And this happened during industrialization too. The world keeps evolving and politicians will always use it to fear monger.
If you told someone in 1850 how many people we’d have employed today as automobile mechanics, airplane techs, computer engineers, etc., they would be so lost. Just like we would be if someone from 2150 tried to tell us about their economy.
…except we’re worried the prevailing system will be “Well you gotta find work to justify your existence, lazy peasant!” And will still plug their ears screaming incoherently about “automation creating more jobs” when we tell them they eliminated all the work.
This is the ideal outcome. I’m afraid other factors will conspire to make this an unlikely outcome.
A glaring problem is that the people doing the jobs that take 20 years of experience were once young and needed to get their start somehow. If young people never get their start… They will never have the skills for the older person job, further incentivizing more centralization and automation.
My next concern is that humanity as a whole has some fundamental flaws. One of them being laziness to pursue endeavors that are hard when there’s a lack of motivation. I think the underlying message of the movie Wall-E kind of address that.
If there’s any doubt, look at the economic output of regions around the world where food is never in short supply because there is never a winter. The people are poor, largely uneducated, not entrepreneurial, oftentimes ruled by dictatorships or regimes, not really going anywhere, and yet they are fed and sleep in a hovel.
Whether they are happy with this outcome relative to a wage slave in a different kind of culture is a topic for interesting debate, but I think their stories show that people left to do whatever they want with their own time do not necessarily, on the whole, become mass producers of the arts or automatically find joy with their lives.
Sounds like the problem there is more with shitty dictatorships. Leave it to a few evil assholes to ruin a good thing. But even in best case scenario of giving everyone the freedom to use the entirety of every day the way they want, it’s going to be a very, VERY mixed bag. There will be folks who literally spend the rest of their life watching TV or some other form of idle entertainment, but if that’s how they want to spend it, more power to em. I’d guess the majority of folks would engage in some form of arts just to have an outlet for creativity. Relatively few would turn to academics and pursue research for the sole sake of finding answers; but even that relative few would count for something… I think most important would be the kinds of things people study. Today we have a TON of talent wasted on finding clever new ways to blow each other up, or enshittifying the web, or perfecting the psychology of advertisements… if those people were all focused on, say, climate change… then we might not be in the whole planet-on-fire situation we’re in now.
Speaking of, we’ll probably be extinct before we figure out how to pull our political heads out of our asses anyway. Humanity actually living up to its potential is locked into the “wouldn’t it be nice if…” category.
Social good. If work stopped being such a demand, boredom would start to be an issue, and outside of just leisure entertainment part of the solution would be ushering folks to a field of study that interests them, which would lead to an explosion of research and breakthroughs. That shouldn’t come with a barrier to entry: folks who want to spend their time doing that should be enabled no questions asked.
But we already have countries with free healthcare and education for citizens.
UBI experiments are also ongoing in many places and government programs are usually available at least for limited groups like disabled people, veterans, some unemployed, etc.
And less consumption-centric world would do much more good for these initiatives than further automation of low-level jobs, I think.
If we’re going to force people to work to live, maybe removing jobs due to automation isn’t the best thing for society.
Well, it certainly isn’t the least painful way, but it’s probably the most likely path towards getting UBI. The government will have to do something when 50%+ of its population is unemployed.
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