I am reminded of the dumb woman at work who said “how great would it be if they could make a robot to do my job.” “Once the price came down to 5x your salary the company would buy one and fire you. You’d be unemployed and looking for work with all the other people who had been replaced. Yeah, that would be great.”
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I almost forgot, this should be required reading:
In Praise of Idleness
By Bertrand Russell
I think this is the entire essay here: [1932] http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
From this guy:
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I’m a government administrator, and I can say that 90% of my job is being a stopgap against human error. By “error,” I mean greed, laziness, wastefulness and stupidity. It’s definitely not fulfilling work to any extent, but as long as humans are in charge of and a part of the system, I don’t see how my job is either useless or likely to disappear any time soon. I frequently think throughout my day how much of my job would disappear if A.I. were in charge of many of the systems currently mismanaged by humans, though.
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Of course telephone sanitizers wouldn’t actually be on the B Ark, since they’re performing a necessary service.
Although I assume it’s payphones that were being sanitized? Do those even exist anymore?
I don’t mean to get all Death of a Salesman on you, but It is a shame so many good paying jobs are simply about the shuffling around of money, rather than creating anything, or empathy for fellow humans.
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No, no. . I’m pretty sure that’s just a regular moment of clarity.
We’ve got billions of people, and most of them aren’t doing anything that anybody else particularly wants done, are they? It almost seems like the moment we do manage to make anything good a whole bunch of others just want to blow it up. Heck, and that’s on top of discussions on how we treat each other.
Sometimes I marvel at us, we somehow are making incremental progress despite all this.
(note: I Have NO idea how I made that little light bulb happen. . . but . . .neat! I’m going to call it serendipity)
(the moment, not the light bulb)
I completely agree. I’ll get paid more, with better benefits, and have a job that’s easier on my body, all just shuffling money.
Um, if the idea of a couple hundred million panics you, I’d be happy to take it off your hands. When someone says “Oh I wouldn’t quit my job if I won the lottery” I want to slap them in the face. Hard. (unless they are already doing charity work of course). If you can’t figure out what to do without being required to go to your job every day, you need help. There aren’t enough hours in any lifetime to do all of the enjoying of family, travel, hacking, volunteering, that I want to do.
So be sure and let me know if I can help by taking all that worrisome money away from you. Or you could buy what you want and need, then spend you time and money doing charity work. What’s there to panic about?
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Y’know, an empathetic accountant – someone who can handle things like “here’s an unusual situation, how do we arrange it so it’s comprehensible, legal, minimizes how much we have to give up to the IRS – oh, yeah, and I want to put these ethical limits on the investments” – could be a good thing. Though I suspect that requires more than just accounting skills.
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Moderation in all things. Including moderation.
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or bullshit assignments.
Though let’s be fair – some of the bullshit is necessary to make processes work. It is necessary to have someone available to defend the accused even if they were caught red-handed, confessed, and are actively trying to torpedo themselves. Logically it’s wasted energy; practically, it’s a required feedback loop.
Radical!
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Most of the possible explanations you list for why a company might hire someone they don’t need to employ are examples of bullshit jobs.
The little I do that has any real social value is unpaid. If I didn’t have to spend most of my waking hours at my bullshit job to earn the wages I need to survive, I could spend more time doing things that were actually useful or interesting to other people.
Nah, they even stupidly complain about that too. “Millions for playing a child’s game!!!”
In that case the joke is that they never complain about the owners or corporations associated with the game that make much more despite the fact that nobody would pay to watch those old white guys perform on the playing field.
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You have to remind those people that it’s the unions that are dragging the country down, despite the fact that, you know… in REAL LIFE union membership has steadily declined over the years to historically low levels. That usually results in crickets chirping , or elicits a: “Shut up! Just Shut up!, because? Shut up!!”
Some of us like what we do. I mean, it’s not always perfect. Sometimes things get stressful. Most days it isn’t. If I won hundreds of millions and things get stressful at the day job, it would be no big deal because I know I would be going home to roll around in a kiddie pool full of cash.
Slight amendment of nuance:
It wasn’t lies, it was just - bullshit.
What I wanted was a bit of punctuation that was some kind of bastard comma/hyphen. Semicolon wasn’t gonna cut it…
In any case, Ackroyd uttered it to perfection.
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I like your idea, but I have a question. Let’s say I’m an inventor. I need equipment and materials to do my thing. How do I buy or acquire the stuff I need? Is there money? And if there is money, how do I acquire the money to buy my raw materials, if there are no wages?
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Ooh! I bet I can toss in some ideas there.
So, assuming we’re dedicating a tiny number of people to overproduction of the basics (nonperishables, housing, clothing, health care, etc.) and are abusing automation gleefully we can write some of the ‘bottom of Maslow’s pyramid’ issues’.
In the vision that some of us are working on (there would be different options for different visions, obviously) then your motivation should be just to invent amazing, useful, or fun things, right? Since you don’t have to worry about getting taken care of. If you’re stumbling a bit, then we just treat it like we haven’t invented what you’re best at yet.
Some resources would be limited, even with the best of recycling and everything else, so we’d need a mechanism to connect people with their passions. Kind of like what we see at Valve, but in a much broader way.
So, since we’re talking inventors, we’re still kind of in a wide terrain, so I’ll take liberty of giving you a couple of specific things to invent! Let’s say you saw these, and we’re already putting them in a lot of our houses (so we can just replace little projectors and turn your wall into awesome, and can upgrade just by changing projectors rather than comparatively lame and resource intensive/heavy big screen TVs). And you like the idea, but you have something better.
You know about fiber optic tapers, and you know about image guides
And you wonder, what if you did it backwards? With cheap, plastic fiber optics that start the size of a wall in an array, and end with a much smaller (say a couple of inches) input. It could be flexible, and you wonder if you could make something even better, where you could just stick it to a wall and save even more space and really kick that technology up a level. Because that’d be all kinds of awesome.
So, You’re already working with a bunch of other inventors and share a huge makerspace with a few other facilities that cover some more industrial bases, though most of you work independently, because that’s just your thing. This has been great for your other prototypes and such but you’re about to drift into new territory.
So, you hit the internal site and try to see if anybody else is working on anything similar, since that way you can join up and share ideas and might find out they’ve solved some problems you haven’t and vice versa. . . learning is more important than anything after all, right? But in this case again, you’re in new territory as far as you can tell.
So you contact somebody who’s job it is to do precisely what you need (connect you with the people/teams to help get your idea off the ground) or you can do it yourself. You’re bridging a couple of technologies so this may involve getting a bit more information. You find out it’s a pretty easy sell as an idea, and sure enough the process for making polymer fiber optics is just as flexible as you hoped. If for some reason you don’t gain headway or your idea is extremely resource intensive you may have to do something to justify the extra expense, whether it’s a sort of stockpiling for a riskier experiment (though we prefer that to be mostly psychological) or contacting somebody to help set up an internal kickstarter of sorts to help get the extra resources you need.
And pretty soon you’ve created a small revolution of fun.
So how’s that sound? Or if you’ve got something more specific in mind I’m curious 
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