The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era is a non-fiction book by American economist Jeremy Rifkin, published in 1995 by Putnam Publishing Group.[1]
In 1995, Rifkin contended that worldwide unemployment would increase as information technology eliminates tens of millions of jobs in the manufacturing, agricultural and service sectors. He traced the devastating impact of automation on blue-collar, retail and wholesale employees. While a small elite of corporate managers and knowledge workers reap the benefits of the high-tech world economy, the American middle class continues to shrink and the workplace becomes ever more stressful.
As the market economy and public sector decline, Rifkin predicted the growth of a third sector—voluntary and community-based service organizations—that will create new jobs with government support to rebuild decaying neighborhoods and provide social services. To finance this enterprise, he advocated scaling down the military budget, enacting a value added tax on nonessential goods and services and redirecting federal and state funds to provide a "social wage" in lieu of welfare payments to third-sector workers.
The objection I often hear (and I recall that this is PG's stance as well) is that as old jobs disappear new ones will take their place. For example, as the article mentioned, the former toll booth operator could now repair the automated toll booth system.
So far this general idea has been true. Before computers existed as we know them, "computers" were people who did lengthy computations for a living, often for scientists. Once electronic computers arrived these people seemingly found new jobs and survived.
I'm not sure if this will continue to be the case. We may be reaching a discontinuous point on the economic timeline. If robotic and computer systems are developed that can effectively do the jobs of most humans for less than minimum wage, there won't be enough work for people to make a good living.
The key difference is the following: in the past, technology has only disrupted specific segments of the economy, allowing humans to find work other places where they could still add value. Now, technology has the potential to disrupt the majority of the economy. There won't be any work to do.
There will still be pockets where humans can add value, but there will be so much competition for this work by all the unemployed that the wages will be driven down to nil.
If this situation occurs, the Government will have to find a way to distribute resources directly to the masses lest every sitting politician be voted out of office. In fact, all the rhetoric right now about creating jobs is exactly that. Politicians are promising that they'll find a way to distribute resources to the unemployed.
IT itself is susceptible to the danger of shrinking given 2 things:
- The rise of *aaS
- The mindset of maximizing profits and and minimize expense
Some of us have said a few times in the past: building software is expensive.
Some of us have also said a few times in the past that: good programmers are expensive.
Put two together and you get a recipe as to why more companies shy away from custom-development and prefer to build IT based on OOB + small tweaks.
I've been seeing a growing demand of Microsoft Office 365 + Sharepoint Online + Dynamics CRM Online as opposed to in-house installation or using Basecamp.NEXT + Backpack (yes, SP Online is equal to Basecamp.NEXT + Backpack). Some companies don't necessarily put top premium for nice UI or super simple easy and friendly software.
Open Source software is also impacted with the rise of the cloud: in certain area of software, if the cost of the commercial offering is less than installing+maintaining Open Source software, then that particular area of software for Open Source probably will die eventually (e.g.: Open Source bug tracking and project management software => Is it more expensive to install+maintain Trac vs paying GitHub/FogCreek/Atlassian to host everything?)
We might be slowly eating ourselves as well (in the context of IT). Whether we can produce something new, innovative, and exciting, faster than we can eat is yet to be seen.
PS: There are industries with unique requirements and regulations, these industries might pay for expensive custom software until one day a new software will arise and effectively kill customization in the said industry.
Peak Labor. Anyone that's ever argued this in the past 200 years has been called a luddite. Yet, in the past 40 years as computers have automated more work, both labor and white collar, it's become clear that the productivity gains are only making it into the pockets of the 20% or so that own investments.
Sure, a lot of people might just become layabouts doing nothing. But are they really doing much right now, by enduring crappy jobs that add marginal value?
Other people might unlock vast reservoirs of creativity which would bring great positive externalities to society, if they didn't have to spend their productive hours on such a trite problem as survival.
"Without enactment of legislation by the end of this month, the Postal Service faces default, as funds will be insufficient to make a congressionally mandated $5.5 billion payment to pre-fund retiree health benefits, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe told a Senate committee today."
This was a manufactured crisis, passed by a lame duck Republican congress in 2006. See Title VIII - Postal Service Retirement and Health Benefits Funding in the following link:
Jobs aren't obsolete. There are plenty of jobs. Part time, low wage, no benefits jobs. Careers? Full time, living wage that can support a family, full benefits packages? Those are becoming obsolete, and fast.
Screw any politician who crows about "creating jobs". I would support one who can create careers. Won't happen.
> Jobs aren't obsolete. There are plenty of jobs. Part time, low wage, no benefits jobs.
The 600,000 the article mentioned were mostly of this type, I presume (not the part time maybe, but the other two).
E.g. Secretarial/bureaucracy type jobs which rarely pay more then $15/hour, and usually ~$10/hour, are quickly being replaced with computers.
> Careers? Full time, living wage that can support a family, full benefits packages? Those are becoming obsolete, and fast.
I wouldn't say obsolete. I doubt they're growing at the same rate of the population, but there are still many fields where building a career is a reasonable venture.
I love how the media overreacts to everything. Here's a pretty obvious maxim: nothing is as good as it seems at its best, and nothing is as bad as it seems at its worst. To wit: the recession and slow recovery of the last couple of years are just that, a recession and slow recovery--they aren't a harbinger to the end of capitalism or conventional labor or employment. The jobs are already coming back.
Psychologically, people seem to have a basic need to do something productive with at least a good chunk of their time, and jobs do fulfill this important need. The jobs might become more abstract and more indirectly removed from everyday necessities, and hours might even drop, but I don't think they'd go away.
To wit: the recession and slow recovery of the last
couple of years are just that, a recession and slow
recovery--they aren't a harbinger to the end of
capitalism or conventional labor or employment.
The recession and slow recovery are what we make of them. The future is not already determined. There may or may not be the end of capitalism, but that doesn't say anything about whether that's a goal we should pursue.
Even though Rushkoff believes that automation is killing jobs, he doesn't believe that the alternative he proposes is inevitable. He just invites us to consider it.
It is more a problem of motivation. Since we have not yet stopped universal entropy to guarantee our unending existance forever, we still have progress to be made.
Too bad we have probably billions of human beings not contributing towards that progress.
We need people motivated to enter the sciences and engineering disciplines to make the future happen. We will probably see our means of survival fully automated in our lifetimes, and besides the imminent highly coupled crisis of global warming / overpopulation / resource depletion this century, we will probably emerge from it in a state where no person born will ever need to toil to survive to the next day.
We might even get to the point where people don't die, or aren't bound to biological form.
But we are too busy complaining about celebrities on TV and our neighbors to have a collective motivation towards progress. The greatest problem to solve in the 21st century is one of motivating people to tackle hard problems to progress the whole of humanity, en masse.
I accept that humanities continuation as a species depends on science/tech, there has to be more to it. Living longer and expanding further should be the how, not the why.
Unifying people into action is historically only possible by getting them to engage in shared values and beliefs. We need culture, politics, philosophy and, dare I say it, religion to motivate people into tackling these problems. Promoting science beyond these seems unlikely to result in the kind of Utopian vision you are talking about.
Also, is toiling always such a bad thing? Hard work can be rewarding too.
In Europe, some people are thinking of replacing welfare by a certain ammount of money being payed to everyone, without condition, everymonth. Could be solution, even if you have to work out the details of such a scheme. What makes this different from any system we have today is, that people not working are most likely not stigmatised anymore. Currently you have condition attached to recieving money from the state, so as soon as you can get away from these conditions you will. Meaning you need a job , a.k.a. employment. The result is, that everybody without a job has nothing to offer to an emplyeer. Hence, the stigma that he's worthless. But he isn't, maybe he only has talents nobody is willing to pay enough to make a living these days.
If this really is a solution or how we can get there, well no idea. But we should think about it. As soon as there's enough for everyone, why not letting everyone participate on it. And when you look at the conditions you have to get your money when you ARE employed, well I'm not sure you're better of than without a job, from a self-respect point of view I mean.
Not many have mentioned policy here, just automation.
How are we to create sustainable jobs if we keep taxing, regulating, etc... such that we increase the requirement for marginal productivity of labor in order to turn a profit?
Basically, on-the-job training and low skills employment could be made more profitable by making it so that there is some room left for the free market. If they have lower non-employment costs, then they will be able to hire less productive people. This drives demand for employment, and thus, wages.
But I'm not suggesting that this will ever happen. ;) Some people in power pay lip service to the free market while attacking it, and others aren't shy about attacking it. We create "make work" jobs that come at the cost of companies and individuals. If it didn't come at the cost of companies and individuals their costs would be lower. If enough wiggle room was given, on-the-jobs training would be possible, and low-skills labor more profitable.
As of April, the US will have the highest corporate tax rate in the world. This approach doesn't seem to be solving the inequality of wealth problem, and it doesn't look like it's giving people a way to earn their living.
I've never understood taxing of income, except that for the point of a taxing bureau it's a very convenient spot to impose taxes.
Namely, taxing reduces whatever that is taxed. Taxing work makes work less desirable, and sometimes not worth to be done at all. Taxes should target things that are unnecessary or harming.
Thus, income shouldn't be taxed at all. Conversely, consumption should be taxed with a VAT roughly equal to the lost income tax. Food could certainly be taxed less than cars but the general rule should be that you're taxed for consuming. Because income wouldn't be taxed, people's purchasing power would increase but taxing the consumption would make them think twice where they spend their money. Consider that this is the opposite of the current situation: people are all pre-taxed (=license to consume) and items and products are so cheap they can get spent money on and ultimately discarded without anyone blinking an eye.
Whether a human being or a machine is doing a task, value is being created; the overall economy isn't worse off.
The issue is value capture -- who derives the benefit of this value creation, and how?
If a human being does a job, they're compensated through wages. Machines have owners, which earn income in exchange for the productive output of their machines.
There are a lot of ways to earn income besides having a job. The sooner people realize this, the sooner we'll get beyond this absurd "job creation" mentality around which so much of modern politics revolves.
Jaron Lanier, recently pointed out, we no longer need to make stuff in order to make money. We can instead exchange information-based products.
The article doesn't mention Lanier's extensive writing on what he calls Digital Maoism: the notion that collectives always solve problems better than individuals, who should give their digital content away for free. If there were some way of monetizing this digital content that did not benefit only a few well-positioned social networking hubs and that did not require draconian intellectual property legislation (which mainly benefits a few monopolists), then there might be some hope.
Yeah was getting into the article until near the end when it started to feel like a not-so-subtle defense of "intellectual property", i.e., "if only we could better monetize our digital creations Utopia would be within reach".
I honestly feel that the way our government is run by lawyers (who seem to actually believe in this silly idea of an IP-based economy) is the reason so much manufacturing has fled the country. Americans today just don't know the value of mining, manufacturing, and agriculture. Germany and Switzerland didn't make this mistake. They love and value manufacturing and look where their economies are.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard states in the film Star Trek: First Contact that
"The economics of the future is somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century. The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity."
Disclaimer: Copied from the comments on the original article.
Generally, one ought to start thinking about this instead of the "End of jobs". Jobs are an industrial-era economic construction, work is something we always had and will probably always have, even as an evolutionary relic.
Somewhere out there there's a social model that makes a lot more sense and just works, but we can't fathom it right now because we are so busy worrying about competing over pieces on the ground.
As a software engineer, I would love to see all the tedious tasks people do all day replaced by technology. If having money is the only way to stay alive and I had a job, I would even pay higher taxes, just to let people do more of what they might love more (and what in the long run would benefit society in other ways). -- I guess, that this opinion is diametrical to current ideology.
If my assumption is correct, let me reply- land has real value. This is for two reasons.
First, everybody occupies space. We all live somewhere; space is valuable because we all have to occupy it, the same way that food is valuable because we all have to eat.
Second, all wealth originates from two sources; human labor/effort, and natural resources. Natural resources are harvested from land.
Thus, the competition over plots of land will go away only if land becomes so plentiful (or humans become so scarce) its value is unimportant, AND resources become so plentiful their value is also nominal. An example is air; it has little value, even though we all have to breathe, because there is so much of it.
Charlie Stross brought this idea up on his blog recently; what does a post work-for-pay world look like? What would you do if you had a home, food, and health care as a basic right?
Could we even get there with our current basic cultural value being that if you don't work, you have no value?
Large numbers of people have home, food and health care as a basic right (e.g. all inhabitants of the UK and also I assume many other countries).
I think the major problems are:
- People like nicer food/nicer homes. Some (most?) of this is social signalling, some not. Some of the signalling issues could perhaps be addressed by raising the level of the basic provision, I'm unsure. (Basically, there will always be scarcity of some things and they can be used for signalling).
- Advanced human interaction/daily interest. For many/most people, working from home is in some ways less satisfying than working in an office environment (it may be better in other ways). I mean lack of social interaction in etc. Similarly full time mothers/fathers bemoan the lack of grown up contact/use of their higher mental faculties etc.
Lots of the issues are fixable with culture changes, but I suspect we'd need to be closer to full abundance before we could make much progress there.
Yes we could: replace 'work' with 'contribute' and it makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't believe in the mid- and long-term viability of a society that supports its members without requiring them to participate in its existence, development and improvement. Without some form of obligation, it would stagnate into a world of (so to speak) couch potatoes too easily.
If I had a home, food and health care as a basic right, what I would do? Raise my child with undivided attention, care and love. Try to make his environment a happy, safe and stimulating place. The kind of stuff that modern society apparently considers optional, or not valuable at all.
In 1900s, with Nietzsche, we killed God but at least people had distractions of "work".
But in 2000s, we are slowly killing work itself and replacing it with automaton.
Without a world with religion or necessary work, I wonder, what is there for (majority of) humans to "cling to"? Without distractions, won't their "freedom" drive them insane? Without God and profession, what would give meaning to their life?
I get into friendly arguments with family and friends on the conservative and liberal side of things over this. While I believe that paying taxes partially to support people who can't work or can't get jobs is simply part of the cost of living in a (reasonable) civil society, I also believe that there has to be a strong incentive built into the system.
I believe that able bodied people and their families who don't have means of earning money should be supported in clean and safe tent cities and incentivized to put effort into accepting and working with training programs and education. Incentives might be things like cable TV, etc. in their housing.
No one should starve to death or go hungry in our country. People who simply don't want to work or accept training and education should get fewer perks in life, but should still have enough to be happy if that is the lifestyle they want.
All children should have good educational opportunities, including free meals at school if they need them.
The idea of this has been around for a LONG time and is not a new one. I think the term for this type of society is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopian_socialism or a socialist utopia.
New jobs always pop up though. The problem with this logic is that because all of today's jobs will likely be automated in the future you think everyone will be unemployed, but in reality you just can't fathom what the jobs of the future will look like. Can you imagine trying to describe to someone that lives in 1900 your job description? You write code for a living? You're a computer scientist? Wtf is that? They pay you to just sit there all day and press buttons?
Let us put it this way. As automation increases and there are cheaper and greener ways to harness and use energy. What we are likely to see is change of goals in life.
We may no longer strive for food, clothing and shelter. Many things may come automatically. But we will have to still work to make a living for many things like medicine, travel, vacations etc but the basic stuff may all come at cheaper prices.
There will still be 'rich' and 'poor' people. People will pay for greater things. The poor will no longer strive for basic survival, but they will have to strive for luxury.
The whole point is the definition of poverty and luxury will change. And we are likely to have better standards of living at the lowest levels.
Funny that you include medicine in the list of luxury things you have to work for. In a large part of the world that's the one thing you don't have to work for.
I think this is just hysterical nonsense. Remember, it used to be not that long ago that 95% of the labor force worked on farms, and still famine was a regular occurrence. Now only 1 or 2 percent work on the farms.
I can't imagine people running out of productive things to do. After all, can making movies be automated? How about becoming a professional dancer or athlete? Writing books? Building a custom car? Making art of any sort? Elder care (a booming business as baby boomers age)? Research? Tutoring?
There have never been greater opportunities for productive work than now.
The abstraction of "jobs" from "the things we do to survive" is interesting. The only things we "need" to do are reproduce, and find food and shelter towards that end. It's crazy that we have blown past the struggle for survival so far it's almost been forgotten, like the binary code under our lovely Ruby scripts.
But we still feel the flutter of our primal fears for survival, even in the abstraction, and fight to the death over increasingly excessive piles of wealth, as if we might not "survive". And because we do that, in the global picture not everyone DOES survive. If you are convinced you do not have enough to survive, it's very hard to share.
Even worse, as our personal bar of "survival" continues to rise in this abstract world, our frantic and instinctual struggle to "survive" is apparently driving us towards an incredibly sad and ironic demise - if you believe the headlines about nuclear war and global warming.
I agree with the article's idea that as technology takes care of more and more basic needs we should move to "information-based products" to keep ourselves busy and satisfied. We have to. All the world's billions can't have two cars in the garage, but they can all have giant digital art and music collections. (I guess we could do more recreation/sporting too, that's not a finite resource.)
But it's another level of abstraction. How far can we get from our concrete instincts for food and babies and still find sufficient meaning and purpose?
But we still feel the flutter of our primal fears for survival, even in the abstraction, and fight to the death over increasingly excessive piles of wealth, as if we might not "survive". And because we do that, in the global picture not everyone DOES survive. If you are convinced you do not have enough to survive, it's very hard to share.
Are you familiar with the 8 Circuit Model of Consciousness? Sounds like you're describing a negatively imprinted first circuit (or "bio-survival anxiety").
"Jobs, as such, are a relatively new concept. People may have always worked, but until the advent of the corporation in the early Renaissance, most people just worked for themselves."
I feel kinda stupid for saying this but I always thought people stopped producing their own "stuff" when we really got the hang of money. In other words, thanks to money, I can do one thing all day (and maybe get really good at it!) instead of doing all the little separate things I need to do to survive. And then I can exchange the fruits of that one thing for all the other stuff I might need or want.
I appreciate this more now since I started learning how to write code. By my second or third go at a script, I figure out how to factor out common functions and reuse them. Good thing these lines of code aren't laborers because what I'm essentially doing is firing all of them and replacing them with a workhorse (a function or a subroutine) which will do all the work for me, multiple times.
I guess I'm sort of brainwashed into thinking the efficiency gained by factoring my code is more important than the livelihood of all those little redundant lines I figured out a way to delete. But what this guy's saying sounds too politically charged for me to be fully persuaded by it. I'm like 88% persuaded by it but there's the nagging 12% saying, "He's got an agenda, Jimmy. Don't listen to him!"
This isn't true at all. Working "for" someone else goes back to the earliest governments and religions. Corporations only took off much later, after the end of mercantilism.
"New technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures -- from EZpasses ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles rendering taxicab drivers obsolete."
I wasn't aware that "Google-controlled self-driving automobiles" was rendering taxicab drivers obsolete any time in the near future... call me a luddite, but we've probably got several decades of legal and social hurdles before that even approaches being a reality.
Or that toll booth collectors were a vast segment of our economy... These sort of articles by this sort of author indicate, if anything, that our economy is robust enough to produce such inane nonsense.
[+] [-] jerrya|14 years ago|reply
The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era is a non-fiction book by American economist Jeremy Rifkin, published in 1995 by Putnam Publishing Group.[1]
In 1995, Rifkin contended that worldwide unemployment would increase as information technology eliminates tens of millions of jobs in the manufacturing, agricultural and service sectors. He traced the devastating impact of automation on blue-collar, retail and wholesale employees. While a small elite of corporate managers and knowledge workers reap the benefits of the high-tech world economy, the American middle class continues to shrink and the workplace becomes ever more stressful.
As the market economy and public sector decline, Rifkin predicted the growth of a third sector—voluntary and community-based service organizations—that will create new jobs with government support to rebuild decaying neighborhoods and provide social services. To finance this enterprise, he advocated scaling down the military budget, enacting a value added tax on nonessential goods and services and redirecting federal and state funds to provide a "social wage" in lieu of welfare payments to third-sector workers.
He was mostly laughed at.
[+] [-] hpvic03|14 years ago|reply
The objection I often hear (and I recall that this is PG's stance as well) is that as old jobs disappear new ones will take their place. For example, as the article mentioned, the former toll booth operator could now repair the automated toll booth system.
So far this general idea has been true. Before computers existed as we know them, "computers" were people who did lengthy computations for a living, often for scientists. Once electronic computers arrived these people seemingly found new jobs and survived.
I'm not sure if this will continue to be the case. We may be reaching a discontinuous point on the economic timeline. If robotic and computer systems are developed that can effectively do the jobs of most humans for less than minimum wage, there won't be enough work for people to make a good living.
The key difference is the following: in the past, technology has only disrupted specific segments of the economy, allowing humans to find work other places where they could still add value. Now, technology has the potential to disrupt the majority of the economy. There won't be any work to do.
There will still be pockets where humans can add value, but there will be so much competition for this work by all the unemployed that the wages will be driven down to nil.
If this situation occurs, the Government will have to find a way to distribute resources directly to the masses lest every sitting politician be voted out of office. In fact, all the rhetoric right now about creating jobs is exactly that. Politicians are promising that they'll find a way to distribute resources to the unemployed.
[+] [-] edwinnathaniel|14 years ago|reply
- The rise of *aaS
- The mindset of maximizing profits and and minimize expense
Some of us have said a few times in the past: building software is expensive.
Some of us have also said a few times in the past that: good programmers are expensive.
Put two together and you get a recipe as to why more companies shy away from custom-development and prefer to build IT based on OOB + small tweaks.
I've been seeing a growing demand of Microsoft Office 365 + Sharepoint Online + Dynamics CRM Online as opposed to in-house installation or using Basecamp.NEXT + Backpack (yes, SP Online is equal to Basecamp.NEXT + Backpack). Some companies don't necessarily put top premium for nice UI or super simple easy and friendly software.
Open Source software is also impacted with the rise of the cloud: in certain area of software, if the cost of the commercial offering is less than installing+maintaining Open Source software, then that particular area of software for Open Source probably will die eventually (e.g.: Open Source bug tracking and project management software => Is it more expensive to install+maintain Trac vs paying GitHub/FogCreek/Atlassian to host everything?)
We might be slowly eating ourselves as well (in the context of IT). Whether we can produce something new, innovative, and exciting, faster than we can eat is yet to be seen.
PS: There are industries with unique requirements and regulations, these industries might pay for expensive custom software until one day a new software will arise and effectively kill customization in the said industry.
[+] [-] angstrom|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itmag|14 years ago|reply
Sure, a lot of people might just become layabouts doing nothing. But are they really doing much right now, by enduring crappy jobs that add marginal value?
Other people might unlock vast reservoirs of creativity which would bring great positive externalities to society, if they didn't have to spend their productive hours on such a trite problem as survival.
[+] [-] sc68cal|14 years ago|reply
http://about.usps.com/news/national-releases/2011/pr11_102.h...
"Without enactment of legislation by the end of this month, the Postal Service faces default, as funds will be insufficient to make a congressionally mandated $5.5 billion payment to pre-fund retiree health benefits, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe told a Senate committee today."
This was a manufactured crisis, passed by a lame duck Republican congress in 2006. See Title VIII - Postal Service Retirement and Health Benefits Funding in the following link:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h109-6407
Yes - E-mail has made an impact on the USPS' bottom line, but it's because of POLITICS that the USPS is in such bad shape.
[+] [-] ricardobeat|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alpad|14 years ago|reply
Screw any politician who crows about "creating jobs". I would support one who can create careers. Won't happen.
[+] [-] mmj48|14 years ago|reply
The 600,000 the article mentioned were mostly of this type, I presume (not the part time maybe, but the other two).
E.g. Secretarial/bureaucracy type jobs which rarely pay more then $15/hour, and usually ~$10/hour, are quickly being replaced with computers.
> Careers? Full time, living wage that can support a family, full benefits packages? Those are becoming obsolete, and fast.
I wouldn't say obsolete. I doubt they're growing at the same rate of the population, but there are still many fields where building a career is a reasonable venture.
[+] [-] philwelch|14 years ago|reply
Psychologically, people seem to have a basic need to do something productive with at least a good chunk of their time, and jobs do fulfill this important need. The jobs might become more abstract and more indirectly removed from everyday necessities, and hours might even drop, but I don't think they'd go away.
[+] [-] icandoitbetter|14 years ago|reply
Even though Rushkoff believes that automation is killing jobs, he doesn't believe that the alternative he proposes is inevitable. He just invites us to consider it.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] zanny|14 years ago|reply
Too bad we have probably billions of human beings not contributing towards that progress.
We need people motivated to enter the sciences and engineering disciplines to make the future happen. We will probably see our means of survival fully automated in our lifetimes, and besides the imminent highly coupled crisis of global warming / overpopulation / resource depletion this century, we will probably emerge from it in a state where no person born will ever need to toil to survive to the next day.
We might even get to the point where people don't die, or aren't bound to biological form.
But we are too busy complaining about celebrities on TV and our neighbors to have a collective motivation towards progress. The greatest problem to solve in the 21st century is one of motivating people to tackle hard problems to progress the whole of humanity, en masse.
[+] [-] moddedarmstrong|14 years ago|reply
Unifying people into action is historically only possible by getting them to engage in shared values and beliefs. We need culture, politics, philosophy and, dare I say it, religion to motivate people into tackling these problems. Promoting science beyond these seems unlikely to result in the kind of Utopian vision you are talking about.
Also, is toiling always such a bad thing? Hard work can be rewarding too.
[+] [-] hef19898|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skylan_q|14 years ago|reply
How are we to create sustainable jobs if we keep taxing, regulating, etc... such that we increase the requirement for marginal productivity of labor in order to turn a profit?
Basically, on-the-job training and low skills employment could be made more profitable by making it so that there is some room left for the free market. If they have lower non-employment costs, then they will be able to hire less productive people. This drives demand for employment, and thus, wages.
But I'm not suggesting that this will ever happen. ;) Some people in power pay lip service to the free market while attacking it, and others aren't shy about attacking it. We create "make work" jobs that come at the cost of companies and individuals. If it didn't come at the cost of companies and individuals their costs would be lower. If enough wiggle room was given, on-the-jobs training would be possible, and low-skills labor more profitable.
As of April, the US will have the highest corporate tax rate in the world. This approach doesn't seem to be solving the inequality of wealth problem, and it doesn't look like it's giving people a way to earn their living.
[+] [-] yason|14 years ago|reply
Namely, taxing reduces whatever that is taxed. Taxing work makes work less desirable, and sometimes not worth to be done at all. Taxes should target things that are unnecessary or harming.
Thus, income shouldn't be taxed at all. Conversely, consumption should be taxed with a VAT roughly equal to the lost income tax. Food could certainly be taxed less than cars but the general rule should be that you're taxed for consuming. Because income wouldn't be taxed, people's purchasing power would increase but taxing the consumption would make them think twice where they spend their money. Consider that this is the opposite of the current situation: people are all pre-taxed (=license to consume) and items and products are so cheap they can get spent money on and ultimately discarded without anyone blinking an eye.
[+] [-] eldavido|14 years ago|reply
The issue is value capture -- who derives the benefit of this value creation, and how?
If a human being does a job, they're compensated through wages. Machines have owners, which earn income in exchange for the productive output of their machines.
There are a lot of ways to earn income besides having a job. The sooner people realize this, the sooner we'll get beyond this absurd "job creation" mentality around which so much of modern politics revolves.
[+] [-] ChristianMarks|14 years ago|reply
The article doesn't mention Lanier's extensive writing on what he calls Digital Maoism: the notion that collectives always solve problems better than individuals, who should give their digital content away for free. If there were some way of monetizing this digital content that did not benefit only a few well-positioned social networking hubs and that did not require draconian intellectual property legislation (which mainly benefits a few monopolists), then there might be some hope.
[+] [-] marshray|14 years ago|reply
I honestly feel that the way our government is run by lawyers (who seem to actually believe in this silly idea of an IP-based economy) is the reason so much manufacturing has fled the country. Americans today just don't know the value of mining, manufacturing, and agriculture. Germany and Switzerland didn't make this mistake. They love and value manufacturing and look where their economies are.
(And by the way kids, get off my lawn :-)
[+] [-] aseembehl|14 years ago|reply
Disclaimer: Copied from the comments on the original article.
[+] [-] zerostar07|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ttt_|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtrn|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sliverstorm|14 years ago|reply
If my assumption is correct, let me reply- land has real value. This is for two reasons.
First, everybody occupies space. We all live somewhere; space is valuable because we all have to occupy it, the same way that food is valuable because we all have to eat.
Second, all wealth originates from two sources; human labor/effort, and natural resources. Natural resources are harvested from land.
Thus, the competition over plots of land will go away only if land becomes so plentiful (or humans become so scarce) its value is unimportant, AND resources become so plentiful their value is also nominal. An example is air; it has little value, even though we all have to breathe, because there is so much of it.
[+] [-] mmj48|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aurynn|14 years ago|reply
Could we even get there with our current basic cultural value being that if you don't work, you have no value?
[+] [-] jbert|14 years ago|reply
I think the major problems are:
- People like nicer food/nicer homes. Some (most?) of this is social signalling, some not. Some of the signalling issues could perhaps be addressed by raising the level of the basic provision, I'm unsure. (Basically, there will always be scarcity of some things and they can be used for signalling).
- Advanced human interaction/daily interest. For many/most people, working from home is in some ways less satisfying than working in an office environment (it may be better in other ways). I mean lack of social interaction in etc. Similarly full time mothers/fathers bemoan the lack of grown up contact/use of their higher mental faculties etc.
Lots of the issues are fixable with culture changes, but I suspect we'd need to be closer to full abundance before we could make much progress there.
[+] [-] Jare|14 years ago|reply
If I had a home, food and health care as a basic right, what I would do? Raise my child with undivided attention, care and love. Try to make his environment a happy, safe and stimulating place. The kind of stuff that modern society apparently considers optional, or not valuable at all.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] paraschopra|14 years ago|reply
But in 2000s, we are slowly killing work itself and replacing it with automaton.
Without a world with religion or necessary work, I wonder, what is there for (majority of) humans to "cling to"? Without distractions, won't their "freedom" drive them insane? Without God and profession, what would give meaning to their life?
[+] [-] molsongolden|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Drbble|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|14 years ago|reply
I believe that able bodied people and their families who don't have means of earning money should be supported in clean and safe tent cities and incentivized to put effort into accepting and working with training programs and education. Incentives might be things like cable TV, etc. in their housing.
No one should starve to death or go hungry in our country. People who simply don't want to work or accept training and education should get fewer perks in life, but should still have enough to be happy if that is the lifestyle they want.
All children should have good educational opportunities, including free meals at school if they need them.
[+] [-] andr3w321|14 years ago|reply
New jobs always pop up though. The problem with this logic is that because all of today's jobs will likely be automated in the future you think everyone will be unemployed, but in reality you just can't fathom what the jobs of the future will look like. Can you imagine trying to describe to someone that lives in 1900 your job description? You write code for a living? You're a computer scientist? Wtf is that? They pay you to just sit there all day and press buttons?
[+] [-] kamaal|14 years ago|reply
We may no longer strive for food, clothing and shelter. Many things may come automatically. But we will have to still work to make a living for many things like medicine, travel, vacations etc but the basic stuff may all come at cheaper prices.
There will still be 'rich' and 'poor' people. People will pay for greater things. The poor will no longer strive for basic survival, but they will have to strive for luxury.
The whole point is the definition of poverty and luxury will change. And we are likely to have better standards of living at the lowest levels.
[+] [-] jules|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|14 years ago|reply
I can't imagine people running out of productive things to do. After all, can making movies be automated? How about becoming a professional dancer or athlete? Writing books? Building a custom car? Making art of any sort? Elder care (a booming business as baby boomers age)? Research? Tutoring?
There have never been greater opportunities for productive work than now.
[+] [-] mcantelon|14 years ago|reply
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/census-shows-1-2-people-103940...
There is, of course, no shortage of productive work, but getting paid for that productive work is another matter.
[+] [-] thaddeusmt|14 years ago|reply
But we still feel the flutter of our primal fears for survival, even in the abstraction, and fight to the death over increasingly excessive piles of wealth, as if we might not "survive". And because we do that, in the global picture not everyone DOES survive. If you are convinced you do not have enough to survive, it's very hard to share.
Even worse, as our personal bar of "survival" continues to rise in this abstract world, our frantic and instinctual struggle to "survive" is apparently driving us towards an incredibly sad and ironic demise - if you believe the headlines about nuclear war and global warming.
I agree with the article's idea that as technology takes care of more and more basic needs we should move to "information-based products" to keep ourselves busy and satisfied. We have to. All the world's billions can't have two cars in the garage, but they can all have giant digital art and music collections. (I guess we could do more recreation/sporting too, that's not a finite resource.)
But it's another level of abstraction. How far can we get from our concrete instincts for food and babies and still find sufficient meaning and purpose?
[+] [-] itmag|14 years ago|reply
Are you familiar with the 8 Circuit Model of Consciousness? Sounds like you're describing a negatively imprinted first circuit (or "bio-survival anxiety").
http://theuniverseas.com/bio-survival
[+] [-] n_time|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimmytucson|14 years ago|reply
I feel kinda stupid for saying this but I always thought people stopped producing their own "stuff" when we really got the hang of money. In other words, thanks to money, I can do one thing all day (and maybe get really good at it!) instead of doing all the little separate things I need to do to survive. And then I can exchange the fruits of that one thing for all the other stuff I might need or want.
I appreciate this more now since I started learning how to write code. By my second or third go at a script, I figure out how to factor out common functions and reuse them. Good thing these lines of code aren't laborers because what I'm essentially doing is firing all of them and replacing them with a workhorse (a function or a subroutine) which will do all the work for me, multiple times.
I guess I'm sort of brainwashed into thinking the efficiency gained by factoring my code is more important than the livelihood of all those little redundant lines I figured out a way to delete. But what this guy's saying sounds too politically charged for me to be fully persuaded by it. I'm like 88% persuaded by it but there's the nagging 12% saying, "He's got an agenda, Jimmy. Don't listen to him!"
[+] [-] zeroonetwothree|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjwalshe|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josscrowcroft|14 years ago|reply
"New technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures -- from EZpasses ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles rendering taxicab drivers obsolete."
I wasn't aware that "Google-controlled self-driving automobiles" was rendering taxicab drivers obsolete any time in the near future... call me a luddite, but we've probably got several decades of legal and social hurdles before that even approaches being a reality.
[+] [-] parsnips|14 years ago|reply