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Are jobs obsolete?

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Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#11

Post by psb217 »

mtrn wrote: post #7
ttt_ wrote: post #3

Somewhere out there there's a social model that makes a lot more sense and just works, but we can't fathom it right now because we are so busy worrying about competing over pieces on the ground.

As a software engineer, I would love to see all the tedious tasks people do all day replaced by technology. If having money is the only way to stay alive and I had a job, I would even pay higher taxes, just to let people do more of what they might love more (and what in the long run would benefit society in other ways). -- I guess, that this opinion is diametrical to current ideology.

The word you want in that last sentence is "diametrical", or perhaps "antipodal".

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#12

Post by evincarofautumn »

“There is enough food produced to provide everyone in the world with 2,720 kilocalories per person per day”…except that’s not how ecology works. When a species is given a food surplus, its population grows, not the quality of life of its individuals. If you give your surplus food to an area that supports 5,000 starving people, then you have only ensured that 6,000 of them will be around in the next generation to starve even more severely.

“Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with ‘career’ be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?” I’d like to think so. We are just as much competitive creatures as collaborative ones, though, so in a world where needs are fulfilled regardless of whether you do anything, I fear people will have little incentive or inspiration to create.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#13

Post by zanny »

It is more a problem of motivation. Since we have not yet stopped universal entropy to guarantee our unending existance forever, we still have progress to be made.

Too bad we have probably billions of human beings not contributing towards that progress.

We need people motivated to enter the sciences and engineering disciplines to make the future happen. We will probably see our means of survival fully automated in our lifetimes, and besides the imminent highly coupled crisis of global warming / overpopulation / resource depletion this century, we will probably emerge from it in a state where no person born will ever need to toil to survive to the next day.

We might even get to the point where people don't die, or aren't bound to biological form.

But we are too busy complaining about celebrities on TV and our neighbors to have a collective motivation towards progress. The greatest problem to solve in the 21st century is one of motivating people to tackle hard problems to progress the whole of humanity, en masse.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#14

Post by evincarofautumn »

dlikhten wrote: post #8

Can the same argument not be used for the industrial revolution? The job of the specialists was replaced by technology. The job of the orchestra in theaters was replaced by audio recording/playback technology. And the list goes on. Now it is no different, more automation. The real problem is that we keep reproducing uncontrolably. The religiously crazed keep pushing having tons of kids with NO WAY TO SUPPORT THEM. Fu…

Humans are going to mate regardless of religion. The only way to control population growth is to stop increasing food production. We cannot make more people if there is nothing for them to be made of.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#15

Post by ChristianMarks »

Jaron Lanier, recently pointed out, we no longer need to make stuff in order to make money. We can instead exchange information-based products.

The article doesn't mention Lanier's extensive writing on what he calls Digital Maoism: the notion that collectives always solve problems better than individuals, who should give their digital content away for free. If there were some way of monetizing this digital content that did not benefit only a few well-positioned social networking hubs and that did not require draconian intellectual property legislation (which mainly benefits a few monopolists), then there might be some hope.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#16

Post by angstrom »

jerrya wrote: post #10

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Work The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era is a non-fiction book by American economist Jeremy Rifkin, published in 1995 by Putnam Publishing Group.[1] In 1995, Rifkin contended that worldwide unemployment would increase as information technology eliminates tens of millions of jobs in the manufacturing, agricultural and servic…

Peak Labor. Anyone that's ever argued this in the past 200 years has been called a luddite. Yet, in the past 40 years as computers have automated more work, both labor and white collar, it's become clear that the productivity gains are only making it into the pockets of the 20% or so that own investments.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#17

Post by icandoitbetter »

evincarofautumn wrote: post #12

“There is enough food produced to provide everyone in the world with 2,720 kilocalories per person per day”…except that’s not how ecology works. When a species is given a food surplus, its population grows, not the quality of life of its individuals. If you give your surplus food to an area that supports 5,000 starving people, then you have only ensured that 6,000 of them will be around in the next generation to star…

   If you give your surplus food to an area that supports 5,000
   starving people, then you have only ensured that 6,000 of 
   them will be around in the next generation to starve even 
   more severely.
Not sure how well that applies to human societies. Poorer countries tend to have a higher population growth because poor people have children so that they can put them into labor. In developed societies, the general quality of life is increasing while population growth is decreasing, something that contradicts your assumption.

   so in a world where needs are fulfilled regardless of 
   whether you do anything, I fear people will have little  
   incentive or inspiration to create
That's a typical libertarian argument that borders on sadism (is producing great creations more important than living comfortably?). It can also be easily dismissed: Money is not the only incentive for producing art or science. In fact it's far from the most important incentive. Are you saying that important scientists or artists have produced their works merely in order to fulfill material needs?

I wish I didn't have to care about making enough money to survive so that I would have time to pursue my lofty research ideas.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#18

Post by [deleted] »

aurynn wrote: post #6

Charlie Stross brought this idea up on his blog recently; what does a post work-for-pay world look like? What would you do if you had a home, food, and health care as a basic right? Could we even get there with our current basic cultural value being that if you don't work, you have no value?

[deleted]

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#19

Post by jerf »

evincarofautumn wrote: post #14
dlikhten wrote: post #8

Can the same argument not be used for the industrial revolution? The job of the specialists was replaced by technology. The job of the orchestra in theaters was replaced by audio recording/playback technology. And the list goes on. Now it is no different, more automation. The real problem is that we keep reproducing uncontrolably. The religiously crazed keep pushing having tons of kids with NO WAY TO SUPPORT THEM. Fu…

Humans are going to mate regardless of religion. The only way to control population growth is to stop increasing food production. We cannot make more people if there is nothing for them to be made of.

The evidence flatly contradicts this. Give people contraception and reasonable financial security and the reproduction rate drops like a rock. You can argue about the why, but the what is at this point undeniable. There is no need to go around starving people to "control" the population. This suggestion is no longer a fashionably cynical stance to take in the face of hard reality, it's just evil.

We are not reproducing uncontrollably. This memeset needs to take a good long look around, and then die itself, before it gets enough power to do something truly unfortunate... and entirely unnecessary.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#20

Post by icandoitbetter »

dlikhten wrote: post #8

Can the same argument not be used for the industrial revolution? The job of the specialists was replaced by technology. The job of the orchestra in theaters was replaced by audio recording/playback technology. And the list goes on. Now it is no different, more automation. The real problem is that we keep reproducing uncontrolably. The religiously crazed keep pushing having tons of kids with NO WAY TO SUPPORT THEM. Fu…

   The real problem is that we keep reproducing 
   uncontrolably. The religiously crazed keep pushing having 
   tons of kids with NO WAY TO SUPPORT THEM.
That's only the main issue if you're wearing Reddit atheist goggles. Population growth is steadily decreasing in developed countries. On the other hand, automation is becoming increasingly a problem and is partly responsible for the increasing economic inequality we are facing - people with access to the means of production have a lesser need for human labor, resulting in the disempowerment of the middle class.
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