do with our time when work goes away. 3. Crime has fallen by A LOT in the last few decades so I didn't want to go too deep into predicting a rise in crime at a time when violent crime seems to be in structural decline. That said, for young, less educated black men, there are a variety of barriers to their participation in the labor force including racist bosses not wanting to hire them, an abundance of low-paying service sector jobs that seem feminine (they're in health care, government, and education), and the cultural and economic allure of the black market and gangs in some areas. This is a really short summary, but I think the allure of gangs and crime is very complicated. 4. One of the biggest differences between 1977 and today is certainly the decline in crime. Crime didn't spike during the Great Recession, surprisingly. 5. I thought that's what the piece was about! :) But seriously, the section labeled Government: The Visible Hand tries to address this question (or at least this question as I understand it) head on.

woodchuck64 11y ago

The best kind of work is flow: immersed in an activity with energized focus and involvement, seeing progress, learning and achieving goals. That just isn't a concept that machines or automation can take away. But, yes, it does seem like virtual reality will step in to offer this if actual reality has no more to offer.

CapitalistCartr 11y ago

What if the new capital is creativity? The new model for "work" is OSS? Replace money with creativity in the definitions of capitalism. Material possessions are socially discounted; creating new designs, new originals the new currency to excel. If so, the first classes we now cut in schools: advanced mathematics, chorus, art, music, etc. are the areas we need to emphasize the most.

SapphireSun 11y ago
This still doesn't sound fair. It's still an economy based on luck (those fortunate enough to be creative types) in a land of abundance. In a land of scarcity, prioritizing efficiency and rewarding based on getting things done (even or especially creative things) makes sense, but not if robots are producing all the necessities of life. It makes sense that creative work will continue to be rewarded, but something more fair (in terms of human dignity, not in terms of meritocracy) will be needed.
nkozyra 11y ago
Creativity may be good for human satisfaction and happiness, but it, too, will likely fall to automation. More and more I'm convinced that computational creativity will be able to better and more finely translate resonant emotion into consumable art than humans.
rezistik 11y ago
In high school I read a book about this idea, "The Creative Economy", solidified my decision to go into a creative and knowledge based industry.
s73v3r 11y ago
Are you trying to suggest that I could pay my rent with a song?
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  What if you could live without paying rent? What if all your basic needs were met without needing to earn money? What would you do with your time then?

VLM 11y ago

Cultural observations: Lots of people currently believe in the idea of go to school, get degree, get great job, and work hard, get ahead or at least don't get downsized. Today we laugh at people in my grandfather's generation who had weird employment ideas like lifetime employment at one firm, college isn't necessary, and no women allowed (well, we laugh at dinosaurs like that outside silicon valley where its still prevalent, etc). Cultural analysis and conclusion: Generation AJSKGJ, or whatever the marketing people will call tomorrows kids, are highly likely to laugh at our ideas like the previously mentioned "school/degree/job" or "work hard get reward or at least not punished" axis of evil. We have other weird cultural hangups that'll likely look weird in the future, its hard for us to understand how nationalistic foreign cultures (nazis, communists, etc) in the early 20th century were all into promoting the nation ahead of their citizens, yet today we see corporations as the only important members of our culture and we're mere resources to be thrown away at their whim, this is likely to look equally weird in the future. Or how about endlessly describing boring old corruption as holy capitalism, thats going to look totally weird to people in the future.

frandroid 11y ago
> no women allowed (well, we laugh at dinosaurs like that outside silicon valley where its still prevalent, etc). The Valley has its own social obstacles to women's employment...

zzalpha 11y ago

I find it presumptuous that the authors lay depression and so forth at the feet of unemployment and not the obvious: poverty. If folks could live, unemployed, receiving mincome that supported a reasonable quality of life, is there a reason to believe these various effects would still be a major issue?

waxymonkeyfrog 11y ago
Sorry I didn't mean to suggest that at all. When I wrote "the ills of unemployment go well beyond the loss of income" that was my way of saying loss of income is the first-order outcome of losing a job, but there are more complicated effects to consider. The reason I focus on the other effects is that, in deciding how government/culture might rearrange itself to replace work, I think it's critical to see that work is about more than money--and the benefit of work is about more than a paycheck. It is about esteem, flow, purpose, community, a sense of meaningfulness in life, and it's not clear to me that all of those things comes with a monthly government check; so it's useful to think of ways we could replace these values in the future.
- zzalpha 11y ago
  The article flat out assumes that "If John Russo is right, then saving work is more important than saving any particular job. Industriousness has served as America’s unofficial religion since its founding. The sanctity and preeminence of work lie at the heart of the country’s politics, economics, and social interactions.", and that "Most people want to work, and are miserable when they cannot." Put succinctly, the article poses as its fundamental thesis that unemployment itself leads to social degradation. But I could find no actual supporting evidence for that claim. The Youngstown example is just as likely a posterchild for the alternative theory: the dangers of unmitigated poverty. Now, I grant you, social pressures likely lead people to feel shame and so forth in the face of unemployment. But that just means a cultural shift away from the idolization of work is necessary, not that we must find some way to employ those folks who might truly be unemployable.
  - waxymonkeyfrog 11y ago

anon4 11y ago

Weird how the article keeps reusing the word "paradox". I don't think it means what they want it to mean. The paradox of work is that many people hate their jobs, but they are considerably more miserable doing nothing. - if you haven't found out how to live your life without the framework of work, then yes - you will feel miserable. The work routine is pretty useful in that way - it fills up your time and you don't have to define what you want to do yourself. Kind of like the difference between someone serving you bland food, but food you can rely on to feed you to some degree vs. you having to cook for yourself from raw ingredients you chose. Whether or not one has artistic ambitions as Schubert does, it is arguably growing easier to find short-term gigs or spot employment. Paradoxically, technology is the reason. - this is still not a paradox. You could insert "ironically" in there and it would be about as good a choice. And their choice of just "technology" sort of reminds me of this short segment https://youtu.be/VGj5EffwnDg?t=6m3s https://youtu.be/VGj5EffwnDg?t=6m3s

ilaksh 11y ago

"Work" connotes a class distinction. Class is part of this. Subjugation of workers and caste are the origin of the current system. Who owns the machines? Who owns the land? Does a human being have a natural right to live? To own his own small plot of land? Are humans just like common animals, to be yoked or corralled? Fundamentally the intellectual framework is driven by patronage of the highest caste which cannot help but maintain elitist, regressive, Darwnian, Malthusian worldviews to rationalize the inequality. The life-giving moneyflow is primitive and its volume arbitrary and should be replaced by something more sophisticated, but there is no actual reason it could not be returned to its previous high rate if we make the right psychological adjustments. Sustainability doesn't require halting development, it just needs smarter systems, like putting real science into economics or better adoption of common operational data exchange.

oldmanjay 11y ago
I'm interested in your view concerning one of the axioms that I infer underlies your political thinking. What do you consider equality, and what do you consider the reasoning behind considering it a desirable goal?
- ilaksh 11y ago
  A human has a natural right to the minimum necessities of life. Owning a small plot of land to provide for oneself should be one option. Owning a huge plot of land or controlling access to another person's minimum necessities is unequal. The alternative is the default, primitive, animal that must fight to survive. Until this supposition that we must prove our right to exist falls from popularity, civilization is a myth. The underlying assumption is the understanding that human is greater than base animal, starting with comprehension of the noosphere and what that entails.

kavehkh7 11y ago

it may be way in the future or it may not ... but combination of advance robotic, AI, nano-Tech and BioTech can easily eliminate the need of 99.9% of the workforce. But, the journey and social unrest may be so bumpy that could push the human race backward ... or it may reach to 99.9% point in which there is really nothing for billions of people to do. In that case either a small number of people will rule the world and the rest will be in poverty and misery and pain; or it will be a golden age and all will focus more on science and spirituality - not religion but true spirituality to expand human consciousness ... for sure until then the road will be very bumpy.

roneesh 11y ago

Can the author expound upon his encounters with universal basic income and his decisions on how to include it in the piece? I see that it's mentioned in the piece as something that can assuage the financial loss of work, but not the loss of civic cohesion or meaning in people's lives. However I feel that this idea was not an alternative the author seriously investigated, if you're still commenting can you confirm? Did you encounter any deep exploration of what even a basic $1000/mo. guaranteed income might mean for people lacking work? What guided your thinking in how to approach this aspect of dealing with a post-work future, did it just feel too different, or another topic entirely? Thanks for commenting here and thanks for the great piece!

mirimir 11y ago

While this is a very interesting and insightful article, it might be useful to add a broader historical/anthropological perspective. I'm not qualified to do that. But it's my understanding that development of agriculture and animal husbandry, and much later industrialization, drove huge increases in human population. In part, of course, that was driven by the abundance of food and so on. But there was also the need for workers. So as machines displace workers, one might expect human population to gradually decrease, perhaps back to neolithic levels. The challenge, then, would be to have that occur as humanely as possible.

notNow 11y ago
Are you a eugenicist and human depopulation advocate?
- mirimir 11y ago
  Nope, I'm an anarchist and transhumanist :) I am concerned that the human population may crash after nuking too many ecosystem services. However, I'm not a biodiversity freak, but rather take a broader evolutionary perspective.
  - notNow 11y ago
    Your admission of being a transhumanist and social darwininst should dissipate any fears I have after reading your comment. The good thing you are not one of those Gaia nutjobs still better than nothing.
agumonkey 11y ago
Also increase in comfort and development is correlated with smaller children number, so an hyper modern world may have smaller population "momentum". There's a statistician with a TED talk about that. Maybe that one http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_y... I cant recall.
- 11y ago

ianstallings 11y ago

I honestly don't think this will be much of a problem because frankly most of the work we do today is not essential for living. We busy ourselves with busy work. Ideas have become the product. And since we are so unhappy when we're not working towards something, we'll simply invent something new.

cfonger 11y ago

For years we've claimed that we're on the brink of a world without work. However I believe that this claim is fundamentally flawed because it goes against Parkinson's law, which we've seen to be consistently true. We naturally try to gather more material wealth, and this involves having a system where we give bigger rewards to those who work harder and smarter. No matter how much we eliminate menial tasks, we will always find more ways to spend our energy to reward those willing to do so.

x5n1 11y ago
Has little to do with work and a lot to do with sociology and economics. If you are paying someone, make them do shit. That's what good managers do. And then when this happens the expectations go way up alongside that... and now everyone is a whiny baby that wants things RIGHT NOW!
wvenable 11y ago
Parkinson's law doesn't apply to this situation. We are in a situation where the same amount (or more) work is being done, just with fewer humans. This might lead to bigger rewards to people who work harder and smarter but that will be an ever smaller group.

methodover 11y ago

I really enjoyed reading this article. I've been thinking quite a bit about work recently. I'm just about to turn 29, and by all accounts I'm fairly successful: I graduated college with a worthless liberal arts degree just as the Great Recession was beginning. After an unsuccessful attempt at copywriting for a couple years, I managed to learn programming. A few years after that and I'm the leader of the engineering team at 12-person startup that looks to be pretty successful. And yet I'm as unhappy now as I've ever been. And it sucks. Why can't I just be happy with what I have? I've got a steady job, I've got a pretty good income. Why do I feel so awful about my own life? I've suspected for some time now that work itself is the problem. I'm trading in the best years of my life, my focus, my attention, my time, my life for money. That's the nature of this transaction. I'm trading in this short life I get for cash. I feel like a prostitute. Honestly I'm sitting here with tears in my eyes thinking about it. And apparently I'm not alone in how I feel about work. From the article: "A 2014 Gallup report of worker satisfaction found that as many as 70 percent of Americans don’t feel engaged by their current job." I think the truth is that work is an ocean of human misery, unfulfilled dreams and wasted lives. I think a vast majority of us waste our youth, our time, our energy in fields that we don't give a shit about, when in a better society we'd be able to work on the things we do care about.

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oliveira12345 11y ago
This. Basic income would pay for basic needs, and let people devote "free time" to more personally-satisfacting-activities: open-source programming, studiyng new interesting fields, etc... The mere fact that in today's professional career there is little oportunity for a 40-50years to work on a completely-new-unexperienced-field is an clear example. There is a point in time after which a job converts from ilusion-and-motivation into delusion-and-economic-compromise. And that's blocking people from growing and fully apply their capabilities to reach higher achivements
- daodedickinson 11y ago
  Look, I think the robots are gonna take over, but you have to be REALLY ignorant to not realize that there are far too many jobs we need humans to do, going on right now, for us to subsidize even the highly technically skilled to go off and follow their whims without any sort of economic integration whatsoever. The value of the denomination of the "minimum income" will fall immediately, lowering that supposed minimum, because no one will want to produce the boring things everyone wants to consume on the other end. Therefore, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER agitate for a basic income in terms of whatever brand-name of money (dollar, euro, nyancoin or some abstract non-existent Platonic form of "money"), but instead say something like "Everyone will be given a X by Y square foot dwelling, allowed Z gallons of water a year, given 20 fresh tomatoes, etc." and THEN reason about how those can be provided (do we force [enslave] people to provide this to others? what do we do if no one coughs up the goods?). If you agitate for a minimum wage or minimum income, it will always be worthless at the whim of the currency's authority(ies). More realistically, just reason instead what the least you need as an individual is, work to get it from within whatever economy you find yourself in, and then begin the REAL work of life, developing your happiness for and from what you have. See: Tolstoy's "How Much Land Does A Man Need?"

crimsonalucard 11y ago

What's the alternative to this world? A world where 99% of us work and 1% don't?

Sideloader 11y ago

"The paradox of work is that many people hate their jobs, but they are considerably more miserable doing nothing." This is true in *today's culture of work. Unemployment, even if a person was laid off due to their employer going bankrupt, is still seen as a personal failing. And unemployment for most people means a race against the clock before savings dwindle (if they are lucky enough to have been able to save for such an emergency). And prolonged unemployment and the uncertainty and drop in status that comes with it can be demoralizing and depressing, especially for people who have little prospect of finding a satisfying or at least decent paying job. The people that sleep and watch TV are likely doing so because they are under psychological stress. Our culture fetishes work to a degree that would make a Marxist blush and unemployment and not working is punished by society on many levels. But if the culture of work changes over time and not working in the traditional sense no longer means destitution, stigma and loss of status, well, who can say for sure not working at an unsatisfying job will result in misery and lazing around doing nothing.

wehadfun 11y ago

Only read very small part but author talks about Youngtown and says that when the local steel industry went bust suicide and assumingly criminal behavior increased. To me this is because of loss of income not so much the loss of having to report to work. Does the article talk about why loss of income was not pointed to as the reason for the problems?

nosuchthing 11y ago

It seems like the mass amount of money dumped into alternative advertising models is increasingly pushing the 'Attention Economy'[1]. Video games designed by behavioral psychologists to be addicting, compulsive, and time consuming [2]. Advertising IS attention economics, but now it's being said we're reaching peak advertising and that the attention of the masses is saturated. Amazon recently begin experimenting with paying writers based upon feedback of single pages being viewed long enough. [4] I could only hope for the money previously allocated to garner everyone's attention for brand recognition may now be channeled into further product development and research, as it's becoming harder to rely solely on brand name identity with easier access to information on alternative products and review websites like anandtech or thewirecutter. Although I have a hunch much of that development will be into building more invasive advertising and attention economy games - [5] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Economy [2] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/21/candy-crush-angry-birds-psychology-compulsive-casual-games-mobile-flappy-birds http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/21/candy-crus... [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/magazine/angry-birds-farmville-and-other-hyperaddictive-stupid-games.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/magazine/angry-birds-farmv... [4] https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A156OS90J7RDN https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A156OS90J7RDN [5] https://vimeo.com/14533403 https://vimeo.com/14533403 [6] http://pastebin.com/jJZVxfRm http://pastebin.com/jJZVxfRm

orionblastar 11y ago

When I worked I would automate reports using Visual BASIC and Crystal Reports. I would create an MS-Access database at first to prototype the app, and then migrate it to MS-SQL Server later on when it went to production. I even made an ASP 3.0 based web app that could export the report to RTF, PDF, or TXT format for review on a mobile device. That was 1997, and people who did the reports by hand ended up being fired. I felt sorry that I wrote a series of apps that cost people their jobs. My coworkers struggled with Crystal Reports because all they knew was Visual BASIC and Crystal Reports has a scripting language based on Ada. Something I learned in college as I attempted to learn as many programming languages as possible. None of the apps I wrote used AI or were using robots, but they got the job done faster and more accurate than a human being would get them done. At most I called it business intelligence because I used accounting and statistics and other things a business would use to make decisions. But I worked too hard and the stress was too much and developed a mental illness in 2001. Ended up on disability in 2003. Been in a hole and trying to get out of it so I can one day go back to work. I'm in my 40s now, have a huge gap in my resume, and basically I am unemployable because I am old and mentally ill. Over the Opal CoC debate I got contacted by a woman who seems to be in the same area but she is a former sex slave that was trafficked at a young age and escaped and fought to clear her record so she could work and now she is in her 40s and learned how to program and freelances to earn money to keep a roof over her head. When managers and HR pull resumes, they throw away the ones with gaps in them, they want to hire people in their 20s, they don't want a person with a mental illness or in her case was part of some past human trafficking in the sex slave market. There are some people who are unemployable until the IT market is reformed. When most of the jobs are gone, I expect there to be some sort of social program like a basic income that is paid for by taxing the companies who use robots and AI and automation instead of people to do work. There are a class of poor people who cannot afford a used PC and an Internet connection to learn how to program to be able to apply for the jobs. They cannot even afford good clothes for an interview. I wanted to form my own company that helps out people who are unemployable and see what they can do. Provide on the job training and mentorship to get them up to date with modern technology and programming. I think there is a key need to provide jobs for people who normally wouldn't get hired due to gaps in their resume, their age, a mental illness, exploited in human trafficking and overcame it, etc.

Hoasi 11y ago

This is reminiscent of David Graeber’s essay “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ and its commentary on the Economist http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/08/labour-markets-0/ http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/08/labour-m...

hamoid 11y ago

"many people hate their jobs, but they are considerably more miserable doing nothing" Why assume we can either work or do nothing? Of course doing nothing sucks! What about doing something instead? Could the problem be that most people have been trained to do what they're told, instead of being creative?

ScottBurson 11y ago

Here's an interesting counterpoint, arguing from economic evidence that at least in the last decade or two, downward pressure on wages doesn't appear to be primarily the result of automation: http://prospect.org/article/it%E2%80%99s-not-skills-gap-that%E2%80%99s-holding-wages-down-its-weak-economy-among-other-things http://prospect.org/article/it%E2%80%99s-not-skills-gap-that...

ChuckMcM 11y ago

Nicely written[1] and not as hyperbolic as others but to buy in you have to get past this: The job market defied doomsayers in those earlier times, and according to the most frequently reported jobs numbers, it has so far done the same in our own time. Unemployment is currently just over 5 percent, and 2014 was this century’s best year for job growth. One could be forgiven for saying that recent predictions about technological job displacement are merely forming the latest chapter in a long story called The Boys Who Cried Robot—one in which the robot, unlike the wolf, never arrives in the end. This paragraph does an interesting double switch and it is that switch that is important. It is demonstrably true that throughout history, displaced workers have cried the warning to other that soon, their jobs would be on the block and what would they do then? And through out history that doesn't happen. To understand why that doesn't happen you have to understand the causal relationship between work and spending. People spend money, how they get that money to spend, whether it is waiting tables at a restaurant or Daddy's trust fund doesn't really matter, it gets spent for "goods and services" (which we'll just call goods). And other people figure out ways to provide desirable goods in order to attract someone to give them money in exchange for that. But no where in that transaction is there a specific "job" there is only money and goods. Take for example blacksmiths and auto mechanics. In the 1850's there were lots of blacksmiths and perhaps a handful of auto mechanics. In the 1950's there were lots of auto mechanics and a handful of blacksmiths. So what happened? People started driving cars, stopped riding horses, they spent money to get goods and services for cars, stopped spending money to get goods and services related to horses or wagons. Conceptually, people spent part of their money on transporting themselves and their stuff around. Other people provided goods and services around transportation technology in support of those people. As the technology for transportation evolved, people who provided goods for the previous technology found fewer and fewer customers, people who provided goods for the new technology found more and more customers. Net of everything else, same "number" of employed people, but the way in which they were employed changed. They important bit is that not spending, that kills jobs for everyone, changing technology just moves around who can find employment and who can't but the number of jobs stays about the same. The third vector is productivity, which is to say when it took 10 people to do X units of work toward producing a good or service, and now it only takes 1 person, that is a productivity gain. You can pay that one person[2] twice as much as any of the other 10 people and come out ahead. So more productive implementations win over less productive ones. But even with productivity gains, when you're now spending perhaps 20% for the same goods, you now have the 80% you are not spending on those goods available for still other goods and services. So 9 "jobs" get eliminated in one market and 9 more different jobs get created to supply the other stuff the now freed up money can be applied toward. The key here is eliminating certain jobs does not lead to unemployment in the large, but eliminating spending does. You lose jobs in a recession because people spend less, you gain them back more slowly if technology change has created dislocations (like it did in the Steel Mills.) But if a robot takes away your current job, it doesn't mean there doesn't exist another job you could do. So economics aside, there are very real social justice issues around retraining and making available resources when conditions cause problems, but the luddite view that there won't be any way to earn a living, or that we won't want to or have to, is not well supported by the evidence. [1] Not something I often say of stories in the Atlantic [2] Remember, it is money seeking goods not "jobs"

metasean 11y ago

Obligatory link to Manna by Marshall Brain - http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm (different chapters explore different possible outcomes)

sktrdie 11y ago

I strongly believe in universal basic income and that being forced to work is a form of slavery. I also believe that if you let people do whatever they want, sure you'll have 90% or more just doing nothing all day, but you'll have those 10% doing something great. Also, capitalism is really not that great! Builds societies that nurture exclusion, self-interest and survival of the fittest. In 100 years, when robotics has automated pretty much everything (this is inevitable), we'll look back at these days and laugh about how we used to build societies where people worked most of the day, rather than just lived most of the day.

nothing 11y ago

When I was a kid, I instinctively felt (did not have any kind of intellectual ability at that age) that I was in a trap. I can NOW supply language to my instincts. That instinct gradually grew into a concept - or a non-concept - and at 35 while still not sure what IT was - started saving, saving and more saving. In a country with high interest rates - that helped. I finally quit in 2010 at 50 - exactly 50. I spent the last 5 years doing absolutely no work for money. I never felt that I was missing out on anything at all. And I am sure I will never ever have to ask for help outside my family - unless of course any one of us is struck by an expensive disease. But then what that mostly would mean is physical pain. So we are now getting mentally ready for pain. Preparing to endure unendurable physical pain, which I personally have never experienced before. I do not feel like I am prostituting myself. That takes a lot of misery out of my system. I never ever switch on the TV, but spend a lot of time reading random stuff off the net.