Serious question. What would you do for work if we did get a robot to do your job?
Look, we're rapidly approaching a point where all human needs (food, shelter, etc) can be handled by automation. If we reach that point, why do people need to have jobs? Why can't we turn our lives towards something better?
>why do people need to have jobs? Why can't we turn our lives towards something better?
Answer: the basic faults inherent in basic human nature that have prevented us from getting along at any point in human history : avarice(greed), lust, sloth, envy, gluttony, etc. General religious intolerance and ethnic hatred, war, prejudice, etc. And that's just among the so-called normal people. Factor in psychopathic behavior and it's not difficult to find an answer. But that only covers behavioral issues.
Now factor in contributions from natural disaster, drought, pestilence, pollution, scarcity, etc. and this explains why I don't think we have a chance.
Maybe some people actually like that stress and pressure to succeed (lest they starve); takes all kinds.
Because we will likely still be living in capitalist societies in which people increasingly unable to provide value to the marketplace due to automation will still need income to survive, and no one implementing that automation has any intention of doing so in order to usher in some kind of post-scarcity collectivist utopia.
Automation exists to allow the ownership class to reap the benefits of labor without the burden of compensating human employees, not to free the labor classes from having to work.
I’m also a writer and I study the intersection of automation and society.
So while it’s true that most automation engineers don’t think this way, some of us do. :-)
The problem with seeing automation as a means to liberate people from capitalism and free them for intellectual pursuits (a noble and laudable goal) is that it exists to serve capitalist ends. Amazon, for instance, is definitely not automating for the benefit of humanity. They just don't want to pay people.
Although it is good to know someone is thinking about it. I really worry that, at scale, mass employment won't be addressed until it actually threatens the status quo.
Andrew Yang. See his discussion with students at Georgetown Univ. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tuJ0phjFys
or for a longer exposition of his ideas see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTsEzmFamZ8
But the technology, while not liberating, will become more accessible. And I think a lot of people, just as in many decades past, are interested in something beyond bare capitalism.
My hope is that the collectivists can make progress in the coming decades too. We can develop our own open source alternatives to the machinery of dystopia. We can abandon intellectual property as a concept and ensure that when we labor for new development, the knowledge we gain is accessible to everyone who wants to liberate themselves.
And just as a group of hobbyists and corporations built Linux, perhaps we could build our own alternative to dystopia.
Politically right now I think we need unity and we need to stop trying to use the government to solve our problems. The government is a tool of force and force cannot be the way we build utopia except perhaps as defense against those who would have it shut down.
Another question: what proportion of homes had washing machines by year starting in 1928? Large proportions of American homes weren’t even electrified in 1928.
Because humans want more than just basic human needs addressed?
So I don’t believe an automated utopia is going to happen automatically. We’ve got to work to create corporate structures that naturally reward all of the workers instead of a few at the top. Cooperatively run companies are one way to do this. If the major companies of our world were cooperatives, a wide swath of the population would gain the wealth our world is increasingly producing.
But technology alone won’t solve the problem. We need to intentionally structure our society in a way that makes this socialist utopia possible. That’s what I study and I’m trying to figure it out. I’m also a robotics engineer.
I'm interested in reading more about this. Do you have books/research papers you recommend?
I’ve not read Karl Marx but I’ve learned from others that his critique of capitalism is worthwhile and relevant today and has been since it was written.
At one time I found Richard Wolff helpful, including his book “Democracy at Work” about worker run collectives. His lectures may be of value but lately I find him hard to listen to because of how kind of smarmy he gets.
This interview with Murray Bookchin from 1986 was pretty informative: https://youtu.be/kBP_BMOblzc
Otherwise the subject of interest is called “anarchism” or “libertarian socialism” or “communism”. It all falls under the broader umbrella of “socialism”, which is the intentional organization of society to produce a certain quality of life for all people. All of those terms have been heavily loaded by history and it’s propaganda, so you have to search carefully. Pundits of all persuasions will make broad claims about these social sciences, but know this: socialism and the other ideas laid out have a rich and complex history that absolutely must be researched. Ignore anyone who says the soviets were socialist and they were horrible so socialism is horrible. There is a history of socialist movements going back over 150 years that includes many writers and activists including those who were murdered by the soviets or the nazis precisely because they wanted power in the hands of the people, not the state.
When you look this up, also study imperialism, feminism, the black panthers and black liberation moments, lgbtq movements, and liberation movements in other countries. If you’re white and/or otherwise privileged (as I am) know that the experience of less privileged people are so different from yours that they absolutely cannot be excluded from the development of a utopia.
For more information see here: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/
There's going to be a tipping point where the distribution of wealth is so unbelievably bad that voters will finally start voting for policies that will redistribute more equitably.
Either a new industry, or new innovations in existing industries, creating more low-skill jobs in the same manner that previous industries have done.
Or make the need to work in order to make a living obsolete for many.
Bucky Fuller wrote "GRUNCH of Giants" which says something similar.
("GRUNCH" is GRoss UNiversal Cash Heist)
https://fullerfuturefest.com/humanitys-critical-path-from-we...
How do you imagine we manufacture for example microprocessors in such scenario? I.e. how does a group of people start the next Intel as a co-op, without ever taking any external capital? BTW I've sent the same question to Chomsky some time ago, but no response yet.
Moreover: liberating technology will not be developed by the capitalist establishment because our liberation runs counter to the opportunity we represent as tools to be exploited. This is why Silicon Valley relies on surveillance and the big companies don’t share their key source code. They don’t have the goal of liberating us.
Invention of technology doesn't rely on capitalist establishment though, as long as there is at least one engineer out there to work on it just for the sake of it. For example, the invention of linux.
The reason this has happened is that we use an economic system where laborers are paid market rate and the owners are paid the rest. So when we automate something new, the market rate for labor stays the same (at best), but reduced costs mean there's a bigger chunk leftover for the owners. So business owners capture all the returns from automation. As long as this holds, you should expect increased automation to benefit whoever already owns the machines, not society at large.
And there are lots of possible solutions for this, some quite simple, but they're all considered socialism or communism, so when you start talking about them people assume you want Soviet Russia and stop listening.