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A world without work

theatlantic.com

31–40 of 187 posts

Re: A world without work

#31

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.

Read Veale's The Creativity Myth. What you call "creativity" can be automated much like anything else. Emphasizing creativity would work for an extra couple of decades at most, so there's no sense in building, say, brand new educational institutions around it. Check out the N.Y. Times article announcing the creation of the Camp Fire Girls (co-invented by Gulick, a co-inventor of basketball) - there was a panic then about automation and the problem was not solved, it has just been continually deferred as the pace of change increasingly wreaks havoc on our ability to prepare children for adulthood. When the buzzwords of today's companies are "innovation" and "disruption", you may translate them to "unpredictability", "chaos", and "social insecurity". No one even tries to design to rightfully earn a place in a human being's short life cycle - Silicon Valley designers often enough end up making dopamine squirrels for poor toddlers on touch screens. The designers then heed warnings against giving their own children screens, ban TV's in the home, and send the kids to an unplugged school. Fewer are able to escape the swathe of the indefatigueable machine. Have we made some thing more clever than ourselves? Yes and no, but the no shrinks. Perhaps instead some could follow Kant's idea of treating humans solely as ends, never as means, a sort of human-centered chauvinism or "humanism". Or one can conclude that if machines lack human flaws, and out perform homo sapiens at their supposed virtues, they deserve the future. New genders, new sexualities, new body images, these might get some attention economy for a few, but they must be rewarded by a mass of bored, a creativity economy is the fame and long tail economy we already have. The assimilation of new distinctiveness will approach instantaneousness. And computers can be reformatted much more easily because they have no "self" to worry about or reinforce.

Re: A world without work

#32
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2. I know this is anecdotal, but when I was unemployed I often didn't socialize because I simply couldn't afford the luxury. Many social activities are fairly expensive, depending on your area, friends, and preferences.

Great point. This gets at the impossible endogeneity of the subject. Are the jobless miserable because they're poor, lonely, bored, or distraught? Well, perhaps they are lonely and bored because they can't afford to socialize. And perhaps they're distraught because they're failing to live up to a cultural expectation that, with more wealth and more redistribution, wouldn't exist. Etc etc. One last thing, apropos of n…

> Where else could this sort of pride come from?

You're still focused on a person only being able to gain value to society by working.

You're also conflating working to survive (our day jobs) with doing tasks or that you would can choose to do (the student attending a class, the retiree building sawhorses, the 20 something contributing to OSS, the full time homemaker). Not being required to do the first doesn't mean you're suddenly not doing the second as well.

Re: A world without work

#33
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 scal…

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)!

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.

Re: A world without work

#34
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 ar…

Unemployment clearly leads to degradation, both of cities (Youngstown) and of individuals.

The question I think we're debating is whether the flow of causality goes unemployment->poverty->social degradation (this is your case, I think) or whether unemployment leads to social degradation more directly, even among people who don't currently need money (so, removing the variable of poverty) because it's a terrible blow to esteem, purpose, and community. I think there is a lot of evidence for this claim; see the section Paradox of Leisure.

Re: A world without work

#35
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.

Re: A world without work

#36
post #17

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?

Strictly an off-topic aside, but "mincome" is absolutely awful. The concept might catch on but hot damn is that a bad name.

Re: A world without work

#37
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!

Re: A world without work

#38
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 scal…

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)!

People theorize that all of life is busy work. No one should care that they thus theorize.

Re: A world without work

#39
post #17

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?

I am not a sociologist or psychologist, but I do not belive humans can handle significant idle time in a socially productive way. Look at the disaster zones that are most public housing projects.

Humans evolved needing to work to survive. It's in our nature to become restless and sociopathic if we have nothing to do.

Re: A world without work

#40

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 ba…

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 scal…

Comparative advantage.
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