Would a Work-Free World Be So Bad?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
> Plus, in many modern-day societies, unemployment can also be downright boring. American towns and cities aren’t really built for lots of free time: Public spaces tend to be small islands in seas of private property, and there aren’t many places without entry fees where adults can meet new people or come up with ways to entertain one another.
Really? I feel the market for entertainment and those interested in niche activities is as rich as it has ever been.
> “Sometimes people retire from their work, and they don’t know what to do,” Gray says. “They’ve lost the ability to create their own activities.” It’s a problem that never seems to plague young children. “There are no three-year-olds that are going to be lazy and depressed because they don’t have a structured activity,” he says.
I've read the opposite from PG, who suggests that children are now unhappy and depressed because they have no purpose. Many parents are just using schools as daycare [0]
> But need it be this way? Work-free societies are more than just a thought experiment—they’ve existed throughout human history. Consider hunter-gatherers, who have no bosses, paychecks, or eight-hour workdays. Ten thousand years ago, all humans were hunter-gatherers, and some still are.
The authors romanticizing such lifestyles are free to build a cabin in the woods. But one should understand the accompanying poverty that would accompany such a decision.
I could go on...
Besiders, hunting/gathering is a dead end -- it doesn't lead off this planet, which is ultimately what we'll need in order to not be a forgotten about galactic footnote.
Almost all of my illnesses have been contracted either at work or from my partner who contracted it at work.
I think it is also worth noting that our current capital-centric trajectory does not lead off of this planet either. We are far closer to global catastrophe than we are to extraterrestrial colonization.
... All of which have been driven by the application of lessons learned by public health doctors and scientists.
I'm talking about the 1890-1940 activity to make food safe. Stuff like mandatory pasteurization of milk, wholesomeness requirements for meats, etc. You had early 20th century Typhoid epidemics in NYC fueled by bad milk.
If you take a look at longevity and infant mortality statistics, they got dramatically better from 1800 to 1890.
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/MsQfdPAn_0XUdZUoReBfbg
I'd call it 1880-1920, but yes.
All of which you need civilization to properly achieve, and which aren't available to purely hunter-gatherer societies.
A nomadic culture in a moderate climate doesn't cluster to the point it has contaminated drinking water, is floating in its own effluvia, or is breeding epidemics.
Mid-ninteenth century London and New York were pretty horrible. No freshwater supplies, no sewers, no waste removal, horse-drawn transport leaving droppings, urin, and carcasses everywhere, cholera epidemics killing 50,000 people a year.
Absent in-migration, London couldn't maintain its population.
I'm not saying pre-ag life was easy. Simply that early industrial conditions were horrid.
Even many viral infections are far less common thanks to vaccinations and early intervention/isolation.
> Almost all of my illnesses have been contracted either at work or from my partner who contracted it at work.
And this is a social problem, not a "modern medicine" problem. Idiots need to stop going to the office sick. One dumbass knocked out half my office 3 or 4 years back. Came in with a cold, 15 people sick over the next two weeks.
Also you're taking for granted all of the illnesses you avoided merely by being vaccinated for them as a child. Almost nobody in developed society contracts polio anymore, but that doesn't make it any less lethal to groups not acquainted with modern medicine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_diseases_eliminated_fr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_infectious_dise...
When your hunter-gatherer alter ego gets wounded by a spear or an animal, there's a high probability that that wound is going to get infected, and a moderate probability that the wound turn into sepsis and kill you.
And while anecdata don't prove points, let me present to you my opposing anecdote. I recently fractured my tibia in a fall. I had it properly treated by doctors, and not quite three months afterwards all that remains of my injury is a slight limp, which should be gone in another month with continuing physical therapy. Meanwhile, in a hunter-gatherer society, this type of injury would likely result in permanent lifelong lameness, and could easily be a death sentence. But for me it was just an inconvenience -- I only even lost a total of three days of work, because modern civilization thankfully affords me the opportunity to be a knowledge worker. I can deal with catching the occasional cold.
As far as measuring happiness, one method would be levels of stress hormones in the blood.
Infectious diseases, though, are very much a product of agricultural society, as is starvation/famine. We might be living through the century (or possibly, have just lived through the century) where our technology finally enables us to fix these two problems caused by our ancestors' conversion to agriculture.
[0] http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/GurvenKaplan2...
I don't "get" why we're arguing about it at all - we don't need to. In 2016 there exist authentic, functioning hunter gatherer societies and it is possible to witness and document them.
Here is some witness and documentation:
http://www.vladsokhin.com/work/crying-meri/
... perhaps scroll down to the photos of women being cut open and burned at the stake for witchcraft, or the mutilated survivors of tribal justice.
Looks like a real party.
I can't even imagine the hunger and famine they had to endure if the herds didn't migrate in the same pattern one year. Or if a harsh winter killed off your gathering food.
What about all the worms and parasites they probably had. If you look at hunter gatherers today they are all short and thin.
[1]http://www.history.com/news/encampment-discovered-near-stone...
[2]http://www.smithsonianmag.com/videos/category/history/why-wa...
[3]http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/01/10000-year-old-massac...
To that point, there are many people who would, if freed from the need to "work for a living", happily be farmers. The happiest people I know are the farm family that provides our CSA food. And they take more pride in their farm than someone riding a tractor to spray Monsanto chemicals all day. They love their work. If someone gave them a million dollars and they would never need money again, they'd still run the farm just as they do now (although they might give the food away).
Likewise, doctors! People become doctors to heal the sick, not to get rich. Virtually every doctor I've ever met is completely passionate about their job, frustrated mostly by the money-driven bureaucracy, not the patients. And they were taught by professors who couldn't be any happier than they are, teaching a new generation of doctors how to save lives.
Most jobs worth doing would gladly be done for free. If you look at a job and realize that no one would do it if they weren't paid a lot of money (or were desperately trying to stay off the street), you have to wonder if that job should be done at all.
Like garbage men? Or people who work in sewers? Or many of the "dirty jobs" out there? How many of those jobs are important to the function of our society and need to be done but would be grossly understaffed in no one "needed" to work? It is a great utopia to think about if you don't go too deep.
If you have horrible jobs and pay very little for them and the only way you can fill them is by making it a choice between shitty job and starvation, then what's the functional difference between that and slavery?
Oh yeah. Just like slaves could choose between serving and torture and death.
If someone wants more than the basic, though, more than just eating and shelter, they can always go get a job, doing those things that may not be pleasant, but are financially valuable (like picking up the garbage). And since people can choose to not do them in a meaningful way (not just choosing between work and starvation), the jobs will have to start paying real value.
CSA's are different and most families I've met doing it quit some other job to do it. Hell if I didn't want a certain standard of life (one of MY choosing) I'd happily do organic farming and raise animals for food. But I work so I can be happy outside of work and have the freedom to do what interests me. Office jobs are easy, I've done shit jobs for shit pay and burnt out.
Contributing back to society through actions not necessarily normally compensated needs to be brought out as a worth endeavor for employed, the unemployed, the unemployable, and so on.
From an early age we should encourage helping others and volunteering. This is not the same as "you have a nice pencil set and bookbag and should be forced to share it" its the idea that when you have free time here are things you can do to improve yourself and the world around you.
Then we get government and charitable organizations a means to easily communicate to all the opportunities available.
Being idle can really wreck the mind and soul. Never underestimate it
On a side note, most of my uni-lingual friends have often bemoaned not knowing another language despite taking it in school for 3 to 4 years. Not only has the school failed at teaching them basic proficiency of foreign language, the failure has convinced them of the futility of the effort. Talk about unintended consequences...
Right. If you have money to spend on those.
The author is talking about things people can do for free on public land - ostensibly what you would need to occupy people if they had no work or money to spend on leisure.
Dr. Gray is a long-time professor of psychology who has written a book about the subject. What are Paul Graham's qualifications in regards to this topic? What research has he done?
Dubious claims, indeed.
I don't think the author is saying we should all become hunter gatherers. I think the author is using those hunter gather cultures as examples of one where a lack of constant work doesn't bring negative consequences.
You are nitpicking the author's (somewhat poorly made) argument, but not making a counter argument of your own.
As far as I can tell, the counter argument runs this way (please correct me if this is not the argument you are trying to make):
1) People need to work to feel purpose and be happy. 2) People will only work if it is necessary in order to feed, clothe and house themselves. 3) Therefor we must make access to food, clothing and housing contingent on work so that people will be happy.
I have several issues with this argument. The first is that 1) and 2) clearly do not apply to everybody, but to some unknown portion of the population. There is little evidence as to what those proportions are, which makes the argument difficult to evaluate effectively.
My second problem with this argument is that the underlying assumption that we should deny people the choice to be purposeless and unhappy. This seems like an very presumptuous and authoritarian premise. To allow people the freedom to pursue happiness necessitates allowing them the freedom to choose unhappiness.
Totally spot on. A lot of people these days are romanticizinglife as "close to nature" which is in reality life of poverty, deprivation and lack of serious opportunity. Not to mention it might even be lot more harmful to nature as well.
I grew up in a remote village in India. When I moved to USA my father taunted me that he was enjoying the beautiful natural atmosphere of the village while I toiled in AC office and wasting hours in traffic. He told me how my kids will never experience the joy of catching a turtle in hand or knowing how a Jackfruit tree looks like.
He recently visited me in SF and I took him to see the brilliant botanical garden in SF, took him to California's farms and ranches and once in Yosemite we saw several deers crossing the road. He was almost speechless because deers had gone extinct in our village because of poaching. Not to mention he also found the air here cleaner than the village air. (Villagers burn plastic and other garbage in open air).
Maybe because they have this irrational belief that having no money to pay rent is bad?
I think it'd be more relevant to interview retired persons in reasonably good health.
Source: Tyler Cowen, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Pk654J8-5c
Unsubstatiated bull. I've hundreds destinations near me with no entrance fees, beaches, trails, clubs, churches, libraries, parks, etc.
> The primary purpose of the educational system is to teach people to work.
And that's why the curriculum includes civics, american history, geography, literature? K-12 does not perpare students to become workers aside from providing a struture of authority and some discipline.
Let's take a typical american city, cleveland ohio.
Plenty of trails:
http://www.traillink.com/city/cleveland-oh-trails.aspx
Beaches:
http://www.cleveland.com/travel/index.ssf/2015/06/the_10_bes...
Parks:
http://www.clevelandmetroparks.com/Main/Recreation/Hiking-an...
The average American city/town has a population of 20,000, yet 80% of the population lives in a metropolitan area.
(http://www.newgeography.com/content/00242-america-more-small...)
If that's counterintuive, imagine the extreme case of a country with 100 cities of 10,000 residents, and one city of 10 million residents. The median city has 10,000 residents, yet 10 out of 11 millions live in the big city.
If you are interested in the experiences of people as opposed to statistics about cities, the sort of city a typical American lives in is more interesting than a typical city.
Getting paid is orthogonal to the effort. Even if performed voluntarily there is still work that needs to be accomplished.
Even having fun is a hell of a lot of work in all proportion. It's no mystery, work is the implication of existence.
Besides technological solutions create new, unanticipated problems that need to be solved. And this endless cycle is inherent in human existence. We regard present technology as far advanced vs. what there was 2000 years ago, yet we have at least as many problems to preoccupy us as there ever were.
Everything changes, technologies in particular, except for one thing, and that's human nature. We can't escape the essence of our being.
It really doesn't. Machines have been putting people out of work for ages. We could survive it for a while by growing the economy pretty fast, but any time it slows down, things get bad. Look at truck driving alone - it's the most common job in most states, and when that gets even partially automated, it's not going to create that many new problems to be "solved".
But with our current system, someone owns the machines, and the sources of minerals to make then, and make a profit. In the end, this will lead to the ultimate in income inequality.
We have to start thinking about the post-work world, at least for non-knowledge workers, and what we want that world to actually look like. Basic income might be a reasonable component of that.
Like most here, I have great enthusiasm for new technologies, but we aren't served by uncritical belief while ignoring potential or actual limits and unanticipated effects. IOW we shouldn't be consumed by our biases.
Health care is an example of work hugely impacted by technological innovation. Look at imaging, automation of clinical testing, robotics, and pharmaceutical development to name a few. Believe me, these tools are quite astonishing achievements and enormously useful.
Yet with all these marvelous advances, the number and proportion of people needing care hasn't decreased, if anything, there are more. One factor is the improvements granted by technologies enable finding more cases, and finer gradations of illness. More patients and findings means there's more work to be done. It follows that greater number and type of treatment options also requires more work to parse and apply treatments.
Also worth considering is that technologies might actually produce illness, one familiar example is RSI, "carpal tunnel" problems are common in programmers. Consider the evidence that developed nations have much higher incidence of autoimmune and other conditions vs. developing nations, technological differences being one factor. Currently research is looking at adverse effects of circadian out-of-phase exposure to blue light via LED illumination of devices as a source of metabolic disturbance, etc.
Again, the issue isn't whether we'll continue to develop technologies, certainly we will and should. It's equally important to consider unanticipated effects which are inescapable. Sorry to say, but history shows solving one problem more often than not exposes others, and the cycle goes on. That's in no way a criticism of technology or its developers, merely a fact of life.
But the point of automation is that it doesn't really.
One computer software can eliminate 10,000,000 clerical jobs, and that just needs 100 people to write it, deploy it, etc. You don't suddenly need new and expected jobs to create/deploy that software, and those you do are an order of magnitude less than what where needed before.
1) Fall victim to the problems of our own creation- e.g. climate change
2) Never attain the further advancements around the corner
Suppose, for example, we decided we had come "far enough" and halted technological advancement just before obtaining the vaccine, or the antibiotic, and never developed that technology.
We might be able to automate construction, agriculture, manufacturing- but we are still a fair ways from automating science, research, and development.
Technology is not just a tool it's very soon a competitor.
I think it refers to that which society is structured around and makes most of us have to be somewhere at a certain time, doing a certain thing, regularly and for a long time, in exchange of regular payment, within an operation with a more-of-less clearly defined purpose.
There will luckily be always problems to be solved.
Dont get caught in pedantic details.
A world where only e.g. 10% of the population needs to work on anything, and any other work is all automation, still qualifies as a "work-free world" compared to 100% of human history.
>Getting paid is orthogonal to the effort. Even if performed voluntarily there is still work that needs to be accomplished.
It's not, because getting paid implies work you do for the wage, and not necessarily because you like it (as is the cases for billions of people. Nobody, statistically, really considers their calling doing 9-5++ accounting, park valet, taxi driving, serving at McDonalds, waiting tables, garbage disposal, transporting goods, digging for coal, and thousands of other jobs). And even if you do like it, you do it under the terms of one or more bosses, company imposed deadlines, etc, just because you also need the money.
So it could turn out that the only people who would "work" in such a society are those who aspire to rule over others. And since they would be dependent on no one else in society, what recourse would the rest of society have if the "priests" turned evil? Or what if the "priests" got tired of maintaining mundane machines that take care of "useless" people and decided to have their machines eliminate the rest of the population? Then they could have wide open spaces and peace and quiet, and they could all go live on a beach of their choosing while their machines grow food and deliver it to them.
I imagine these ideas have already been done in scifi novels...
If we were to automate all work so the only people who had to work were the ones running the machines, those people would effectively be the state. Everyone else would depend on those people. They would be untouchable, if for no other reason than that, if they were eliminated, the machines would fall into disrepair, and everyone who depended on them would die.
It would be like a future version of MAD: kill the machine keepers, and everyone dies--except not MAD, because the machine keepers would have no need for everyone else. So it would be more like a future where only one nation had nuclear weapons, and they were second-strike capable: they can freely eliminate their enemies without repercussion, because anyone who attacks them is guaranteed to be destroyed by nuclear weapons.
The only ways, then, to keep those people maintaining the machines would be altruism or threat of violence. Altruism isn't reliable, and what good is threat of violence if they can program the machines to protect them and eliminate their enemies?
So it seems to me that the only hope is for the machinekeeping to be as widely distributed as possible. Maybe 3D printers will lead to self-replicating machines and a world where everyone is a machinekeeper. But I have serious doubts, because I don't see how even a self-replicating 3D printer could cover the whole chain of gathering and processing raw materials. I could imagine a distant future where all the natural mines are exhausted, and fortresses are built around old landfills, the only remaining source of raw materials for the machines.
Not in our lifetimes, though! :D
It's after all how we "pick" who goes digging for coal or throws the garbage. Force those people through lack of other options.
"According to Everett, while some might consider hunting and gathering work, hunter-gatherers don’t. “They think of it as fun,” he says. “They don’t have a concept of work the way we do.”"
Under that definition, the "work-free world" the Author is discussing is one where all of our problems are being solved by people who want to solve them and thus we don't need to force anyone to solve any problems they don't want to.
The article isn't making argument about whether such a world COULD exist, but whether such a world is one we should strive towards.
Jokes aside: idle hands lead to new art, science, and culture on the one hand; and trouble on the other hand. For those with a natural inclination for creative endeavors they will explore. For people who have desires to conquer, pillage and plunder they'll go around beating people up and destroying things. For the lazy people that like sitting around, they'll end up just like Wall-E predicts.
But, if those young men aren't angry for not having a job and are entertained by things like video games all day. I don't think you'll have much trouble.
People might take a generation or two to adapt but, we will adapt.
Eventually, doing "nothing" with your life will be socially frowned upon so people will try to find interesting, unique bohemian pursuits if only to appear like an interesting and well rounded person at dinner parties.
Men will certainly do this. Without the ability to make lots of money, men will have to have something to attract women. Men have been doing this for literally thousands of generations. It's not going to change any time soon.
Also, I see a future where people will work out alot more. It's incredible how cheap and easy lifting something heavy repeatedly decreases stress, makes one more attractive to the opposite sex and makes one happy.
In a post scarcity world, I see alot of gyms and not people too fat to get out of their chair. Even without the capital markets or paying rent to spur competition, there will always be the sexual market to spur competition. In a Wall-E world, the one guy who works out would get more women. The woman who worked out would get access to the best men. If both of these groups had nothing but free time, mating market competition alone would lead to an explosion of attractive people. If one was raised not to over-eat or was constantly stressed out from work (in order to survive) then the chances of being obese would drop.
People today are fat because they sit all day, get stressed from work. Poor people are stressed because they don't have enough money. Rich people are stressed (maybe less so) because they are competing to get more money.
If you have massive unemployment from technology, you won't have the social stigma of not having a job. Or to put it another way, you can surround yourself with people who are jobless and you'll compare yourselves in other ways.
We already see this with hipsters. Millennials already are in the first generation of post-Work thinking. They already demand more from a job than just a steady paycheck (often because finding and getting one is so hard). They look for fulfillment, work/life balance and opportunities to change the world for the better.
This will only continue and deepen. Despite media that competes for attention by making more and more dire predictions and alarming rhetoric, the world is largely getting better. More diseases are being eradicated, billions are being lifted out of poverty, billions more are gaining access to the entirety of the world's information.
There are interesting problems to solve and they will be solved quickly in our lifetimes. It will be extremely pleasing to be a part of the world as we eliminate poverty and bring the global standard of living up to where the poorest of us will still be able to live a decent life.
The optimal path could usher in the greatest climb and heights humanity has ever seen. We could make a world better than people 200 years ago could have even imagined.
We could potentially make basically Heaven on Earth if we play this right.
> Edited for grammar and clarity. It's still a bit rambly
Yeah, until we achieve that level of technological sophistication, where human labor isn't needed because much more intelligent AIs and robots handle everything, then we can't truly have a work-free world. Don't get me wrong, the hedonistic Culture sounds amazing, it's just so far from reality as it stands today that it's not even worth talking about as anything other than science fiction.
Star Trek would be another post-scarcity parallel to draw, and again, it's very far from our current level of progress.
Not to everyone, it doesn't.
We need to discuss this today, because we need to determine the path we will take forward.
1) Do we impede the adoption of automation to make sure there is work for everyone?
2) Do we have to keep the increasingly large numbers of unemployed mired in poverty to incentivize people to do the remaining necessary work?
3) Do we allow people the economic freedom to choose whether to work or not and then trust that the necessary work will get done because enough people want power and status?
I personally think 1) is a bad idea and will retard our progression. However, if you believe work is necessary for happiness and we have a duty to provide happiness for everyone, then 1) seems to be the only choice. (The article's point is to make an argument agains this option)
I do think we need a balance between 2) and 3). To me the unknown is how much economic freedom can we provide before we start losing economic output. I don't think we need to have a clear answer for this right now, but we can find the balance gradually by introducing a slowly increasing basic income.
I understand that the best person to take charge of the average individual is themselves, and ultimately one's continued survival is their responsibility. That said, life is pretty sublime for most people where I live and most of the time all needs are met - so survival ranks low on the priorities list. Perhaps the responsible thing to do would be to make it a part of a standard education to teach low-tech survival skills. Boy Scouts was the closest thing I had to this kind of training as a kid, and I still hang on to my boy scout manual if I need knowledge in an emergency.
I try to buy food and manufactured goods made at the local level wherever possible to increase the chances that essentials can be provided if my area were to ever be cutoff from outside support for a long period.
Thanks, I needed a good laugh today.
Seriously though, we can't even agree on what color to paint the shed. How are we going to agree on what path to take as an entire species on the whole planet? Besides that, who is "we"? You and me? The country you or I live in? The EU or the UN? What if someone decides to do something other than agreed upon? Go to war to stop someone from building a farming machine? What about when everyone has a 3D printer, and someone leaks a blueprint for a banned machine online? (Obviously, 3D printers will be banned, then, or licensed, or only allowed to run government-approved software that can print approved designs...and then programmers will be licensed and bonded, or compilers will be banned, or...)
This thing is a huge ship with billions of tiny rudders all turning whichever direction they want. We're basically along for the ride.
Might explain why there are double the numbers of depressed people in the unemployed vs the employed. Not so much a lack of purpose, but a lack of money.
Money might not buy happiness, but its a lot easier to be happy with money than it is without it.
the entire concept vastly downplays the actual number of services people utilize and purchase. how do you automate a lawsuit? which robot knows how to install a new circuit breaker box? and even if a robot could hypothetically discover new oil fields who decides how it searches and where are these mythological solar powered oil field search bots that have close to unlimited range so nobody has to figure out what depot they're stashed in?
finally, how do I build a new computer and phone from scratch when no slave labor exists to create all the components that go into that design since apple and microsoft and samsung and sony all have to go out of business because nobody has any money to buy their devices?
I would google it, but they're out of business since ads don't work in a society without money.
the library card only goes so far. psychological thrillers to academic psychiatry, kids books to romance novels, newspaper articles going back 50 years, but somehow I don't think I'd be able to learn micro-computing circa 2016. It would be back to concepts circa 1980-1996 and the entire field would be tedious again.
yes. a work free world would be terrible. I've thought about it a lot because the better part of my life is spent figuring out how to work less. you notice over time the people who don't have a choice in automation and they get my respect because there's very little chance they're ever unemployed longer than a couple days in their lifetime.
You seem to be saying a work-free world is not technically feasible without reducing economic output. I think if such a world is possible, it is quite far off and dependent on numerous advances in robotics and AI.
However, the article is not trying to say such a world is feasible, but trying to make an argument about whether we should be imparting a value to work besides the economic value that work creates. (I.E. should we value work because it is necessary to provide purpose and happiness).
The point is that the average median person might not be good enough to get a job. If automation makes it so that only 20% of people are employed in any traditional sense that we recognize today; that world would be drastically different than the one we have.
In that world, we have a path where we don't get rid of money but, just use taxes on large mega companies and redistibute that money as a basic income to people without a job. This keeps capitalism and the efficiencies it brings.
With basic income, you still have advertising, you still have companies and you still have consumers buying things. There is still competition to push quality up and prices down. There is still the invisible hand of the market.
It's elegant in that it achieves the goals of eliminating both poverty and forced labor to survive without eliminating the competition that makes the world so damned efficient and effective.