Voted up for being accurate about the evils of work. Pity the author has absolutely no clue what to do about it, and so little knowledge of economics as to not even be aware of his own ignorance.
It's all about incentive structures, professional specialization, and comparative advantage. If you want to replace work, you have to find something better. The author shows no sign of understanding why they are important.
If you could come up with a better incentive structure that gives people a reason to try, while still exploiting professional specialization and comparative advantage, without creating bosses and managers to regiment life, you could systematize it and start companies that used it which would outcompete existing companies.
I could not disagree more with the article. Work is not evil. Oppression is evil, sometimes the way people treat each other in the context of work is evil. But work itself, especially hard work, is good for the soul.
It's not the drudgery or labor that's so satisfying. It's the sense of working on something necessary. No one would drive rail spikes or write in machine code for fun--at least, not on the scale necessary to actually achieve something. But once upon a time, the tasks were necessary, and those who undertook them rightly took joy in what they were achieving. That's work. Doing something necessary and useful is satisfying, even if it isn't fun.
Automate all you want; I'm all for it. It's one of the ways we make ourselves rich. I'd never argue that writing in machine code or taking out the garbage are inherently good for the soul, and eliminating the need for such things is good. But while they remain necessary, they are a source of satisfaction. There will always be tasks like that, because there will always be great things we can achieve that aren't possible without a lot of work.
I'm constantly pursuing projects, some for pay and some for play. But the funny thing about projects for play: most of them I never finish. The ones that do become great have a lot of the characteristics of work: I can see a need for them, I expect a big payoff for completion, others ask me to get them done, there's some sort of time constraint, I approach in a disciplined way and power through the dull bits. Of course, the inverse is also true: those projects I do for pay which turn out great have a lot of aspects of play: I make them interesting, I learn things, I experiment and inject humor, I have time to make them beautiful, to do things right. Great achievement lies in the intersection of work and play, I think.
I certainly wouldn't advocate unemployment, as this fellow does. I spent a year or so unemployed, once--and with no real financial pressure to get a job. It was absolute misery. My creative and passionate impulses slowly dried up. I always say, "I'll learn this new language when I have time," but in fact I learn things exactly when I don't have time, but need them to get something done. When I had all the time in the world, I didn't pursue all those projects I was so interested in. After a few half-hearted starts, I shriveled into a TV-watching video-gaming internet-reading ball of goo.
I plan to never pursue that lifestyle. I may retire early from financially necessary work--in fact, I plan to. But I don't plan to ever actually stop working. That was hell!
I used to have my freshmen composition classes read Bob Black. Was always interesting, but often hard for some students to see the difference between work, the stuff that gets done, and work, the social construct. I think it's good for everyone to think about the ways in which the latter is alienating (in the Marxist sense) and exploitive, even (maybe esp.) if you're not an anarchist.
Now imagine trash bins that trundle themselves, Roomba style, to the loading lift of a DARPA-challenge AI-drone garbage truck.
The problem nowadays is not really eliminating dull work. We're pretty close to the tech level even where we haven't already reached it. The problem is figuring out an economic system that still feeds, houses and entertains people despite near 100% structural unemployment.
In such a post-scarcity Asimovian future, limited socialism (perhaps 1-5% of GDP) would be a viable option. Socialism misallocates resources. But if you have nearly unlimited resources, why worry about misallocating a small fraction of them?
"But if you have nearly unlimited resources, why worry about misallocating a small fraction of them?"
Because there is no society so rich that it can't misallocate even worse. Yes, I include full post-Singularity societies in that statement.
I think rather than saying "socialism can work then" or even "X can work then" for X in (socialism, anarchy, capitalism, etc.), it is rather worth saying that in that case, the foundation will have changed so radically that it is, correspondingly, time to completely reconsider society's economics from scratch.
The laws of economics will still be in play, and for a very long time there will still be the challenge of deciding which projects we wish to engage in, large and small ("which star do we colonize?"). That is not the problem that goes away. The problem that goes away is the lack of resources for basic happiness for some entity, a world we still live in.
Edit: Actually, for proof I point to modern society. We are already, not to put too fine a point on it, "fucking rich". We have massively more resources than we did even twenty years ago. Yet many of us feel poorer today, because an awful lot of that excess is getting tied up in various things that I will put under the umbrella of "economically unproductive". For instance, in the context of recent state government funding troubles, many people have observed that almost across the board state governments are spending radically more than they did in 2003, yet it hardly seems like they're performing that many more services than they did in 2003. A lot of that is because we are being terribly economically inefficient.
Health care has some of the same problems. We have radically more resources than we used to, but thanks to some systematic failures in the system (pick your choice of excessive centralization or insufficient centralization, for this point I don't care), we are spending way more than we need to. This is proved by people's ability to fly to, say, Argentina, and get virtually identical surgeries (even in a clean and safe environment) for one-tenth the price, give or take a bit. (The exact ratio doesn't matter, what matters is that it is large.)
We should be either getting massively more from our government, or paying massively less, than we did ten years ago, but we aren't. Health care expenditures may still be going up (it is a potential economic sinkhole just by its nature), but it still should be costing less per procedure than it did ten years ago, but it doesn't. (On average. There are exceptions where medicine has advanced so far that it is cheaper for some procedures.)
Unfortunately, it's just not possible to "wealth" your way out of needing to put at least some thought into economic efficiency.
(Also, I personally do not feel poorer and believe that we are still better off than twenty years ago. I am merely observing that A: I appear to be in a minority there, at least among people motivated to post in online discussions and B: we should be even better off than we actually are.)
The point I made was somewhat more limited than what I think you are arguing against. Obviously, wealth needs to be properly allocated or it is useless. However, my argument was merely that the solution to one particular problem ("how to care for people replaced by robots") would be cheap in the particular future envisioned.
Consider how this might work in modern terms. If you can't survive in the modern economy, you are provided with food and a bed to sleep in. We actually have such a system (homeless shelters + soup kitchens) and the cost of providing it is a negligible fraction of our GDP.
The problem comes when you try to add too much to this basic package, or when corruption eats up big chunks of wealth. I don't disagree with any of that.
And you are probably right about jealousy: people will feel poor when they get free health care but immortality pills are only for the rich. But that's a separate issue.
It wouldn't necessarily be post-scarcity, since I'm envisaging linear-extrapolation robotics and narrow AI, not nanotech etc. It would be a normal (larger but not immensely so) future economy that simply didn't have any room for humans on the lower few tiers.
People could move up, because a very large proportion of the labor force was working jobs below their intellectual limits. I think we in the "first world" are a decade or two off the point where this slack pulls taut. At the moment it's mostly experienced as meritocratic good - everybody now has the freedom to reach as high as their native abilities permit. But automation isn't going to stop. The replacement of humans in an economic tier which was fully taut will leave those people with nowhere to go - they can't rise, or they would already have done so. Short of supertech IQ boosters, they're permanently surplus to requirements.
As per trash bins, imagine all materials used in all products were bio-degreadable. Simply throw your waste into a bin in your back-yard, wait 3 months and you have fresh earth. No need for complicated garbage pick-up robots.
Are you saying composting does not work? In Montreal, we have major universities with industrial size anaerobic digesters in the downtown core. They work there.
I'm saying that "Simply throw your waste into a bin in your back-yard, wait 3 months and you have fresh earth" doesn't work. Size isn't isn't the only difference between "a bin in your back-yard" and "industrial size anaerobic digesters".
Take a walk in the woods. You'll see plenty of "not fresh earth" that has been dead for more than 3 months. As I discovered when I used composing to get out of some yard-waste disposal work, composting requires actual work. (I've actually done this a couple of times, the most recent with worms.)
I'm a big fan of "actually earth friendly" as opposed to feel-good. If you cherry-pick the easy stuff (mostly large metal objects), it's actually quite hard to do significantly better than a landfill. And, in a couple of decades, landfills will be a great place to find resources. (We're already harvesting methane from them and it's viable to harvest other things now.)
The US has a waste disposal "crisis" because it created one. Do the arithmetic - the total amount of trash generated in the US over decades could fit in a small corner of Nevada and no one would even notice.
Of course too much waste is produced. And of course, when I said throw it in a bin the back-yard, I left out the details of how manage a compost heap - but do you tell people to put gas in the car before starting it? I am unsure how large metal objects generate methane in a landfill. Generating methane from organic waste is not a particularly efficient form of energy production.
Reducing consumption would be a good first step. Proper product design for maximal recycling and bio-degreadable components would be a good second step. Apartment buildings could easily have digesters. You could easily have them spread out throughout a city. Until we have electric trucks with a clean electricity grid (not very common in the US), you still have a transportation issue.
> And of course, when I said throw it in a bin the back-yard, I left out the details of how manage a compost heap - but do you tell people to put gas in the car before starting it?
Actually, you said that there were no such details. I'll quote again "Simply throw your waste into a bin in your back-yard, wait 3 months and you have fresh earth".
> I am unsure how large metal objects generate methane in a landfill.
It's unclear why you would raise that question. The discussion is about waste disposal. Few metals "compost" and since metal is often useful....
> Generating methane from organic waste is not a particularly efficient form of energy production.
Didn't say that it was, but it can be "free" energy, as can burning. Meanwhile, backyard composting simply wastes this energy.
Me - I think that recycling/reusing energy is important too.
As to the rest, you don't get to ignore costs on things that you like and ignore benefits on things that you don't like. (Refuse transportation isn't a big issue.)
But you would always have up to 3 months worth of garbage in your backyard. And what of human waste, or any waste that is unattractive stinky, or takes up too much room? There will always be a need for infrastructure. The trick is to automate the infrastructure so that humans can be employed on more productive work.
This is why I support automated checkout stands at stores. By automating jobs away, there are more people capable of doing things that we can't automate yet, and more money available to pay them. Example: a store installs the automated checkout stands and reduces the number of cashiers from 4 to 1. Assuming the automated stands cost $0 to maintain (not true, but the cost I believe is trending that way) then the store can have those 3 displaced employees work the store helping customers find what they need. There are now 3 extra people working at a zero net cost to the company.
I think you over-estimate the creativity of the MBA class, particularly in public companies.
While people with imagination and empathy for customers might see this as a worthwhile idea, which would actually positively benefit both the customers and the business, in the rarefied air of balance sheets and "strategy", I'd bet a brick to London that those extra three people would be seen as a cost, and would be made redundant at the first opportunity.
I understand this point, but I kept them hired in my example to illustrate how extra production value is realized when systems are automated like this. I do believe that those 3 employees would be let go. My point is that those 3 employees could go on to be productive in some other capacity in a situation where automation can't yet replace them. They would probably work for another company, but the point remains that there are now 3 extra workers in society.
It's going to happen. Once a human's living wage starts being more costly than automation and AIs, no amount of laws and unions will hold the tide back, nor is taxing the few to support the idle many a stable state. At that point we basically have 3 choices. Contract the population to the ever-dwindling employable remnant, panic and retreat into a Luddite dark age, or switch the economy to some yet-to-be-devised ludic system.
That's in there too, but basically the idea is a lot less work, as in 99% less.
It reminds me of geography class when I was younger and I learned about the primary, secondary and tertiary parts of the economy. We were taught that economies with a large tertiary sector were "better". The tertiary economy mainly produces goods that are not fundamentally important to peoples lives. (Although obviously I think peoples lives are better than they were 50 years ago when it comes to longevity and other health issues, that's not what I'm getting at.)
With developed economies, there were two options that I can see. One was to lessen work hours and maintain consumption levels as technology improved, and the other option, which exists today, is to keep work hours the same (or increase them in many cases), and create more jobs in the services sector, which in turn requires more consumption to keep everything going.
I saw two options instead of two choices, because people were never given this choice.
Basically I think it boils down to this: You can work your ass off to buy stuff you mostly don't need and make someone else rich, or you can be an anti-consumerist, work less and...do whatever you want?
I call my solution to this the "Panera model" everyone clears their own tables instead of requiring bus boys. Same thing would happen for other non satisfying jobs.
What if I'm willing to pay someone $2 to clear my table, and someone else is willing to clear it for $2?
Are you going to say that we can't engage in this voluntary transaction? Because this is basically the system we have in place now and a lot of people are willing to pay and be paid.
I agree this is the ideal method; however, there will be people who will refuse to clear their table/throw away their trash ... then others will look over and say if he isn't doing it, why should I?
I agree. I think that after automation, whatever residue of crap jobs in society should be shared in an equitable way. Participatory Economics (parecon for short) offers one decentralized way of doing this; maybe people know of others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics
If everybody just ceased work at once (no cheating, breathing is also work!) then all our problems would be solved within minutes. No more trash either.
I propose the author goes first. We sheeple need a proof of concept.
I'm worried about the full scale psychological break down that's likely to come from not requiring anything from anybody. pg mentions 'Manhattan house wives' somewhere in his writing. It's that psychological affliction writ large. Some people can auto-impose the structure necessary to not sink into an orgy of escapism, but I'm guessing it's less than 3%.
Imagine the popular culture in a world where it's trivial for people to endlessly indulge their most idiosyncratic whims and vices - where hard knocks no longer cull delusional and generally ineffective behaviors.
This reminds me of another manifesto arguing to expand our ideas of what's possible, 'The Hedonistic Imperative', that takes a mostly pharmacological approach:
All such romantic manifestos are interesting in how they make you think, but the devil is in the details. Humans compete for power, for status, for reproduction; if you somehow remove economic competition you might get something worse, corrupt and oppressive and murderous in another direction.
And the hunter-gatherer past was a bit nastier than this piece lets on. Some alternate views:
Pinker summarizes the knowledge of prehistoric combat death rates: "If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million."
There is a long-standing anarchist critique of industrial society, and both the Unabomber and Bob Black are part of that tradition. The Unabomber just never got the memo that "we tried bombing our way into anarchy back in the nineteenth century and it didn't work out so well".
From the text:
As Smith observed: "The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations . . . has no occasion to exert his understanding . . . He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become." Here, in a few blunt words, is my critique of work.
Then what would the outcome be if man don't have to work at all? Better for some, but worse for many others is my guess.
I believe work is the source of happiness. Happiness comes to you when you see the fruits of your work.
I remember feeling really happy after finishing up a program that I had been working on for a long time. Just seeing it work so perfectly gave me an incredible sense of satisfaction. It was far better from the satisfaction/pleasure I got from doing things like watching TV/movies, going on dates, eating at nice restaurants, etc.
Developing the program was definitely not play either. It involved things (like fixing bugs, coming up with algorithms) for which I had to expend a considerable amount of intellectual energy. It was work, but it was work worth working on.
It's all about incentive structures, professional specialization, and comparative advantage. If you want to replace work, you have to find something better. The author shows no sign of understanding why they are important.
If you could come up with a better incentive structure that gives people a reason to try, while still exploiting professional specialization and comparative advantage, without creating bosses and managers to regiment life, you could systematize it and start companies that used it which would outcompete existing companies.