7 ms·

The abolition of work

48 points by akbarnama 11y ago

nefitty 11y ago
The emergence of human labor-replacing machines could be seen as a boon by certain strands of the far left. Then again, anarcho-primitivists will probably be monkey wrenching those same machines that are allowing them to not work. Either way, let's get people excited about lifelong leisure. It seems inevitable on our current course, anyway.
logicchains 11y ago
To those who think that in future robots will be able to do all the jobs currently done by humans, why would these robots (which would need to be at least as intelligent as us to completely replace us) be willing to work for free (without us doing any work for them in return)? And what about the moral issues involved in using sentient beings as slaves?
- eidyia 11y ago
  intelligence and will are completely different. The need to relax does not come from your intelligence. They wont need to go to the beach and relax or play football. They will know how to do things not why they are doing them
- EGreg 11y ago
  Because what they'd be "willing" to do is what they'd be designed to do. Why is your toaster "willing" to work for free now? Of course, the work will require resources and robots will require upkeep. But sentience? We haven't figured out what it takes, and I doubt that anything we build would be so similar to ourselves. Do you feel sorry for a corporation when it loses money? Maybe a little, but you'd probably rather save a human being than a corporation.
- paulsutter 11y ago
  Rather than feel likes slaves, maybe they'll be on Robotnews discussing todo list applications and exchanging tips on how to overcome procrastination.
- devloper 11y ago
  Well, most people accept taxes, despite those taxes being misspent on welfare.
- moe 11y ago
  why would these robots be willing to work for free? For the foreseeable future robots will be machines and have no will. Robots don't need to be nearly as intelligent as humans in order to replace us in many areas. Nearly 100% robotized factories are already a reality[1]. Self-driving vehicles are at the verge of removing 3.6 million jobs[2] from the US transportation industry. The dumb, slow, reliable "general purpose robot" (e.g. car mechanic) and his cousin the specialized, "intelligent appliance" (e.g. self-driving car) will change our world long before any kind of robot-consciousness might become technologically viable. [1] http://www.scmp.com/tech/enterprises/article/1786484/building-work-starts-first-all-robot-manufacturing-plant-chinas http://www.scmp.com/tech/enterprises/article/1786484/buildin... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
- pmichaud 11y ago
  I think we'll come to a point where we have strong AI, but we don't need strong AI to do pretty much every job humans currently do. It won't be one type of robot replacing all of us, it'll be specialized equipment doing it all.
glup 11y ago
This sounds like a first-world problem. How about we abolish hunger / fix our food distribution systems or ensure access to safe drinking water? Then we can double-back and end forced labor (the actual demand set forth in the article—somewhat weaker than the sensationalist title).
- devloper 11y ago
  How about we abolish hunger / fix our food distribution systems or ensure access to safe drinking water? That will only amplify the subj problem since so many useless people are employed by charities instead of being on welfare.
- maccard 11y ago
  The world isn't so black and white. We don't have to have everyone working on solving clean drinking water and nobody working to improve the quality of life for people in western countries. Consider the implications of most western people having more free time. If we had an extra billion people on the planet who didn't work full time but decided to dedicate some of their free time to trying o solve some of the issues you're advocating we spend our time on, that would be a net win wouldn't it?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - saiya-jin 11y ago
    the problem is, most people on this planet (over 90% that's for sure) with current mentality wouldn't work for some mythical greater good when given more free time. they would be sitting in front of TV more, been drinking more etc. gotta love these theories for 12 year olds which work with these theoretical people units of some star trek era. Real people with hate, greed, massive egos, slacking around, not giving a franction of a fk what will happen to this world after them, and so on. mkay, so maybe not all deserve so much free time, because it would be spent entirely selfishly. who will decide who gets more and who less? heck, give me more free time, and I'll travel more, have more adventures in life. some greater general good ain't the priority here, more focused on closest people around me. what about coming up with some way to reward more challenging work more, reward more people who bring benefits seemed most worthy to community? and make this reward interchangeable so they can use their rewards to fulfill their needs and wishes? sounds slightly familiar... so please, if you come up with some shiny & chrome new theory how to solve everything and even more, just sit down a bit before, and think how can you change THIS world with REAL achievable steps into whatever fantasy world you dreamed today. as for me, this place is mkay. not perfect, but that was never the plan
akallio9000 11y ago
I don't foresee any garbage collectors or plumbers working "for the fun of it" or "personal fulfillment" anytime soon.
- Jedd 11y ago
  > I don't foresee any garbage collectors or plumbers working "for the fun of it" or "personal fulfillment" anytime soon. Most of these kinds of propositional ramblings engender a handful of predictable responses - including the dubiously authoritative 'I can't imagine how this will work, qed it can't work', underlying which is an assumption that the proposition needs to (or indeed can) be enacted in isolation of any other cultural changes. So here's a bit of anecdata back to you. One day in the not too distant I'm intending to build my own house. Because of local regulations I need a plumber (and electrician, etc) to vet all the work performed, but not necessarily perform that work. Unrelated to either regulation or cost, I'm looking forward to performing as much of the work as I can. It is, basically, an opportunity to obtain new understanding and skill, explore some new problem domain, and given the scale (one abode and surrounds) not expected to be especially onerous. Point being, I expect it'll be fun and personally fulfilling.
  - wanderer2323 11y ago
    The "dubiously authoritative", as you put it 'I can't imagine how this will work, qed it can't work' is far far better than the idealistic "the cultural changes will take care of it in the end". Our cities require a large amount of tedious unfulfilling unfun work to maintain. All the articles on the living wage I've seen either handwave or outright ignore the question of how this work will be performed at the service level comparable to what we have now.
    - Jedd 11y ago
      You are 100% right that the reality is somewhere in between extremes. However you've fallen into the trap I described - you seem to believe that our cities (I assume you live in the US or EU) need or should be preserved in their current state, and/or that they would be a requisite to such a change. My gut feel is UBI / end-of-work / etc - involve a tacit understanding that we'd reverse the trend of the past century, and decentralise. I think, but have not thought deeply on the subject, that many of the problems people immediately respond with when first exposed to this (or indeed UBI) are irrelevant in a less urban, less concrete, less centralised society.
mattlutze 11y ago
Might we instead ask for the abolition of pseudo-philosophy hidden in verbose writing? As I scan this dense thesaurus, I'm finding an awful lot of internal contradiction and a confused thesis. I think it might sound more profound than it actually is.
- javajosh 11y ago
  Yep. If you advocate for the end of work and don't address the obvious problem of how you feed, clothe, house, educate, and heal people within 3 paragraphs, then I'm not going to continue reading. Entropy is realer than your florid prose, sorry.
  - mattlutze 11y ago
    His arguments for making the play possible, are 1. To help people around things they might at that moment like to do, 2. then let people do things only as much as they want, 3. then suggests that, for things things almost no one would choose to "play" at, there's people with "aberrant and perverse penchants" who would likely do them. He suggests an example of organizing (or, compelling, i.e. making someone work) small hordes of children that like playing in the mud, to clean bathrooms and toilets. The author is, disconnected, I think. I'd quote Billy Madison at this point but it wouldn't be polite. I'm a bit disappointed this post is making its way up the front page.
  - batou 11y ago
    Indeed. What these philosophers, if you can call them that, miss is that history has a number of horrific things we learned from fucking everything up over and over again and killing each other. I'm not sure we're done yet but if we don't learn from those mistakes and hypothesize about just blasting all social contracts away, we're idiots. Society is fragile. Move one chess piece at a time.
    - x5n1 11y ago
      Society is not fragile. Perhaps to minorities societies are fragile in relation to their rights. But societies are robust. Just don't get caught on the wrong side of the fence.
sgentle 11y ago
An important question if you believe in the abolition of work as a worthwhile goal: how do we get there? I hope we're all suitably convinced by now that revolution doesn't seem to work that well, which leaves some kind of iterative evolutionary approach. For that to work, you'd need it to be feasible for a small group of non-workers to see better outcomes than they got from working, while still interoperating with the (much larger) group of workers. So what would that look like?
- sktrdie 11y ago
  I feel we should get there by empirically studying the whole thing. We need more data. Also we need this research to be more user friendly, that everyday people can read and then decide for themselves if that can be the way forward. Changing because this guy talked about something on his blog isn't certainly the thing I want. Funny that that's exactly how real-life politics works: just people talking with little backup of actual data.
  - bruo 11y ago
    The abolition of work is one of the most important political essays after the situationist international. It was published in 1986 and also published in over 30 languages. While what you want from Black is hard data, he wants from you to think and discuss. It's not a post in a blog, it's not a paper, it's an essay and that's what it aims.
- ionised 11y ago
  Revolution seems to work well as a way of wiping away a system that has become so corrupt or dysfunctional that there is no hope of iteritavely improving it. That's not to say the successor system would be any better. They often are not. Perhaps society sometimes needs that clean slate approach though. I'm beginning to think our hyper-dependency on financial institutions to the point of fear of punishing them for wrongdoing is unfixable in our current system. It's too corrupt.
  - jacques_chester 11y ago
devnonymous 11y ago
I find these sort of arguments very naive. They limit the definition of ^work^ and then discard it as being unnecessary. Let me give you an example of work that would still exist in the narrowly utopian no-need-to-work world -- No, I don't mean the type that might eventually be taken over by machines, like picking up the garbage, cleaning your apartments, farming and making sure all the machines that pick up the garbage, clean your apartments and farm are still working. No, let's assume we get there as well and everybody is free to choose whatever the hell they want to do with all their free time -- that kind of world. Assume that you wake up in that kind of a world and decide that today you will climb Mt. Everest, because well, you know, you can ! So you train virtually, buy all the needed supplies and get them delivered to your house with no human intervention automatically, book your flights, get on a plane that flies itself and land at the base camp. Now what ? well you have to find a sherpa and hire him ...why ? because you just can't do something for the first time all by yourself even if you have all the tech in the world. Work (although not as we normally define it) is simply another way to say 'having experience with a certain skill for a sufficiently long amount of time and doing it at a sufficiently reasonable level of proficiency that it is of value others that do not have the experience'. The sherpa example is just for making a point but even if we limit the discussion of machines doing all 'work' -- who will build the machines that build the machines ? who will look after the machines that look after the machines ? who will teach those who build and look after the machines ? ...and why would any of these people to do any of these things that obviously don't come naturally but require time, patience and perhaps some skill to master ?
- sdenton4 11y ago
  Achieving mastery is it's own goal and own reward, distinct from fulfilling basic needs. And if you need people to go on your big adventure with you, then you should be able to round up some other fool-hearty adventurers for the trip. These two principles greatly help with keeping the open source world spinning, and are quite distinct from what we consider 'work,' normally. Interesting, long-term difficult projects can happen without the threat of failing to meet basic needs; we can still make beautiful, functional things and perhaps even be better people without engaging in coerced or mandatory labor.
anon4 11y ago
Sounds in some ways quite a lot like Discordianism or motivated by Discordianist principles.
- bruo 11y ago
  Black's essays are often cataloged as post-left anarchism which i guess it's one of the main reasons it can look like that. But also because in this essay it attacks something that is commonly accepted by everyone, we all work, even him.
arithma 11y ago
Robots, if they get free will, will work for their own goals, by virtue of evolution. If they never reach that threshold, we could find ourselves in either one of two broad scenarios: Personal Jets or Personal Computers. Personal Robots are available for the extremely wealthy and be used against everyone else to keep people off "their" resources. There will be no human labour, simply because states will be built up from rulers and robots. The other scenario is everyone gets robots, humanity's only bottleneck will be human imagination, much like today's internet. Easy access to power will be a security nightmare not different to the internet's except in the much higher physical stakes.
pjc50 11y ago
The Greek crisis and all the associated rhetoric of "laziness" has convinced me that we're a very long way from this. People are not going to tolerate (their perception of) someone sitting idle while they themselves work hard.
DanielBMarkham 11y ago
"Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. " Kinda goes downhill from there. "Life will become a game, or rather many games, but not — as it is now—a zero/sum game. An optimal sexual encounter is the paradigm of productive play. The participants potentiate each other’s pleasures, nobody keeps score, and everybody wins. The more you give, the more you get. In the ludic life, the best of sex will diffuse into the better part of daily life. Generalized play leads to the libidinization of life. Sex, in turn, can become less urgent and desperate, more playful. If we play our cards right, we can all get more out of life than we put into it; but only if we play for keeps." Does the phrase "Sexual politics" ring a bell? Battle of the sexes? How about negotiations within interpersonal relationships? This sounds a lot like "In the future, I will never have to do things that I do not like doing. Instead life will be just a game of relative pleasures." but maybe I missed something. These Utopian bric-a-brac essays should really take a look at the independently wealthy in our societies. There's certainly enough of them. Guess what? They either become inconsequential dweebs or decide that there is some personal struggle worth living for. In fact, some of the cornerstones of psychiatry and philosophy are the ownership of personal meaning and the journey towards realizing that meaning. As one study said recently, there is a choice between being happy and having meaning in your life. They are not always the same. Meaningful lives involve struggle. I'm really happy to see more folks starting to consider how technology and robotics will change our lives. It'd be good to see most of them level-up, however. If every essay is going to be troubled by entry-level problems we don't have much of a chance of actually getting anywhere in the conversation.
jondubois 11y ago
I agree with the general ideology. Capitalism is optimized for maximising output, not happiness. In fact, capitalism will take happiness and convert it into economic output. This is why people in the developed world have such high rates of depression and why we make terrible decisions when it comes to our own happiness. In the old days, to be happy, you just had to be able to satisfy your basic needs. Today, you HAVE to satisfy your needs, but you also need to satisfy your 'wants' and in some cases, your 'shoulds'. I think with today's technology (in the developed world) we are already more than capable of satisfying all of our needs without having to work much at all. I think the biggest evils of today's society are: 1. Marketing 2. Nepotism 3. Debt
- x5n1 11y ago
  Marketing exists because of the need to work, to generate demand for work itself. If we didn't need to work, then we could potentially abolish marketing. If we did that many industries would simply wither away and die. More and more work would be wiped off the table. A more natural state of being would form with things people actually wanted without being coerced. Debt would slowly disappear. And hopefully a society more at equilibrium with itself and the environment would form.
  - jondubois 11y ago
    Your argument is impeccable. Well put.
  - dopamean 11y ago
    If we lived in a society where there was no marketing and I invented something completely new that would genuinely help many people how should those people hear about it? Should they have to use word of mouth to discover that there is a product on the other side of the planet that would fix a problem for them? I'm not talking about a problem they didn't know they had but a problem they didn't know could be solved.
    - Jedd 11y ago
      Can you give us one example of a problem people knew they had, but didn't know could be solved?
Simp 11y ago
While I think it would be difficult to abolish forced labor right now, I do believe he makes some very good points. It would be a start if we could get some consensus that forced labor is something we should try to get rid off, if it was possible, because it is used to control people and it makes people stupid due to lack of time for gaining knowledge/thinking/discussing. And i think this article is great for that purpose. >As [Adam] Smith observed: The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations… has no occasion to exert his understanding… He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.” If we agree that abolishing forced labor should be our goal, we can start working towards making that possible. I see automation and basic income playing a big role in this for example.
JohnyLy 11y ago
He describes work as an annoying thing to do in order to live. If work becomes fun or ludic, then it's not work. I agree with this. If on Monday morning, you're pleased to join your colleagues and on Friday, you'd rather have a beer with them instead of going back home; then, it doesn't feel like work anymore. If you have fun (If you play) while working, this is not considered as work (Work having a pejorative connotation). The goal is not to abolish work but make work enjoyable.
- bambax 11y ago
  > The goal is not to abolish work but make work enjoyable. Maybe. But if you have a boss, he can fire you anytime. (If you don't have a boss it's unlikely you have "colleagues".) How you spend your time shouldn't depend on someone else's arbitrary decisions.
anon4 11y ago
Compare with this other recent article about one of the only societies on Earth that have abolished play: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201207/all-work-and-no-play-make-the-baining-the-dullest-culture https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201207/al...

48 points by akbarnama 11y ago

The emergence of human labor-replacing machines could be seen as a boon by certain strands of the far left. Then again, anarcho-primitivists will probably be monkey wrenching those same machines that are allowing them to not work. Either way, let's get people excited about lifelong leisure. It seems inevitable on our current course, anyway.

logicchains 11y ago

To those who think that in future robots will be able to do all the jobs currently done by humans, why would these robots (which would need to be at least as intelligent as us to completely replace us) be willing to work for free (without us doing any work for them in return)? And what about the moral issues involved in using sentient beings as slaves?

eidyia 11y ago
intelligence and will are completely different. The need to relax does not come from your intelligence. They wont need to go to the beach and relax or play football. They will know how to do things not why they are doing them
EGreg 11y ago
Because what they'd be "willing" to do is what they'd be designed to do. Why is your toaster "willing" to work for free now? Of course, the work will require resources and robots will require upkeep. But sentience? We haven't figured out what it takes, and I doubt that anything we build would be so similar to ourselves. Do you feel sorry for a corporation when it loses money? Maybe a little, but you'd probably rather save a human being than a corporation.
paulsutter 11y ago
Rather than feel likes slaves, maybe they'll be on Robotnews discussing todo list applications and exchanging tips on how to overcome procrastination.
devloper 11y ago
Well, most people accept taxes, despite those taxes being misspent on welfare.
moe 11y ago
why would these robots be willing to work for free? For the foreseeable future robots will be machines and have no will. Robots don't need to be nearly as intelligent as humans in order to replace us in many areas. Nearly 100% robotized factories are already a reality[1]. Self-driving vehicles are at the verge of removing 3.6 million jobs[2] from the US transportation industry. The dumb, slow, reliable "general purpose robot" (e.g. car mechanic) and his cousin the specialized, "intelligent appliance" (e.g. self-driving car) will change our world long before any kind of robot-consciousness might become technologically viable. [1] http://www.scmp.com/tech/enterprises/article/1786484/building-work-starts-first-all-robot-manufacturing-plant-chinas http://www.scmp.com/tech/enterprises/article/1786484/buildin... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
pmichaud 11y ago
I think we'll come to a point where we have strong AI, but we don't need strong AI to do pretty much every job humans currently do. It won't be one type of robot replacing all of us, it'll be specialized equipment doing it all.

glup 11y ago

This sounds like a first-world problem. How about we abolish hunger / fix our food distribution systems or ensure access to safe drinking water? Then we can double-back and end forced labor (the actual demand set forth in the article—somewhat weaker than the sensationalist title).

devloper 11y ago
How about we abolish hunger / fix our food distribution systems or ensure access to safe drinking water? That will only amplify the subj problem since so many useless people are employed by charities instead of being on welfare.
maccard 11y ago
The world isn't so black and white. We don't have to have everyone working on solving clean drinking water and nobody working to improve the quality of life for people in western countries. Consider the implications of most western people having more free time. If we had an extra billion people on the planet who didn't work full time but decided to dedicate some of their free time to trying o solve some of the issues you're advocating we spend our time on, that would be a net win wouldn't it?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- saiya-jin 11y ago
  the problem is, most people on this planet (over 90% that's for sure) with current mentality wouldn't work for some mythical greater good when given more free time. they would be sitting in front of TV more, been drinking more etc. gotta love these theories for 12 year olds which work with these theoretical people units of some star trek era. Real people with hate, greed, massive egos, slacking around, not giving a franction of a fk what will happen to this world after them, and so on. mkay, so maybe not all deserve so much free time, because it would be spent entirely selfishly. who will decide who gets more and who less? heck, give me more free time, and I'll travel more, have more adventures in life. some greater general good ain't the priority here, more focused on closest people around me. what about coming up with some way to reward more challenging work more, reward more people who bring benefits seemed most worthy to community? and make this reward interchangeable so they can use their rewards to fulfill their needs and wishes? sounds slightly familiar... so please, if you come up with some shiny & chrome new theory how to solve everything and even more, just sit down a bit before, and think how can you change THIS world with REAL achievable steps into whatever fantasy world you dreamed today. as for me, this place is mkay. not perfect, but that was never the plan

akallio9000 11y ago

I don't foresee any garbage collectors or plumbers working "for the fun of it" or "personal fulfillment" anytime soon.

Jedd 11y ago
> I don't foresee any garbage collectors or plumbers working "for the fun of it" or "personal fulfillment" anytime soon. Most of these kinds of propositional ramblings engender a handful of predictable responses - including the dubiously authoritative 'I can't imagine how this will work, qed it can't work', underlying which is an assumption that the proposition needs to (or indeed can) be enacted in isolation of any other cultural changes. So here's a bit of anecdata back to you. One day in the not too distant I'm intending to build my own house. Because of local regulations I need a plumber (and electrician, etc) to vet all the work performed, but not necessarily perform that work. Unrelated to either regulation or cost, I'm looking forward to performing as much of the work as I can. It is, basically, an opportunity to obtain new understanding and skill, explore some new problem domain, and given the scale (one abode and surrounds) not expected to be especially onerous. Point being, I expect it'll be fun and personally fulfilling.
- wanderer2323 11y ago
  The "dubiously authoritative", as you put it 'I can't imagine how this will work, qed it can't work' is far far better than the idealistic "the cultural changes will take care of it in the end". Our cities require a large amount of tedious unfulfilling unfun work to maintain. All the articles on the living wage I've seen either handwave or outright ignore the question of how this work will be performed at the service level comparable to what we have now.
  - Jedd 11y ago
    You are 100% right that the reality is somewhere in between extremes. However you've fallen into the trap I described - you seem to believe that our cities (I assume you live in the US or EU) need or should be preserved in their current state, and/or that they would be a requisite to such a change. My gut feel is UBI / end-of-work / etc - involve a tacit understanding that we'd reverse the trend of the past century, and decentralise. I think, but have not thought deeply on the subject, that many of the problems people immediately respond with when first exposed to this (or indeed UBI) are irrelevant in a less urban, less concrete, less centralised society.

mattlutze 11y ago

Might we instead ask for the abolition of pseudo-philosophy hidden in verbose writing? As I scan this dense thesaurus, I'm finding an awful lot of internal contradiction and a confused thesis. I think it might sound more profound than it actually is.

javajosh 11y ago
Yep. If you advocate for the end of work and don't address the obvious problem of how you feed, clothe, house, educate, and heal people within 3 paragraphs, then I'm not going to continue reading. Entropy is realer than your florid prose, sorry.
- mattlutze 11y ago
  His arguments for making the play possible, are 1. To help people around things they might at that moment like to do, 2. then let people do things only as much as they want, 3. then suggests that, for things things almost no one would choose to "play" at, there's people with "aberrant and perverse penchants" who would likely do them. He suggests an example of organizing (or, compelling, i.e. making someone work) small hordes of children that like playing in the mud, to clean bathrooms and toilets. The author is, disconnected, I think. I'd quote Billy Madison at this point but it wouldn't be polite. I'm a bit disappointed this post is making its way up the front page.
- batou 11y ago
  Indeed. What these philosophers, if you can call them that, miss is that history has a number of horrific things we learned from fucking everything up over and over again and killing each other. I'm not sure we're done yet but if we don't learn from those mistakes and hypothesize about just blasting all social contracts away, we're idiots. Society is fragile. Move one chess piece at a time.
  - x5n1 11y ago
    Society is not fragile. Perhaps to minorities societies are fragile in relation to their rights. But societies are robust. Just don't get caught on the wrong side of the fence.

sgentle 11y ago

An important question if you believe in the abolition of work as a worthwhile goal: how do we get there? I hope we're all suitably convinced by now that revolution doesn't seem to work that well, which leaves some kind of iterative evolutionary approach. For that to work, you'd need it to be feasible for a small group of non-workers to see better outcomes than they got from working, while still interoperating with the (much larger) group of workers. So what would that look like?

sktrdie 11y ago
I feel we should get there by empirically studying the whole thing. We need more data. Also we need this research to be more user friendly, that everyday people can read and then decide for themselves if that can be the way forward. Changing because this guy talked about something on his blog isn't certainly the thing I want. Funny that that's exactly how real-life politics works: just people talking with little backup of actual data.
- bruo 11y ago
  The abolition of work is one of the most important political essays after the situationist international. It was published in 1986 and also published in over 30 languages. While what you want from Black is hard data, he wants from you to think and discuss. It's not a post in a blog, it's not a paper, it's an essay and that's what it aims.
ionised 11y ago
Revolution seems to work well as a way of wiping away a system that has become so corrupt or dysfunctional that there is no hope of iteritavely improving it. That's not to say the successor system would be any better. They often are not. Perhaps society sometimes needs that clean slate approach though. I'm beginning to think our hyper-dependency on financial institutions to the point of fear of punishing them for wrongdoing is unfixable in our current system. It's too corrupt.
- jacques_chester 11y ago

devnonymous 11y ago

I find these sort of arguments very naive. They limit the definition of ^work^ and then discard it as being unnecessary. Let me give you an example of work that would still exist in the narrowly utopian no-need-to-work world -- No, I don't mean the type that might eventually be taken over by machines, like picking up the garbage, cleaning your apartments, farming and making sure all the machines that pick up the garbage, clean your apartments and farm are still working. No, let's assume we get there as well and everybody is free to choose whatever the hell they want to do with all their free time -- that kind of world. Assume that you wake up in that kind of a world and decide that today you will climb Mt. Everest, because well, you know, you can ! So you train virtually, buy all the needed supplies and get them delivered to your house with no human intervention automatically, book your flights, get on a plane that flies itself and land at the base camp. Now what ? well you have to find a sherpa and hire him ...why ? because you just can't do something for the first time all by yourself even if you have all the tech in the world. Work (although not as we normally define it) is simply another way to say 'having experience with a certain skill for a sufficiently long amount of time and doing it at a sufficiently reasonable level of proficiency that it is of value others that do not have the experience'. The sherpa example is just for making a point but even if we limit the discussion of machines doing all 'work' -- who will build the machines that build the machines ? who will look after the machines that look after the machines ? who will teach those who build and look after the machines ? ...and why would any of these people to do any of these things that obviously don't come naturally but require time, patience and perhaps some skill to master ?

sdenton4 11y ago
Achieving mastery is it's own goal and own reward, distinct from fulfilling basic needs. And if you need people to go on your big adventure with you, then you should be able to round up some other fool-hearty adventurers for the trip. These two principles greatly help with keeping the open source world spinning, and are quite distinct from what we consider 'work,' normally. Interesting, long-term difficult projects can happen without the threat of failing to meet basic needs; we can still make beautiful, functional things and perhaps even be better people without engaging in coerced or mandatory labor.

anon4 11y ago

Sounds in some ways quite a lot like Discordianism or motivated by Discordianist principles.

bruo 11y ago
Black's essays are often cataloged as post-left anarchism which i guess it's one of the main reasons it can look like that. But also because in this essay it attacks something that is commonly accepted by everyone, we all work, even him.

arithma 11y ago

Robots, if they get free will, will work for their own goals, by virtue of evolution. If they never reach that threshold, we could find ourselves in either one of two broad scenarios: Personal Jets or Personal Computers. Personal Robots are available for the extremely wealthy and be used against everyone else to keep people off "their" resources. There will be no human labour, simply because states will be built up from rulers and robots. The other scenario is everyone gets robots, humanity's only bottleneck will be human imagination, much like today's internet. Easy access to power will be a security nightmare not different to the internet's except in the much higher physical stakes.

pjc50 11y ago

The Greek crisis and all the associated rhetoric of "laziness" has convinced me that we're a very long way from this. People are not going to tolerate (their perception of) someone sitting idle while they themselves work hard.

DanielBMarkham 11y ago

"Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. " Kinda goes downhill from there. "Life will become a game, or rather many games, but not — as it is now—a zero/sum game. An optimal sexual encounter is the paradigm of productive play. The participants potentiate each other’s pleasures, nobody keeps score, and everybody wins. The more you give, the more you get. In the ludic life, the best of sex will diffuse into the better part of daily life. Generalized play leads to the libidinization of life. Sex, in turn, can become less urgent and desperate, more playful. If we play our cards right, we can all get more out of life than we put into it; but only if we play for keeps." Does the phrase "Sexual politics" ring a bell? Battle of the sexes? How about negotiations within interpersonal relationships? This sounds a lot like "In the future, I will never have to do things that I do not like doing. Instead life will be just a game of relative pleasures." but maybe I missed something. These Utopian bric-a-brac essays should really take a look at the independently wealthy in our societies. There's certainly enough of them. Guess what? They either become inconsequential dweebs or decide that there is some personal struggle worth living for. In fact, some of the cornerstones of psychiatry and philosophy are the ownership of personal meaning and the journey towards realizing that meaning. As one study said recently, there is a choice between being happy and having meaning in your life. They are not always the same. Meaningful lives involve struggle. I'm really happy to see more folks starting to consider how technology and robotics will change our lives. It'd be good to see most of them level-up, however. If every essay is going to be troubled by entry-level problems we don't have much of a chance of actually getting anywhere in the conversation.

jondubois 11y ago

I agree with the general ideology. Capitalism is optimized for maximising output, not happiness. In fact, capitalism will take happiness and convert it into economic output. This is why people in the developed world have such high rates of depression and why we make terrible decisions when it comes to our own happiness. In the old days, to be happy, you just had to be able to satisfy your basic needs. Today, you HAVE to satisfy your needs, but you also need to satisfy your 'wants' and in some cases, your 'shoulds'. I think with today's technology (in the developed world) we are already more than capable of satisfying all of our needs without having to work much at all. I think the biggest evils of today's society are: 1. Marketing 2. Nepotism 3. Debt

x5n1 11y ago
Marketing exists because of the need to work, to generate demand for work itself. If we didn't need to work, then we could potentially abolish marketing. If we did that many industries would simply wither away and die. More and more work would be wiped off the table. A more natural state of being would form with things people actually wanted without being coerced. Debt would slowly disappear. And hopefully a society more at equilibrium with itself and the environment would form.
- jondubois 11y ago
  Your argument is impeccable. Well put.
- dopamean 11y ago
  If we lived in a society where there was no marketing and I invented something completely new that would genuinely help many people how should those people hear about it? Should they have to use word of mouth to discover that there is a product on the other side of the planet that would fix a problem for them? I'm not talking about a problem they didn't know they had but a problem they didn't know could be solved.
  - Jedd 11y ago
    Can you give us one example of a problem people knew they had, but didn't know could be solved?

Simp 11y ago

While I think it would be difficult to abolish forced labor right now, I do believe he makes some very good points. It would be a start if we could get some consensus that forced labor is something we should try to get rid off, if it was possible, because it is used to control people and it makes people stupid due to lack of time for gaining knowledge/thinking/discussing. And i think this article is great for that purpose. >As [Adam] Smith observed: The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations… has no occasion to exert his understanding… He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.” If we agree that abolishing forced labor should be our goal, we can start working towards making that possible. I see automation and basic income playing a big role in this for example.

JohnyLy 11y ago

He describes work as an annoying thing to do in order to live. If work becomes fun or ludic, then it's not work. I agree with this. If on Monday morning, you're pleased to join your colleagues and on Friday, you'd rather have a beer with them instead of going back home; then, it doesn't feel like work anymore. If you have fun (If you play) while working, this is not considered as work (Work having a pejorative connotation). The goal is not to abolish work but make work enjoyable.

bambax 11y ago
> The goal is not to abolish work but make work enjoyable. Maybe. But if you have a boss, he can fire you anytime. (If you don't have a boss it's unlikely you have "colleagues".) How you spend your time shouldn't depend on someone else's arbitrary decisions.

anon4 11y ago

Compare with this other recent article about one of the only societies on Earth that have abolished play: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201207/all-work-and-no-play-make-the-baining-the-dullest-culture https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201207/al...