This sounds too good to be true. Machines do the boring work and people can work on self-fulfillment. The machines produce more than enough for everybody to have a good time, eat a healthy diet, live in comfortable housing, and enjoy some entertainment and travel.
Nobody judges your idea of self-fulfillment. You can smoke pot (or the future equivalent), watch TV (or the equivalent), cure cancer (or other ills), play games (virtual or real), write open source software (or hardware or life), or get in touch with God (or whoever). Basically, it’s just like now except you get social security at 18.
You can’t work full-time (or at least not for pay) because there isn’t enough work to go around, but if you do something fun that people like, you get a bonus. Work isn’t how you make a living. It’s how you fulfill your social responsibilities—like doing chores at camp.
If this seems unrealistic, consider the alternative:
Things keep on as they are but more so. Imagine 60 percent unemployment. Imagine governments trying to ban automation and create make-work jobs to save the protestant work ethic. Imagine hordes of young people with nothing to do but sell each other coffee and give each other massages.
But you don’t need to imagine. Look at Greece or Egypt or many Middle East countries. Or look at early trends in the United States and Europe.
You can argue the timing, but this is where we’ve been heading all along. If we can adjust, it will be good to be rid of boring, unfulfilling jobs and go back to the Paleo days of hunting and gathering for a few hours before our real jobs—myth-making. Maybe “work” was just a short 6,000-year detour.
The idea of human beings making stuff will be quaint—like a person soldering two billion transistors onto a computer chip. Most jobs won’t be possible, much less desirable. The prospect of piloting a transportation device on crowded highways, waterways, or airways will be terrifying. Nobody in their right mind will let a human with a knife cut into their body to fix or replace organs. Most law, accounting, and other paper pushing will be done by machines that funnel analysis up to a few top-level decision makers.
Some say that robots will just create new jobs for robot designers, programmers, and managers. We can only hope this is wrong. What’s the point of labor saving devices if they don’t end labor?
What could possibly go wrong—other than war, famine, disease, and climate change? But these minor problems can easily be solved by machines. But what if smart machines kill us or keep us as pets? Fortunately that can only happen if we are dumb enough to invent smart machines.
Despite artificial intelligence, robots today have the intelligence of clocks. Science fiction has humanoid robots with intelligence exceeding our own. Real life has robots looking nothing like humans doing our mindless drudgery. Let’s keep it that way.
There will be some jobs left for humans—butler, sales person, scientist, artist, prostitute--but not nearly enough to keep everyone working 40 hours a week. So we just keep cutting the work hours in a week but pay the same until we’re down to two or three hours. It worked before. People used to work 60 or 70 hours a week and received less than we do now. Machines will make everything cheaper so we’ll need fewer hours of future work to pay for current stuff.
But how are we ever going to get from here to there? We can’t trust the market to solve our problems because—well, the market is just another brutal, thoughtless machine. If we want people to cure cancer “just for the hell of it” instead of for money, things will have to change.
Socialism based on class struggle was a bust, but socialism based on technological struggle… How does that even work? Can you dream up an economic system that taxes income from machines and distributes it to humans? It’s like slavery, but without cruelty or exploitation. If we create machines like dogs—just drooling for the chance to serve us—everything will be fine. But if we create machines like cats?
When we look at this future, the policy differences between Republicans and Democrats fade to insignificance. Keynesian spending or Hayekian austerity? Neither. We’re going where no one has been. How do we even evolve in that direction?
Nightmare or utopia? We’d better start nudging in the right direction while we still have a say in it.
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