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The Abolition of Work (2002)

theanarchistlibrary.org

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Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#111

Post by joe_the_user »

robobro wrote: post #4

The author is a friend of mine. His work is interesting but it can be pretty snarky. One of his influences is the Church of the Subgenius, an offshoot of Discordianism, of all things. He was apparently sent a mail bomb by another alt.slack user a few years ago...

I've been around the anarchist milieu off-and-on for years and even run into Robert Black, JD a few times (83 and 07 I think). He's an impressively intense alcoholic, impressive enough to keep up with other epic friends.

For an anarchist, he's fond of sic'ing the cops on people. His most infamous stunt was trying to burn down the apartment of some political enemies of his in the 80s, with them in it. Yeah, quite a guy.

He's a clever writer, if not too deep. His writings are a mishmash of anarchist, primitivist, situationist and whatnot. A lot of his humor is taken from Groucho Marx. Good stuff but still better the first time.

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#112

Post by chordalkeyboard »

coffeecat wrote: post #108
pdonis wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the notion that unemployed people should starve because otherwise no one would work to produce food I don't see where anyone is making an argument based on any such notion. I think the reason most people are suspicious of those who don't work for a living is fairness: we all benefit from the many goods and services that our society produces, so we all should contribute our fair share to producing them. I agree that…

> I think the reason most people are suspicious of those who don't work for a living is fairness: we all benefit from the many goods and services that our society produces, so we all should contribute our fair share to producing them. This implies that an employee of a firm like Renaissance Technologies should have the same social status as an unemployed welfare recipient; I do not believe this is the case in our soc…

> This implies that an employee of a firm like Renaissance Technologies should have the same social status as an unemployed welfare recipient; I do not believe this is the case in our society.

No, rather it implies the opposite because the employee is working whereas the unemployed person is not.

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#113

Post by chordalkeyboard »

Iv wrote: post #104
didericis wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many things we consider "automatic" require complex maintenance and upkeep, and inappropriate automation can actually increase the net amount of work needed to be done. It often coincides with a loss of ownership. If you can't make your own value, and you're letting something else make it for you, you might save yourself labor, but you're giving up your ability to create that value. Yes, the system as a whole will pr…

I am trying to not delve into a 20 pages presentation, but I have gone though and through these themes for most of my professional life. The question whether we can really go to 100% of automation is moot if we can go to 99%. Either way it means that full employment is unnecessary and leads to the creation of bullshit jobs. > I think the solution is for more people to learn how to set up their own automation and to a…

> That's my sad conclusion as well. We could get to an automated society with far less pain and much faster if it was decided collectively though.

I disagree. I think we have decided collectively to progress towards automation as fast as possible without unduly impacting people's quality of life.

> Look at car automation: if a city wanted to make automated cars a reality in their streets, there are tons of accommodations they could do: from radio beacons to official maps, standards on how to signal construction work, purposefully designed roads...

I believe there already are official maps and standardized signs in the developed world. I agree that incremental improvement is possible and desirable, I also think people are working on these things already. It is possible that signs could be redesigned to make them easier for machines to read but I'm not sure that's much of a bottleneck.

> Instead, we are trying to design automated cars with the assumption that zero efforts will be made to promote them.

I see lots of effort to promote them, they just aren't technologically ready to perform at scale yet.

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#114

Post by chordalkeyboard »

Iv wrote: post #102
jackyinger wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact of the matter is that automation is far from perfect. There are many tasks that are simple for a human, but fiendishly hard for a machine due to their unpredictable nature. Take driving a car or cooking in a restaurant. How is a machine supposed to know if the meat is a bit too old to be palatable? Would it really be worth it to implement an elaborate apparatus to determine meat freshness, and deploy it in e…

First, the disagreements: no, driving and cooking are not hard tasks to automate. They are stupidly easy if you decide to create the infrastructure for that. You have industrially cooked food, mostly through automated process, in supermarkets, sold as "prepared food". and actually, many cheap restaurants will have several microwaved prepared food in their menu items. Automatic driving is a very easy task in roads and…

> They are stupidly easy if you decide to create the infrastructure for that. You have industrially cooked food, mostly through automated process, in supermarkets, sold as "prepared food". and actually, many cheap restaurants will have several microwaved prepared food in their menu items.

Everyone agrees these products are inferior in quality to the comparable manually produced offerings.

> Automatic driving is a very easy task in roads and cities that are designed for it. Instrument all bus lines with ground wires, put a radio beacon on each crossing and sign, a front radar/lidar to detect obstacles and 90s tech is enough to automate a whole city. If it was desired, we would already be there.

It's not that easy to redesign an entire city to accommodate a second transportation network. A lot of buildings would have to be modified. Its probably better to approach this task incrementally using the existing road system.

> It would be interesting to make a Turing test for cooking. I am sure that there are many robot-made meals that are undistinguishable from chef's preparation.

I'd like to see a cooking Turing test as well because I disagree with you and this is in fact testable, one of us is mistaken.

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#115

Post by chordalkeyboard »

Iv wrote: post #72
avl999 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can survive without working, although your existence will likely be miserable. For a large number of people not working is likely to directly lead to literally death. For most people it is not a choice at all.

In rich countries, less than 1% of the population work on agriculture. We could have a society without starvation even if 99% of the population did not work. The fact that starvation is possible in a rich country is by design. It is not a necessary fact of the economy.

> In rich countries, less than 1% of the population work on agriculture. We could have a society without starvation even if 99% of the population did not work.

Modern agriculture depends on the technology that is created by the other 40-70% of the population that works. Additionally you have to compensate the people in agriculture with something for their labor.

> The fact that starvation is possible in a rich country is by design. It is not a necessary fact of the economy.

It's also a consequence of human rights. We have decided that forcing people to work in the field so that other people can enjoy the benefit of their labor without due consideration is wrong.

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#116

Post by underslung »

daenz wrote: post #6

>Such is “work.” Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it’s forced. This is axiomatic. Work and play are both voluntary to different degrees. You can survive without working, although your existence will likely be miserable. You can also survive without playing, but again, your existence will also likely be miserable. Play is something we prefer to do voluntarily…

>Calling work non-voluntary reveals more about the author than it does about the system they describe: that they feel that they have no choice. They have a choice, but the choice is unpleasant. That is not the same as no choice. Declaring that you have no choice is a result of the inability to confront the weakness to acknowledge the unpleasant decision.

The author is using the term non-voluntary in a different sense. If all your material needs are met, e.g. housing, food and hygiene — then working to acquire capital is voluntary. The pre-requisites mentioned are the foundation of an abundant society. Obviously someone in India is going to have a far greater need to acquire capital to sustain themselves' than your average metropolitan Australian; such is the wealth disparity that currently exists globally.

Don't get me wrong — I believe work is an important component of our lives'. Indeed it can give us meaning and joy amongst other things (perhaps routine as a fundamental). But what I think this author is trying to illustrate is that our current society as a structure leaves zero room for the disciplines that are either a) unexplored, or b) are creative in nature. If it's the latter then it is a mere pittance of what a full-time employee earns. That is the trade-off.

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#117

Post by sapientiae3 »

gfxgirl wrote: post #76

> Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world This is utter nonsense. Many people enjoy their work immensely. To take a HN hero I'll bet Steve Jobs enjoyed changing the world via his work and through that loved his work. I'll be Steven Spielberg loves (loved?) his work. Further, short of AGI, there will always be work. Let's imagine no one had to work anymore. What would we all do? We certainly wouldn't…

It’s strange that people seem to think that work is always a burden - try do nothing for a few weeks and see how that affects your mood.

Work, while has its difficult moments, and parts that can be very tedious, is one of the greatest things we can do.

No beer ever tasted better than one after a solid day’s work, and being part of the advancement of civilisation, even in some small way is pretty much the pinnacle of human achievement.

If you hate working, I’d say change your attitude or change your job.

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#118

Post by fogetti »

pmoriarty wrote: post #61
fogetti wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a very strange way of looking at the real estate industry. They don't determine who gets to live where at all. They simply gather and withhold information that they then offer for a fee. In most situations the same information can (or at least could) be gathered in different ways also, leaving out real estate industry from the loop. Also just to clarify what I mean: real estate owners =/= real estate i…

"They simply gather and withhold information that they then offer for a fee." That's not even 100th of what they do. One of the most important services they provide is that they are the ones who make sure the deal comes together, which means coaxing the buyers and sellers in to agreeing, without which the deals would just fall apart. They show houses for people, which means sitting and wasting time some stranger's ho…

TLDR You basically described what I wrote but in long format instead

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#119

Post by HideousKojima »

pmoriarty wrote: post #61
fogetti wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a very strange way of looking at the real estate industry. They don't determine who gets to live where at all. They simply gather and withhold information that they then offer for a fee. In most situations the same information can (or at least could) be gathered in different ways also, leaving out real estate industry from the loop. Also just to clarify what I mean: real estate owners =/= real estate i…

"They simply gather and withhold information that they then offer for a fee." That's not even 100th of what they do. One of the most important services they provide is that they are the ones who make sure the deal comes together, which means coaxing the buyers and sellers in to agreeing, without which the deals would just fall apart. They show houses for people, which means sitting and wasting time some stranger's ho…

I think a lot of jobs are characterized as merely being "middlemen" don't appreciate how much value bringing buyers and sellers together really generates.

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#120

Post by avz »

Iv wrote: post #70
roenxi wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And calling for the abolition of work is like calling for the abolition of death. Great idea, difficult to argue against. Difficult to implement too. Given the current state of technology, it seems quite likely that all the actual plans for abolishing work will devolve into a small group of low status, probably socially voiceless, people being picked out and made to do all the work.

For more than 20 years I have advocated and pursued the idea that society should abolish work. I am astonished that in 2020 most of our production is not automated. We have had the ability to automate most work for two decades. Food, clothes, furniture, electronic devices, all of these could be produced with close to zero human labor. Why don't we? After exploring a market (agriculture) in order to launch my own auto…

Returns on investment in automation increase with the scale of the system being automated. Therefore, automation promotes centralization of control.

Be careful what you wish for.

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