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A world without work

theatlantic.com

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Re: A world without work

#51

Post by kmnc »

ams6110 wrote: post #39
zzalpha wrote: 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.

Can these needs be fulfilled in say, an MMO?

Re: A world without work

#52

Post by ianstallings »

I honestly don't think this will be much of a problem because frankly most of the work we do today is not essential for living. We busy ourselves with busy work. Ideas have become the product. And since we are so unhappy when we're not working towards something, we'll simply invent something new.

Re: A world without work

#53

Post by cfonger »

For years we've claimed that we're on the brink of a world without work. However I believe that this claim is fundamentally flawed because it goes against Parkinson's law, which we've seen to be consistently true.

We naturally try to gather more material wealth, and this involves having a system where we give bigger rewards to those who work harder and smarter. No matter how much we eliminate menial tasks, we will always find more ways to spend our energy to reward those willing to do so.

Re: A world without work

#54

Post by notNow »

Einstalbert wrote: post #2

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…

Unfortunately, work esp in these current adverse conditions prepares people and teaches them invaluable survival skills that a vision of world without work could produce as an unintended consequence good-for-nothing slobs like in "Idiocracy" where they can't find their butt with both hands.

We need to teach people survival skills without working them to death.

Re: A world without work

#55

Post by methodover »

I really enjoyed reading this article.

I've been thinking quite a bit about work recently. I'm just about to turn 29, and by all accounts I'm fairly successful: I graduated college with a worthless liberal arts degree just as the Great Recession was beginning. After an unsuccessful attempt at copywriting for a couple years, I managed to learn programming. A few years after that and I'm the leader of the engineering team at 12-person startup that looks to be pretty successful.

And yet I'm as unhappy now as I've ever been. And it sucks. Why can't I just be happy with what I have? I've got a steady job, I've got a pretty good income. Why do I feel so awful about my own life?

I've suspected for some time now that work itself is the problem. I'm trading in the best years of my life, my focus, my attention, my time, my life for money. That's the nature of this transaction. I'm trading in this short life I get for cash. I feel like a prostitute.

Honestly I'm sitting here with tears in my eyes thinking about it.

And apparently I'm not alone in how I feel about work. From the article: "A 2014 Gallup report of worker satisfaction found that as many as 70 percent of Americans don’t feel engaged by their current job."

I think the truth is that work is an ocean of human misery, unfulfilled dreams and wasted lives. I think a vast majority of us waste our youth, our time, our energy in fields that we don't give a shit about, when in a better society we'd be able to work on the things we do care about.

Re: A world without work

#56

Post by cookingrobot »

oldmanjay wrote: post #36
zzalpha wrote: 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.

How about "birthright"?

Re: A world without work

#57

Post by daodedickinson »

daodedickinson wrote: post #31
CapitalistCartr wrote: post #8

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 a…

Edit since edit feature fails: 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 in order to righteously earn a place in a human being's short life cycle - Silicon Valley designers often enough end up making dopamine squirters for poor toddlers on touch screens. The designers may heed warnings against giving their own children screens, ban TV's in the home, and send the kids to an unplugged school, but fewer are able to escape the swathe of the indefatigueable machine, or have any coherent and ever-presebt religion or philosophy. Have we made some thing more clever than ourselves? Yes and no, but the no shrinks, not only as the machine gets stronger, but as it weakens us. Some 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 of the attention economy for a few, but they must be rewarded inequally is a mass of the bored; a creativity economy is the fame / long tail economy we already have. The production and 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. People just won't learn fast enough.

Camp Fire cite:http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=2&res=9F00E...

Re: A world without work

#58

Post by oldmanjay »

ilaksh wrote: post #29

"Work" connotes a class distinction. Class is part of this. Subjugation of workers and caste are the origin of the current system. Who owns the machines? Who owns the land? Does a human being have a natural right to live? To own his own small plot of land? Are humans just like common animals, to be yoked or corralled? Fundamentally the intellectual framework is driven by patronage of the highest caste which cannot he…

I'm interested in your view concerning one of the axioms that I infer underlies your political thinking. What do you consider equality, and what do you consider the reasoning behind considering it a desirable goal?

Re: A world without work

#59

Post by x5n1 »

cfonger wrote: post #53

For years we've claimed that we're on the brink of a world without work. However I believe that this claim is fundamentally flawed because it goes against Parkinson's law, which we've seen to be consistently true. We naturally try to gather more material wealth, and this involves having a system where we give bigger rewards to those who work harder and smarter. No matter how much we eliminate menial tasks, we will al…

Has little to do with work and a lot to do with sociology and economics. If you are paying someone, make them do shit. That's what good managers do. And then when this happens the expectations go way up alongside that... and now everyone is a whiny baby that wants things RIGHT NOW!

Re: A world without work

#60

Post by mirimir »

notNow wrote: post #47
mirimir wrote: post #43

While this is a very interesting and insightful article, it might be useful to add a broader historical/anthropological perspective. I'm not qualified to do that. But it's my understanding that development of agriculture and animal husbandry, and much later industrialization, drove huge increases in human population. In part, of course, that was driven by the abundance of food and so on. But there was also the need f…

Are you a eugenicist and human depopulation advocate?

Nope, I'm an anarchist and transhumanist :)

I am concerned that the human population may crash after nuking too many ecosystem services. However, I'm not a biodiversity freak, but rather take a broader evolutionary perspective.

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