Yeah, whenever anyone responds to the issue of automation taking jobs with, “well, that’s good - the people whose jobs are replaced will just get jobs building and maintaining robots and they’ll be better paid!” really don’t seem to understand the economics of the situation. If every person rendered unemployed did get those jobs, they’d have to be paid a tiny fraction of what they were getting before to make that work (but they won’t, of course). I still hear people say things like that about self-driving cars, despite the fact that we already have auto manufacturers and mechanics (and self-driving cars will also result in fewer cars being sold, ultimately). Sure, some new types of jobs will be created, but it completely fails to make up for the fact that whole classes of employment will become obsolete.
Sadly, it’s more likely to be just more of Republicans blaming unemployment on “those people” who don’t “want” to work, while insisting we need more (and more aggressive) policing and bigger prisons to protect “good people” from the ravening hordes while slashing public services. If recent history is any indication, that is.
Fuck it. After I am done programming robots to take all teh jaerbs I am gonna live a life of planting tomatoes, making cheese from my cow named Mooford Brimly, and getting liver disease from my vineyard.
Then how will all those layabouts be able to afford things in the new economy without jobs? You some kinda socialist, Boy?
In all seriousness the sooner a reasonable basic income across the board can happen without ‘oh hey these people make x per month. we’ll just jack all of our prices up.’ The better.
But, but… Bucky Fuller!
“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
come on, have you seen that cooking show with the one guy whose face has no emotions and the other guy who is breaking down all the time and together they’re in love/hate? Everyone agrees groms make the best eating.
The thing here though is that while productivity has been increasing at a rapid rate and has never been higher, the amount of wealth (normalized over time) the average person has in US has remained basically constant since the mid 1970s. Automation hasn’t made us all richer, or given even a decently sized minority more leisure time because the normalized price of things remains constant relative to the normalized wealth we have. All the excess profit that’s being generated in ever growing amounts never gets put back into the economy but instead simply sits in complex fiscal devices that don’t really serve anyone but the original owners. When you try to harness these types of fiscal devices you get explosions of credit then default then the obscenely wealthy people get to pull more money out of the economy via arbitration and collection, essentially building and deploying a money trap for the less well-off.
We can keep increasing productivity till the cows come home, but as long as the profits of increased productivity don’t go back into the economy to participate with the general public, then it’s pointless, and nobody’s going to benefit besides the people who already have the most money anyway.
And that’s why we work more than ever even though we’re producing more than ever. Marx, eat your heart out, for the means of production, the product itself, the profits, the workers, and the economic output of the wealth generated by the products are completely divorced from each other and piped into the pockets of the richest few percent.
That wasn’t a new thing – Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000–1887 (published in 1888) presented a future history where by 2000 people lived lives of if not complete leisure, one in which they only worked a few hours a week but lived better than even rich people did in the 19th century. What’s going to be our next stereotypical date of utopia? 2100 seems awkward – are we going to push it to 3000?
