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The Abolition of Work (2002)

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Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#131

Post by NalNezumi »

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…

>Ergo, the goal of automating a society is not to automate 100% of the work, but to automate (100-V)% where V is the amount of voluntary work available.

Isn't that the economic reality rather than "the goal"? And doesn't this also put an shade on your original argument that it is "the will. A culture change is needed"?

I haven't worked for 20 years but I work in certain automation, and from what I've deduced it is rather that the V in (100-V)% is quite high, and then there's W = a x V (a is an positive constant) that specify required labour, specialization & investment for automation; which is almost always lower in supply than "voluntary work available".

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#132

Post by konjin »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #128
konjin wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welfare is a full time job. Anyone who thinks otherwise has never had to get the right forms filled out, wait hours on end every x weeks at some govt building that takes hours to get to without a car and then fight the bill collectors that buy junk debt to be collected from the poor. The point of welfare is to make not working so unpleasant that a minimum wage job is less work to hold down. This is true across the wh…

I have been on welfare in the developed world and it wasn’t like that at all - I’m very skeptical that you’ve managed to get significant personal understanding of welfare across even a majority of the developed world. It sounds like you’re not thinking of pensioners, for one, who generally don’t have many recurring forms to fill out.

I was not aware 20 year olds could be pensioners.

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#133

Post by jamil7 »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #126
jamil7 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not interested in or know much about self driving cars so I’ll leave it. I think your points about cooking are really off base though. It seems like you’re basically describing mass production which we’ve already had for a long time, a wasteful process that produces inferior food. As for a turing test, we’re talking about a professional chef here. Someone you can take an enormous variety of ingredients to in vari…

The fine motor skill and expert timing are a given in automation, so let’s start by assuming the chef is not doing the physical work. And if we are trying to recreate the experience of eating at this chefs restaurant, then we aren’t taking them any food to improvise with, we will just eat one or two of the dishes they have already designed - so you may be picturing something more complicated than what would actually…

So if a machine does the physical work and if the chef has designed the dishes and likely needs to adjust them to account for differences in ingredients as well as tasting during the process to get feedback, is this actually fully automated?

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#134

Post by chordalkeyboard »

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…

Is your automation company still active?

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#135

Post by missedthecue »

postingpals wrote: post #65
HuwytNashi_002 wrote: post #57

Something tells me this 'academic' will consider himself above the game of labour when work is abolished. Surely backbreaking work is below somebody who manages to cite a philosopher every other sentence! He's a thinker. He's too pretty to work. I'd be willing to bet he's over-educated, has spent large periods of his life on welfare, wears a cravat to the supermarket, and was always told how clever he is. But he neve…

How can one be 'over-educated'? Is that a bad thing?

I've known many people who have educated themselves into imbecility.

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#136

Post by trevyn »

roenxi wrote: post #15
lordwarnut wrote: post #2

The quote that stands out to me the most is: Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren’t free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or-else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officia…

> Work makes a mockery of freedom Being embedded in a flimsy sack of meat controlled largely by deterministic chemicals makes a mockery of freedom. And yet here we are, embodied. Makes a mockery of fairness too. That paragraph is taking a stand against large organised bodies, without taking a sufficiently nuanced opinion on what 'freedom' means. If we take part in a larger body than ourselves, we lose a bit of oursel…

>Even the most hardened individualist has to admit a company gets a lot more done than an individual.

I think a big part of the argument is that "getting a lot done" may not be as valuable as we have been led to believe, and the things that we give up may be more valuable than we have been led to believe.

If we assume that a human often does what is in the best interest of that human, it is not at all surprising that we may have been misled by our fellow humans about where value lies.

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#137

Post by logimame »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #39
50 wrote: post #8

Reminds me of a line by Mark Fisher (1): "Real wealth is the collective capacity to produce, care and enjoy." 1. https://repeaterbooks.com/abandon-hope-summer-is-coming-kpun...

Too bad he killed himself - though it seems entirely in-line with his pessimistic projections of capitalism (that there is "no alternative")

I'm currently reading Fisher's posthumous book, "Postcapitalist Desire: the Final Lectures" (lectures collected and edited by Matt Colquhoun). And it seems that many, including myself, had overlooked Fisher's whole academic project as being solely a negative endeavor, which is partially because his book "Capitalist Realism" was such a huge success and overshadowed his other writings. He was always actively trying to find strategies for a way out of capitalism, finding various kinds of desires in our current society that capitalism was not able to satisfy. I think the most important essay on this matter would be "Terminator vs Avatar: Notes on Accelerationism" (https://markfisherreblog.tumblr.com/post/32522465887/termina...), which I think solidified his position as a left-accelerationist from that point. It's kinda sad that the next well-known essay, "Exiting the Vampire's Castle", which decried the callout culture of the Left, marked the end of his activities on the Internet because of its backlash and perhaps hastened his spiral of depression. His unfinished project - "Acid Communism", might be critiqued as a nostalgic retreat to the 60s and the 70s - but I think he was doing something more subversive than that. My interpretation was that in order to imagine a society without neoliberalism, we need to reclaim the ability to remember that there was a past before neoliberalism. The tendency of postmodern culture (as critiqued by Frederic Jameson and further elaborated by Fisher) was to destroy the ability to articulate about history and time, leaving any sort of progressive change into a stagnated halt. I think his unfinished project was not about retreating to the past, but remembering the past to turn the wheels of history again. Although he may have taken his own life in 2017 (possibly after seeing a glimpse that something might come after neoliberalism, but that may be fascism instead of what he'd wanted) - I still think he died as an accelerationist and didn't succumb to the "no alternative" dogma of late capitalism.

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#138

Post by burntoutfire »

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…

> Food, clothes, furniture, electronic devices, all of these could be produced with close to zero human labor. Why don't we?

For a large subsets of those categories, they already are. That's why, if you mostly buy food that's handled by automation (combines etc.) you can sustain yourself on a $50/month food budget. Similarly for furniture, check out IKEA factory videos to see the degree of automation employed in making cheap furniture. Electronics are mostly also produced by machines, humans do the last stage assembly only (and it's mostly because labor in Asia is just cheaper than sophisticated robots required to perform assembly).

Clothes are more difficult from a robotics standpoint (mostly because, unlike wood, cloth is not rigid/does not retain shape, which makes it insanely tricky to manipulate), so we're not there yet. But, on the other hand, making of the cloth itself, which previously required an insane amount of labor, has been fully automated for a long time.

Basically, once you own a place to live in, you can easily sustain yourself with a very part-time minimum wage job. Make the job pay more and you'd need to work maybe a month in year. Most people don't do that because they want the comforts and pleasures brought by market enough to work extra hours for them (usually up to a full-time job).

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#139

Post by [deleted] »

sapientiae3 wrote: post #117
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…

[deleted]

Re: The Abolition of Work (2002)

#140

Post by neuronic »

burntoutfire wrote: post #138
Iv wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Food, clothes, furniture, electronic devices, all of these could be produced with close to zero human labor. Why don't we? For a large subsets of those categories, they already are. That's why, if you mostly buy food that's handled by automation (combines etc.) you can sustain yourself on a $50/month food budget. Similarly for furniture, check out IKEA factory videos to see the degree of automation employed in maki…

Sustain yourself just means not die in your text. But there's more to it than that.

Most people won't do the $50/month food unless forced. The Soylent-junkies maybe, so if you're some robotic Western software dev whose sole purpose in life is placed in its optimization to be "productive" in a corporatist society.

Food is a central cultural part of billions of people's lives, provides joy and is a critical component in socializing. Food is more than just plain sustenance unless forced by natural or artificial circumstances.

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