Buckminster Fuller on technology and useless jobs
openculture.com
openculture.com
How many Einsteins never left the patent office? What other contributions were never made, because dude who could have made them decided food and shelter were more important than aspiration? That is a societal loss, and we only have ourselves to blame for it.
Imagine that they are fired. How do they earn their subsistence? Earth is now too crowded to live by hunting, and subsistence farming is even worse than wage slavery. The only available option is some kind of organized work for the marketplace.
'Internal Knowledge', is the paperwork that goes into knowing a specific job in a company. It multiplies rapidly as managers keep inventing more of it to protect their positions. It is useless, and cannot be used in another company. Companies use it as a form of punishment, you have to do this in our particular way or you won't get promoted.
But from what I've seen, people are dying to learn new things. Companies just don't want to teach employees anything new, so they won't leave and find another job. I've worked factory jobs, where this was the defacto policy. Don't teach any new skills to the new hires, they'll pickup and leave.
I'd imagine there are many positives to the system that you are ignoring simply to find the next Einstein. Which is kind of a fallacy, because science is not done by a lone genius but by teams of researchers over decades.
Maybe there are people in the world whose aspiration is to do those unglamorous things that need doing, just to keep the societal wheels properly greased. There are absolutely enough people in the world who are civically-minded enough that they'll take on crap work that needs doing, without obligating everyone else also to do what is, for most of them, also crap work, but which doesn't do those "socially necessary" things, and instead merely shuffles papers from one folder to another.
I fail utterly to see how "there are some things that need to be done" is most appropriately addressed by "Ok, make everyone do something..."
EDIT: Phrasing
If something needs to be done, someone has to do it. The person who is going to do it either must be forced (slavery) or compensated such that they do the unpleasant, necessary thing voluntarily (payment). If others, who do not want to do that thing want to reap the benefits of it, they can choose to force the other person to do it through violence or they can produce something else of value to exchange. That's why everyone who is able-bodied is ethically required to contribute to society: the only alternative to free exchange is forcing someone to be your slave. For those who are not able-bodied, the able-bodied among us voluntarily enslave ourselves on their behalf, to lift their burdens. But if you have the means to work and you choose to be a burden on society or your loved ones, that is an unethical choice.
"The solar system can support a trillion humans, and then we'd have 1,000 Mozarts, and 1,000 Einsteins. Think how incredible and dynamic that civilization will be," Bezos boasted during a speech at New York's Yale Club, which was transcribed by Business Insider.
I wonder if can't figure out something as simple as how to allocate the basic rewards of our system socio-efficiently if the future will turn out more like "The Expanse" than "Star Trek". And if we focused on simply getting all the near-Einsteins out of the patent office (as you said) here on Earth first how much faster the goal of colonizing the star system would be achieved.
I bet a number if naturally gifted kids just don't receive such a boost, and don't spend as much time and effort on unfolding their unique talents. Young Mozart worked a lot, sometimes against his wish.
I play (alto and soprano) recorder and violin, amateur-casual, and listen to almost all styles there are at least occasionally, and depending on mood and context find amazing things in many places. The kind of music Mozart knew is such a small subset.
What may have suffered, not sure, is the ability to play an instrument. Given how easy it is to listen to music made by others anywhere there is no need to learn how to play. On the other hand, using computers and modern music tech in general you can compose and play music that Mozart had to get a hundred people together for, and you don't need to train your synthesizer to play your notes.
When I imagine I would meet a medieval society the one thing that I would want to bring is a synthesizer (and solar panels and good speakers), and a huge electronic library of music. We have come a looong way in the last one- to two hundred years, with ever increasing speed in new musical developments.
I think Jeff Bezos is smart which is why I doubt he holds to any comments indented for layman audiences.
I know people even in supposedly high-value intellectual workplaces (like academia, where I am) who don't find any value in their work but stay in it for completely external reasons which have nothing to do with knowledge-generation (family/PI/societal expectations, fear of disappointing others, fear of being unprepared for the 'real world').
I agree with the point that it's the pressure to do anything that keeps people[1] in shitty lifestyles.
[1]: using "people" to mean those who have sufficient privilege to have the flexibility to choose their work.
edit: word
People who could afford to be were more well rounded.
People also use to live in smaller communities. So they understood each others' roles. Many people in smaller communities also had multiple roles/jobs. There are studies that small towns also produce better athletes for this reason https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279469393_Community...
With specialization I think that the overall general knowledge of people has declined.
The volume of knowledge the protagonist displays is phenomenal, in my opinion.
>He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
Of course he was also a visionary in this idea of alienation, which makes up the core of his early work and is persistent through his mature work. To him, this alienation from one's species-being to achieve ends set by others is only a core part of class society, and it can be overcome.
But it is true that specialization leads to alienation, or (a term I think might express it better) isolation or disconnection. I'm disconnected from the fish I eat, because I'm a computer programmer and not a fisherman. I'm disconnected from the professional fishermen and women, too. That may not have been the sense that Marx meant, but it's also true.
> where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes
and
> society regulates the general production
seems like it's still a bit of a challenge
There was no Golden Age. People have always been the way they are now.
I don't know how old people are or how much they've dealt with people who are truly poor or uneducated, but the narrowness of experience is really telling when you do. How much taste and sophistication is one supposed to develop if they can't even read, or never travel? But that was the norm not so long ago.
"Back in the late 1940s, when the Census Bureau started collecting this type of information, roughly 20% of the population moved in a given year, Ihrke referenced. Since then, the rate has fallen to between 11.5% and 12.5%." https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/americans-moving-at...
I'll give that there is no point in "work for the sake of work", and that bullshit jobs probably shouldn't exist, but the real question comes down to this: If you are not going to earn your own keep, who is going to earn it for you? Why the hell should somebody else's effort be spent sustaining you when they could be following their own aspirations. A 5-year old can understand this, but apparently many college educated westerners cannot (It usually clicks after they start paying their taxes)
A modern economy in a democratic state is built by the collective will of the people. No entity at the top setting rules, no modern economy. So: why the hell should everyone else agree to create and maintain a system that doesn't serve their needs to a degree that, taking into account the constraints of reality and not killing the golden goose et c. et c., satisfies them, regardless how nice a place you've found for yourself in same system?
However, when welfare is badly managed and is essentially given out to anybody, is overpaid because "muh rights to basic standard of living," and without adequate consideration of where the capital comes from to provide the welfare service, then there cannot be a sustainable welfare. The government does nothing but drain capital away.
Poor voters will always vote for the politicians who promise them freebies (out of other people's capital savings!) It is only savers who have skin in the game and who ultimately have the moral right to decide how their hard earned capital should be spent.
Youth for the past few decades have been fed a heavily distorted image of reality where they are expected to believe that capitalists are evil and that government is protecting them from those evil capitalists. It's no surprise they have no idea that capitalists are providing 100% of the funding of their welfare systems, and that their government only consumes the capital - it creates nothing, and cannot survive without the capitalists which fund it.
Capitalists are of course not these evil monsters who only care about getting rich at the detriment of everybody else. They're just regular people who try to improve their own lives, and accidentally improve other people's lives in the process if they succeed.
You really love capitalism: https://www.prageru.com/video/why-you-love-capitalism/
EDIT: I'm also quite entertained (though not in a good way) that we're having this conversation on the internet, in which it's being claimed that the government "creates nothing".
You cannot separate income and especially capital from the system we all collectively buy into (well enough not to rage-vote it out of existence, anyway). It's not magic'd into existence out of nowhere. It is nothing without laws, a military, treaties, some basic market-creating norms, the joint stock corporation, opportunities churned about by trust-busting (when we bother), and so on.
And no, that doesn't mean all your stuff belongs to everyone. It does mean that drawing an absolute and immutable line between what's yours and what's societies is more complicated than "it's mine, so there". There's no context to give capital meaning in anything like the sense anyone today expects, without society, without the state. The whole thing's "unnatural" and just because the system tilts one way or the other when regulation is adjusted doesn't mean any particular direction is absolutely correct or the natural state of things.
[EDIT] and more to the point, the various OECD states seem to have a decent track record of not killing the golden goose, while also protecting basic human dignity and providing more benefits to their population than the economy might give them "naturally" (Ha!) Bad, yes, but then look at what there is to compare them to, historically or now.
evolution, for example, marches forward via experimentation over efficiency: billions of organisms, each slightly different, some highly viable, most marginally so, and some not viable. that's super-inefficient! it has to be easier to find the handfuls of best individuals and propagate them to the next generation, right?
capitalism, too, is inherently inefficient--people deploy capital in all sorts of ways, often profitlessly. it's not like we have one restaurant chain for each type of cuisine.
if the answers are so obvious, why don't we get it right the first time?
My highest "good", and the thing I want to optimize for, is human potential. So maybe Bob wouldn't have been another Einstein, but he could have invented something that made millions of people's lives marginally easier. But Bob had to pay for his (involuntary, on his part) existence, so he ended up driving a garbage truck instead. It's not a bad job, and he's not unhappy, but he knows there's something more, something missing. Do we really want to blame Bob for the structural forces that made "ensuring you can continue to eat" a question he even had to ask?
I'm arguing for a model where everyone is structurally enabled and encouraged to find their own best fitness function, on the theory that such a diversity of thinking and technique will yield a vastly richer world than the "you can have Coke or Pepsi", "Google or Bing", and so on one which we seem hell-bent on ending up with.
EDIT: That's not a question of efficiency. It's one of whether we're structurally dis-enabling people from living their best lives. If we are, what are we trading that for? So the fraction of a percent that already owns most of everything can own a little more of it?
Because, in my categories, when you argue for Capitalism, that's ultimately what you're arguing for: not iPhones and every kind of ethnic restaurant you might want, but more wealth concentration. If that weren't the case, then wages should have risen alongside prices.
Instead, this rising tide is only lifting the biggest boats, while only the waterline is rising for everyone else, and that seems awfully likely to end badly for pretty much all of us. Just look at the history of more or less every other time people have resorted to trying communism in response to exploitation. Those tend to be among the worst outcomes, don't you think?
EDIT 2: Preemptively, no, I don't think the fact that (some) people can buy iPhones or big-screen TVs or whatever means things are great. The real measure of the health of an economy is better taken with things like the prevalence of precarity, than how whiz-bag a thing someone can buy, if they happen to have the right number of monkey status points available at the moment of purchase.
Reshaping the world to be closer to a given ideal may well be foolish and frequently is. But the proper judge of the usefulness of a job is the person paying for it, not a remote intellectual.
The truth is that capitalism is less selfish than communism, because you have to negotiate and produce something that is valuable to others.
We can imagine that society would be well served if we all spent time on our own hobby projects, or if we could subsidize artists to produce creative works...but what about the great bulk of hobby projects and creative works that are ultimately not valuable or desirable to society as a whole?
That is to say, there's nothing wrong with pursuing hobby projects for your own sake and your own satisfaction. But doing that to the exclusion of what people need and want, and then having society subsidize that...that's wasteful and inefficient. It's part of the core reason why communism fails as an economic model.
There's no such thing as a bullshit job.
Change the world by polluting it more?
The idea that employers' actions are motivated by changing the world is a very idealistic view of business. They may have that idea at the start but that idea gets lost very quickly when actually doing stuff. Plus people from other common professions like doctors and lawyers want to change the world. Wanting to change the world says more about youth than it does about the field of business administration.
As in, I’d like to change the world by having a hole dug right over there.
There are various levels of work that can happen around the change.
The lowest level is physical, actually digging the hole. This is usually the lowest paid.
Then there’s the knowledge/expertise level. This is a step up but still pretty lowly. What shape should the hole be? How can we dig it most efficiently and what amount of dirt must be trucked away.
The next layer of work is usually more highly compensated again, feelings, or the sales of holes. How do all the stakeholders feel about the hole? Will this hole help bring someone fulfilment? Do we need more PR to tamp down anti-hole protests? Could an op-ed help sway the council?
The apex layer is usually politics or capital. This is where all the real money is made. Who owns the hole? How are we going to finance the hole? How is it going to increase the value of an investment, and what are the chances I can sell this hole to someone else for more money?
The higher the “level” the work, the more potential for true waste there usually is.
So ok there was one person digging and two people who kinda looked like they were leaning on shovels the whole time. Sure, that’s waste of a sort but to really screw up you need to aim higher.
“Turns out, we spent all that money on the hole project, but gosh darn it, hole investment has cratered and nobody actually needed a hole there and we can’t sell it.”
I'm reminded of when people talking about politics decry public sector waste, then I think of my own work experience and say to myself, wait a minute, they don't think private sector waste exists? Because it's quite huge, and everywhere. Perhaps in real life there is no "proper judge of the usefulness of a job", because as far as I have seen, those who confidently think they know are usually wrong. This is one reason hiring, firing, allocating bonuses, etc., is so challenging and contentious; it's all subjective, and an employee's value isn't always clear.
That includes a wide range of people from gas station attendants to high-middling corporate dudes.
Other people might think differently, maybe that person is depressed, maybe they are depressed because of factors at work -- nevertheless it is a real sentiment.
2. My manager is not really watching out for companies overall profitability. His main goal is to make himself look good and have some BS "accomplishments" on his resume, rise as high as possible in the chain. Eventually this company will go down( for the reasons u mentioned) and my manager will find a new job with his buddies at new place. Repeat.
Why did these companies go down if there aren't any bullshit jobs?
Companies, industries, and jobs all have lives just like organisms. We don't look at a dead person and claim their life was bullshit, because they died, do we?
So every company has a fixed lifetime like human beings, because its law of nature. :D
In optimal conditions, a basic job performed to average standard should be saving life of at least one person. Ideally, of a family. That's no small thing, and that's obviously is going to make the worker proud and self-appreciating.
Hear me out: it used to be that a job, no matter how mundane (a subsistence farmer, a hunter-gatherer, etc.) was all that stood between this person's - and often his or her family - starving and dying. Used to be there was a clear and present connection between even the most basic task, and prolonging and improving life for the person, and commonly also his or her family.
Not anymore. We here in the west have taken this away from most people. No matter how badly they work - or even not work at all - we provide the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy to virtually any citizen anyway [1]. By stripping away the necessity of work we have removed its importance, appreciation, pride, fulfillment and a lot other aspects up top the Maslow's hierarchy.
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[1] not to say "to all citizens at once", but to any given individual? essentially yes.
If anything I'd argue the opposite of what you have to say. People are unsatisfied because Maslow's needs are not being met. I work and I'd say I do it well but I don't make enough money to guarantee shelter for myself.
the first depends on what you consider "worthwhile". for example i think the advertising industry could disappear without detriment to society.
but agreed on the second point, as long as there are problems, there is work to do
In order for A to not have a negative effect, you have to have B.
95% of the labor input of farming has been wiped out over the past 200 years, and yet hunger is a smaller problem than it has ever been in the course of human history.
The anarchist Bob Black had plenty of interesting things to say about this, but a good generalization of one of his key thoughts is that any job worth doing will have people volunteering to do it. If no one ever had to want for anything in terms of food or shelter, we'd still have firemen. We'd still have doctors. We'd still have farmers. We'd still have teachers. These are all jobs with intrinsic meaning, beyond the paycheck.
Employs millions, but is ultimately a nationwide make work program to satisfy congressional districts. USA encourages a byzantine system that substitutes waste for the appearance of choice.
There's this perception by both left and right that wealth is a zero sum game - that it isn't created, only taken.
That's too close to Maoist-style re-education for my taste...
I think we need to have more adult learning opportunities. And, that this has to come from governments, unions, and employers all working together.
Take for example car manufacturing plants. We know those factories are going to close, they always do. That means 1000 to 2000 people laid off. Wouldn't it better to have a 4 day work week, with 1 day of education. Perhaps learning auto repair, welding, or some other skill that people can fall back to or transition to.
But, the only way to get the 4 day work week, with 1 day of education, is to have a large social shift in how things function.
The problem, ultimately, originates from greed for material possessions. It also originates for a need for meaningful work and contribution to society.
I'd love a world where, if I quit my job, I could live in subsidized housing with free food and transportation.
But how do we "pay" for it? Yes, in theory, we can automate so much food, shelter, and energy production that the cost of living is so low that it's essentially free.
IMO: The way to do this is to keep the bullshit jobs, but figure out how to let people retire young. Perhaps there can be some kind of government-managed program where, once someone performs 1-10 years of full-time, minimum-wage work, there's enough money in the system to sustain that person in government-managed housing, with government-managed food, clothing, ect.
At that point, work becomes truly optional.
Furthermore, for people who choose full-time work, we can also do things like pair cost reductions in housing and transportation with shorter loans. Instead of targeting lower monthly payments, we can target shorter terms.
This sounds like a nightmare and to me it wouldn't feel like I'm free at all...being so dependent on the government seems like a terrible idea...Who would want to be so reliant on the government for such basic needs?
That's why I suggest working towards shortening loan payments, so someone can have a career and get similar benefits.
This is a framing designed to get attention but is obviously empty. "We" don't "invent" jobs. There isn't some big council of job inventors we all sit on with the purpose of giving everyone a right to exist. People and organizations decide to hire people for various reasons, and people sign up to be hired---usually so they can make money. Jobs are agreements between people. This is true even of government jobs in a democratic society: people are hired by various government agencies which, with a couple of jobfare exceptions, hire people for reasons of their own---not because of a mandate to make up jobs for people. This is a plea to an imaginary decision-maker.
Of course, it's quite possible for the supply of workers to exceed the demand for workers. It's not a pretty sight - read up on the Great Depression for example. And that seems to be exactly where we're headed right now. People who once worked in jobs that no longer exist thanks to technological advance and market forces, who have no alternative ways to make a living, and are getting shamed as lazy moochers for it. That's how revolutions happen.
If I run a company, my goal is not to hire a bunch of people to do useless "work". I want as few such people as possible, not just because I have to pay them, but also because they slow everyone else down doing the work that actually earns money. In a capitalist economy where inefficient firms can go bankrupt, why is there demand for people who will do useless work?
One possible answer is that we don't actually live in a capitalist society - that government influence prevents real capitalism from happening. There is some truth to that position, but I doubt that people who promote the "useless jobs" theory think that less government involvement is the solution.
I think the correct answer is that the "useless jobs" theory is flawed. No company is deliberately hiring people to do useless work. (Some empire-building managers within companies may do so, however.) The jobs are useless because of inefficiency in the company, not by design, and a more efficient company would find something real for those people to do.
What I think you're trying to say is that the employee doesn't perceive any meaning in the job. And if you do mean that, I can whole-heartedly agree with you.
And, arguably, the employee can't perceive any meaning in the job because they can see that the job doesn't benefit society in any meaningful way.
It's not clear to me what the solution is, either.
And if the answer to this dilemma is to throw them out on the streets because they're obviously lazy and/or stupid, exploiting our hard-earned tax dollars with their immoral ways - or to just keep swelling the ranks of unemployment and disability and "retraining" programs that will never lead anywhere - then the people who are still able to make it are going to face some very nasty shocks.
Also.. about the occurrence of more Mozarts..and Einsteins...they will be tempered with more Hitlers and depressingly even higher proportion of ‘average joes’ who will all consume more than they produce. That’s when the cart will tilt and tip.
I fear we have all passed carrying capacity long time ago. For our planet, about a billion is a good number. If we want to be ‘fruitful and multiply’ we will have to find other suitable habitats for ourselves or alter ourselves(genetically is one way) to be compatible with our new environment.
This is assuming there is no other life forms out there that is already completing and searching for resources.
Having said that, I have become more comfortable with the notion that rather than numbers, quality of being is better. Human evolution is random mutations. We are products of a chaotic unpredictable fickle system. That’s scary. I wouldn’t want to perpetuate or encourage it unless we have some understanding or grasp over who we are and where we are..
The question should be what do so everyone can live a good life. Maybe some want to work to have a good live, others not. The next question would then be if and how a society can afford the individual live styles.
Lets discuss in a more philosophic, post-capitalistic way.
If the means of production are all automated, what does that mean for our society? Do we rail against automation in order to retain traditional jobs? How would that be materially different from Keynes' idea of economic stimulus by making jobs to dig holes and them in again?
Don't think of jobs as employing people. Think instead of society spending people on jobs. When we didn't have to spend a third of our people on growing food, we were able to spend them on manufacturing, and society was better off. If we don't have to spend as many on manufacturing, we're able to spend more of them on computer programming, and society is better off. If we can automate less-valuable work, we can spend our people on more valuable work.
For any individual person without a job, this isn't necessarily a good deal. "You lost the thing you knew how to do, now you have to go learn how to do something harder." That's uncomfortable. We as a society need to do better at helping them learn the next thing.
But the concern seems to be that we're going to run out of "next things". What if there's no work to be done? I don't think we're close to getting there. It's like the farmer wondering what will happen when the factories have produced a car for everyone, and so there's no need for factory workers any more - not knowing that factories are going to produce more than cars, and that factory work isn't the final stage of the economy.
Society needs to have some sort of plan in place for people when there are too few, too difficult jobs left.
Farming? We're close. Factories? We're getting there.
Completing automation of writing software? I mean, we're not writing machine code any more, but we really haven't even started. It's not clear that we're close to being able to start.
Completing automation of scientific discovery? Completing automation of new product ideas? Security? Writing novels?
I mean, I'd hate to say that none of those things could be automated. And yet I can't believe that everything will be.
But even if it happens, then what? Any scheme you propose to handle it is at the mercy of the AGI. If it doesn't agree, your scheme doesn't happen.