I bet that when we get over the hump of robots doing all the work, on the other side we’ll find SURPRISE more work.
People imagine work as a finite quantity, as if we could use it all up and then it would be done and no one will have to work anymore. The guy who wrote this appears to make a living wringing his hands about what we’ll do when robots do everything. I submit this to you as evidence that there’s always something else to do. Your job might be bullshit, but it will still be a job.
This is the key right here. At a given tech level, unnecessary work is infinite, but the necessary quantity of work is finite. And we’ve already surpassed that at our current tech level. We live in an era of abundance, with plenty of food, clothing, shelter, utilities, and other necessities of life for everyone. (In the developed and most developing areas of the world, at least)
Yet our cultural propaganda still insists that anyone who doesn’t surrender at least half their waking life to make someone else richer is a subhuman beast that deserves to suffer and die while all around them housing sits vacant and wasted food rots on the shelves.
So yes, our lives will have more meaning once the robots allow us to acknowledge that our current culture is batshit insane, immoral, and unethical and we then create a culture that allows a more meaningful life.
Unfortunately, that’s our current solution to having filled the necessary quantity - make up more bullshit jobs. More bureaucracy causes more problems, but also provides more jobs! Then we need people to fix those problems - more jobs! More servant-work and busywork is unpleasant (and not really needed) but hey, more jobs! Then we need people to supervise those unhappy workers - more jobs!
But there are other possibilities for work that isn’t strictly necessary - research and experimentation, creative work, arts and entertainment, luxury, preservation and repair, therapy and companionship, etc. Perhaps if we had a culture where we had more meaningful lives, we would value more meaningful things over busywork and bullshit work. There would still be infinite work, but it would be the work that people chose to do.
I found this Intelligence Squared debate instructive, listened to it on our NPR affiliate so it was shorter than this version on yootoob:
Jaron Lanier said some really apt (IMO) relevant things here. The premise is clumsily worded. Worth a listen.
Probably unavoidable. Maybe quietly sanctioned. And carefully, surruptitiously monitored to keep participants beating each other up and not trying to cause trouble.
(There’s probably a SF novel there, but I bet it’s already been written.)
Apparently Protestants and people living in Protestant societies suffer more from unemployment. “Psychic harm from unemployment is about 40 percent worse for Protestants than for the general population.”
I’d say it’s an open question, and it depends on the society we have now. How much meaning do we get from the things that we would be left with if we didn’t have work anymore? Does our society respect people who don’t earn money and who find meaning in non-economic ways? Are they seen as a drain on society or people who add to our communities? Is sufficiency or material gain seen as the goal in society? Where productivity gains are made, who benefits, and how? What is our relationship to the owners of the machines that take our work? What are these machines built for, and why would we still be given them if we’re not earning money? What about our human robots in the developing world - do we care about those people, and how much freedom would they get? If everyone has the time and resources to travel or live where and how they want, that could cause major problems - it’s nice to be in the 1% who can though.
He better get some bodyguard robots then.
Those already exist. Mostly during the Bush/Cheney interregnum, several of my friends were employed to design and create autonomous robots that will do things humans won’t, by which I mean slaughter humans without regard for moral niceties.
Some of those robot designs are in active use by the Obama administration, although an interesting thing has happened due to military trade protectionism - killer robots typically have human soldiers in nominal command by remote control (even though apparently the soldiers have a better than 90% record of accepting the “kill” decisions of the robots, and even though the process is apparently psychologically damaging to the soldiers). The robots are capable of complete autonomy - they can be programmed (for example) to destroy anything resembling a person carrying an AK-47, such as a resistance fighter or the stencil-painted cattle of your neighbor - but that autonomy is leashed in order to preserve the power of generals and admirals.
When there is no need for human workers, the sociopathic .001% who will control the robots will have no need to allow us to continue to breed or feed ourselves. This is one of several reasons we need to reverse the consolidation of wealth and power into fewer and fewer human hands.
So, as I think Lessig might have said, learn to hack or you will be hacked. We need to make sure that we don’t end up with a ruling class that seeks immortality for themselves and starvation for everyone else.
Ok lack of meaning due to lack of jobs.
Quick poll anyone feel the invention of the washing machine has made their lives lack meaning?
And why did we settle down to agriculture? Beer. And beer ain’t no mistake.
There’s no end to the amount of research we could do, the things we could discover, and the toys we could invent.
Yes, our lives will have meaning, so much more than they do when we’re forced to do ‘busy work’ to ‘support the economy’ when we could be doing something meaningful.
What’s the argument for NOT automating everything we can?
Unfortunately, that’s easy. Ask yourself, how well does our society take care of those who cannot find work?
If a person is both unneeded and disarmed, what happens to that person? Do they prosper and grow strong, reveling in their freedom from work? Or are they out on the street looking for a shower, or a fix?
In The Expanse books, there’s something called, “basic assistance”, where anyone who needs it gets a bare minimum of shelter, clothing, and food. I think that kind of welfare state stuff, we could automate the hell out of. It’s the finer things in life, the wine, cigars, wooden boats, perpetual motion machines that homegrown backyard artisans can bring a personal touch to.
The beads that native Americans used to carry value around, were not valuable because they were shiny, or rare. They were valuable because they took time and effortt to create. The Europeans basically brought them counterfeit currency and spoofed their legal system.
It seems quite fitting that status symbols of the future should still remain valuable because of the effort that goes into their creation.
Doesn’t that problem get worse the less automation we have?
It’s an analog scale rather than a binary one, and increased automation creates more opportunities to increase optional tasks, like pure science and research, art, construction, all the way up to luxuries.
We still have an inequality issue, but surely researcher or inventor is more fulfilling than flipping burgers at McDs.
It’s not that inequalities remain, but rather our society works busily towards their increase.
There have been times when people banded together for the common good, and did not let their disagreements prevent them from bending Theodore Parker’s long arc towards justice. It does not seem to me that we live in one of those times; Tea Partiers and Occupiers are more contemptuous of each other than of their common enemies. But hopefully I am wrong; people like yourself are what give me hope.
While that’s obviously sarcastic, suicide rates are actually highest for over 65s. Depression from social isolation and lack of financial means are big factors that could correlate to life without work.
But only a few people will get those positions as something beyond a hobby, and the rest will not be part of the economic system. I just think that a society that has a negative view of socialism or unpaid work is very unprepared to let the robots take over production.
Another question would be: how could people who have no jobs take control of the means of production or have any meaningful influence over their lives? Some people will still need to do certain jobs and a few companies will own a lot of the robots, so how could wealth be shared and the remaining labour be distributed fairly? How much power would governments have over these companies if the wealth is much more centralised than it is now? I think it’s a fundamental departure from the current reality to expect the robots to serve us in the OP’s scenario.
This thread seems to be about highly literate upper class intellectuals.
Stupid people need something to do with their lives, too. So do brain-damaged people.
Such people aren’t inherently less deserving of consideration than those more intellectually suited to be artists, inventors, and philosophers.
When I was younger I worked at manual labor, lifting building stones and digging ditches. I worked with more than a few stupid people - some of them quite literally mentally handicapped by birth, others by physical damage or miseducation - who were able to experience accomplishment and gain the respect of others through their ability to do a simple job reliably and honestly. Interestingly (to me at least) one’s intellect has nothing to do with how much I respect a person; some of the finest people I know are not clever, and some of the worst are extremely intelligent.
Oliver Sacks wrote of how some profoundly brain-damaged people, despite mental disabilities that cause them great stress and discomfort, can still perform agricultural labor and find a certain tranquility therein.
But the first jobs to be automated away are always the jobs most suited for people of less mental capability. Like planting and weeding and harvesting and lifting heavy objects, for example.
There’s also art and other creative tasks. Most people who have what today are considered mental illnesses (and even most disabilities) have lovely minds that are just poorly suited to the specific and very artificial society that we live in.
We’ve got fucktons of people here, we benefit more from embracing diversity than we do from treating intelligence like it’s something that comes off of an assembly line and only exists in one form.
In past lives, when I had five engineers stuck on a problem, I didn’t need another engineer, I needed an admin or a janitor (I’ve seriously pulled random people into meetings and made my people reframe the discussion…either the newbie gave us a great insight or the process itself helped them get past their barriers the vast majority of times).
I’ve always gotten more out of well motivated ‘average’ people than the ‘best of the best’, with the only exceptions being those people who were so contagiously enthusiastic and unafraid of making mistakes that none of us could keep up with them.
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