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Are jobs obsolete?

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Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#21

Post by Jare »

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?

Yes we could: replace 'work' with 'contribute' and it makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't believe in the mid- and long-term viability of a society that supports its members without requiring them to participate in its existence, development and improvement. Without some form of obligation, it would stagnate into a world of (so to speak) couch potatoes too easily.

If I had a home, food and health care as a basic right, what I would do? Raise my child with undivided attention, care and love. Try to make his environment a happy, safe and stimulating place. The kind of stuff that modern society apparently considers optional, or not valuable at all.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#22

Post by mtrn »

psb217 wrote: post #11
mtrn wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

English is not my native tongue, so thanks for the suggestion. (Now that you mention it, I found both words in the dictionary.)

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#24

Post by [deleted] »

angstrom wrote: post #16
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.

[deleted]

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#25

Post by philwelch »

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…

For one thing, population growth in industrialized countries is already at or below replacement levels. The problem is solving itself. It turns out economic development is the solution.

For another thing, population doesn't matter much anyway because the demand for most occupations probably grows linearly with population regardless of technology. You don't need linearly as many engineers, but you do need linearly as many doctors, policemen, firemen, cleaners, repairmen, prostitutes, soldiers, nurses, dentists, veterinarians, barbers, yoga instructors, and dog groomers.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#27

Post by philwelch »

I love how the media overreacts to everything. Here's a pretty obvious maxim: nothing is as good as it seems at its best, and nothing is as bad as it seems at its worst. To wit: the recession and slow recovery of the last couple of years are just that, a recession and slow recovery--they aren't a harbinger to the end of capitalism or conventional labor or employment. The jobs are already coming back.

Psychologically, people seem to have a basic need to do something productive with at least a good chunk of their time, and jobs do fulfill this important need. The jobs might become more abstract and more indirectly removed from everyday necessities, and hours might even drop, but I don't think they'd go away.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#28

Post by kennu »

[deleted] wrote: post #24
angstrom wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

The problem is, people have limits to the amount of immaterial and material products they can consume (limited time, space). So eventually so much stuff is being produced, mostly automatically, that nobody can consume it any more.

The only solution would be to start increasing the quality of the immaterial and material products, putting more and more human effort to designing each one, but I think pretty much the opposite has been happening.

To me this seems like a natural consequence of a market-based economy, which will by default try to minimize costs and labor until they approach zero. So eventually we'll have robots that build more robots and produce everything we need, while the majority of human kind is unemployed.

Not that I'm an expert on economics, just trying to think about it logically.

Re: Are jobs obsolete?

#29

Post by read_wharf »

danielharan wrote: post #26

"That's because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need." Really? We found a way to cure cancer and power our economy with clean energy?

We have enough to live as well as we've ever lived, which is pretty well.

There'll always be something more. Some day, when a sizable portion of humanity lives to 115, we'll consider the genetic limit of 115 year life spans to be as important as cancer is today.

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