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The End Of Work
Last updated Monday, 28-Jun-2004 18:32:06 PDT by Roedy Green ©1999-2004 Canadian Mind Products.
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I never asked but I heard you cast your lot along with the poor. How come I
overheard your prayer that you be this and nothing more than just some grateful,
faithful woman's favourite singing millionaire, the patron saint of envy and the
grocer of despair, working for the Yankee dollar? I know you need your sleep now,
I know your life's been hard, but many men are falling where you promised to
stand guard.
Leonard Cohen, Field Commander Cohen
The Problem
Automation is destroying jobs faster than it can replace them. The benefits of
the increased productivity go 100% to the owners of the machines, and none to
the workers displaced. What are the consequences of this? What will happen if
this trend continues and accelerates to include white collar jobs, and even jobs
currently handled by PhDs? This essay is a work in progress to examine those
issues.
 | The End Of Work |
| 0-87477-824-7 |
| Jeremy Rifkin |
|
|
|
Jeremy Rifkin gives the statistics behind this
collapse in employment in his book The End Of Work.
The Short Term
As jobs disappear more people are forced onto welfare roles. Crime increases.
Employers are free to exploit the workers competing for the few remaining jobs
by expecting them work extra hours without pay. It is cheaper for an employer to
pay overtime than hire extra workers since the overtime worker needs no
additional fringe benefits. This further reduces the amount of employment.
In the short term, the main way to increase employment is to reduce the work
week. By reducing the work week from 5 days to 4:
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You massively create new jobs.
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You give people more free time.
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You increase productivity per hour.
To help fund the fringe benefits of the additional workers, governments could
reduce payroll taxes since they would not need to spend so much in social safety
net payments.
The other stop gap measure is to reward companies that can absorb unskilled
workers by offering a subsidy to hire them. Governments can afford the subsidies
because of reduced social safety net payments.
We can also just close our eyes to the problem and let the market "solve"
it. A pool of skilled unused labour willing to work below minimum wage, will
eventually trigger entrepreneurs to find new ways to employ them. For example,
in Malaysia, when you go to an upper class department store, a store employee is
assigned to help you on your shopping expedition. He guides you through the
store. In Indonesia, even a tiny gum stand will have no fewer than three clerks.
However, these are only temporary measures. Computer technology relentlessly
eats away at all forms of employment. It will even eventually destroy even the
shit jobs like flipping and serving hamburgers at McDonalds.
Optow
Back in the 70s I worked on a computer program called Optow, to design high
voltage transmission lines. It was originally written by Jim Robinson, a blind
computer programmer at the Bonneville Power Administration. At first, the
designs it produced were laughable. Each day I worked on it, the designs got
better and better. One day it got as good as a human. Two weeks later it was
designing lines 10% better than a human. Suddenly a design team of 50 engineers,
most with masters degrees and PhDs were obsolete.
The progress was steady, but the effect on the workers came overnight. I
anticipate that this pattern will repeat. Millions of white collar workers will
find themselves overnight unemployed as gradual advances in AI (Artificial
Intelligence) reach the stage it is better than humans at task after task.
Money
What happens if we have 90% or higher unemployment because computers and
automation have replaced us? How will people make money in order to buy goods?
Currently here are some of the ways we use:
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Work for a wage.
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Work producing a service or good and selling it to others.
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Already have money and loan it out for interest.
What might we do in future?
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Starve to death amid computer-provided plenty because no one has any money, or
rather because it has concentrated totally in a tiny fraction of the population.
Aliens watching us would roll with laughter watching our folly.
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Welfare system to provide a bare minimum. The majority don't starve to death,
but we live like paupers amid computer-provided plenty. The hereditary owners of
the computer production machinery live in luxury. Right now our value system
finds any "welfare" proposal highly repugnant. If you don't work you
deserve to starve. This value is based on the Neanderthal observation that if
you don't work, no food gets produced. If food starts to be produced without
human labour there is logically no need to keep this value in place.
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Live the way people in Star Trek do, without money. Just take what you need. It's
all free anyway since it requires no labour to create.
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Control consumption via rationing tickets. Only things actually in limited
supply are rationed -- like space, the right to reproduce and the right to
pollute. If you want 10 TVs in each room, go ahead and be an idiot, its your
space.
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The means of production are owned by the government.
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The means of production are owned by philanthropists who charge nothing for
their services. They can out-compete any businessmen who attempt to charge for
their services. Anyone with a robot can set it loose building more robots, from
sand if necessary.
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Through implants and other high bandwidth technology, we will merge with the
computers and effectively overcome our mental disabilities, allowing us to again
participate in work.
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Everyone will have a supply of nanites (microscopic robots) that will assemble
themselves into whatever is needed for the moment -- a bicycle, a chair, a kayak,
a bed, a table... There will be little need for permanent possessions.
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Let the machines decide what to do. We probably won't have a choice given they
will eventually be much smarter than us. We will have to hope we trained them
well as children to honour their parents.
What is money? Here are some ways of looking at it:
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Money is a scheme for keeping track of who owes whom a favour. The scheme is so
fanatical we track favours to the penny. Just how big is a penny favour?
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Money is a scheme to track how much each member of society has consumed relative
to his production.
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Money is a way of bartering work that others find onerous, that you don't, in
return for work that you find onerous, that others don't.
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Money is a religious observation (counting tokens like counting rosary beads)
done whenever goods and services change hands.
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Money is a way of tracking the privileges of social class in a society too large
and anonymous to track them directly.
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Money is the human word for quatloo.
Have fun with it now; it will soon be obsolete.
If those definitions have even a grain of truth in them, it is not surprising
the very concept of money may become meaningless if people are no longer needed
to labour to produce goods and services. So even those with money could
find themselves in trouble in future in a world with near zero interest rates.
Safe Jobs
Potentially I would see any job eventually done better by artificial
intelligence. In the lab, the following jobs are already threatened: train
driver, bus driver, truck driver, actor, market analyst and receptionist.
Artists may continue, simply because people may prefer works of art created by
famous humans to superior works of art created by AI.
Famous interior decorators will be busy helping people make the daily choices in
clothing, cosmetics, jewellery, furnishings, appliances, cosmetic surgery etc.
to create the in chic look. Eventually that too could be taken over by AI.
We may find people preferring artificial companions, who can be much more
agreeable and entertaining, than real ones. The 1970s movie The Stepford
Wives explored this possibility.
How many people would be satisfied with a human companion when they could have
an artificial one that looked exactly the way they wanted, smelled the way they
wanted, felt the way they wanted, behaved the way they wanted (including just
the right amount of spunk and rebelliousness), was interested in the things they
were interested in, who liked washing dishes and doing the laundry...
Star Trek Voyager explored this Pygmalion theme when the Captain Janeway fell in
love with her Irish male creation on the holodeck. She kept fiddling with his
program to make him ever more desirable.
In my own fantasies along these lines, I imagine my companion would surprise me
by changing species (e.g. centaur, minotaur), race, size, age, sex... He might
morph into twins or triplets. I once had a real-life lover who was such a
playful actor that I rarely went to bed with the same guy twice.
Computer Hookers and Salesmen
People love to pretend that computers will never be better than they at their
own profession. It came as quite a shock to those transmission line design
engineers to be wiped out way back in the 70s. It was only a few years ago that
people thought computers would never be better than human grand masters at chess.
Consider a computerised hooker. She (or he) would have no compunctions about
doing any physically possible sexual act. She could change her body to any shape,
age or colouration desired. She would be disease free without risk of pregnancy.
She could change her odours and flavours based on feedback as to their effects.
She could have any size breasts, perfect skin, and any size waist, any size hips.
She could speak any of the earth's languages.
It would not in the least bother her/him that you were bald, fat and flatulent.
She/he could discuss quantum mechanics, 1957 Chevy's, or the history of Tuscany
as you so desired in the post coital period.
Closely related is the computerised salesman. He scans your entire body for
infrared radiation hundreds of times a second, and uses that emotional
information to modify his pitch. With his ultrasensitive electronic nose, he can
detect just what excites and bores you. He can measure your pupil diameter so
that he can change his words in midflight to avoid saying something that offends
you. His skills are very similar to that of the computer hooker I just described.
Travelling Light
Mark Twain said, "Buy land, they aren't making any more of it."
There will be pressure to live in minimal space. This means we will tend to have
a single room that changes during different parts of the day for different
activities, rather than having rooms all set for special activities that you
move between.
Goods will be manfactured where they are needed, rather than in giant central
factories. It will cost no more to customise them. You will likely not wear a
set of clothes more than once. Shopping thus becomes an onerous chore, even if
done online.
Everything will be designed to be recycled. Appliances will be much more energy
efficient than now.
This lifestyle makes it much easier to move and travel. Today's lifestyle will,
to future citizens, look like packrats.
I expect when anyone can have as many material goods as they want, that the
charm of them will wear off, much the way a bucket of 500 pieces of bubblegum no
longer fascinates the average adult. Ostentatious displays of material goods
will look preposterous, the way a giant Melmac collection would appear to us
today. (Displays of space, antiques and memorabilia of fame will still be
possible.) We may find many people deciding to lead much simpler lives, that
would look monk-like by today's standards.
Displaying Status
 | The Theory Of The Leisure Class |
| 0-14-018795-2 |
| Thorstein Veblen |
| published in 1899. |
|
|
Thorstein Veblen explained how people use
conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure (wasting their time and the time
of employees) to display status. For example, they will hire a butler who does
nothing but open the door.
Since everyone would have 100% leisure, and all the material goods they could
possibly desire, both conspicous leisure and conspicous consumption would both
be useless for displaying status. How do then people play their status games
with each other if they just make themselves look ridiculous attempting to do it
with conspicuous consumption?
Here are some possibilities:
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Knowledge. This won't have quite the same punch it does now because you can ask
questions of your toaster even more easily.
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Spiritual development. The more airy fairy the humbug the better.
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Travel adventure. The more you rough it, the higher your status.
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Skill at sports.
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Skill at playing a musical instrument.
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Knowing people, hosting fabulous theme parties where all the famous people come.
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Hosting a popular TV show. Anyone would have the means to broadcast, but not
everyone would have the talent.
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Decorating the body and surroundings in a clever way.
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Busyness. The more frantically occupied you are with your leisure activities,
the higher your status.
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Raw Esteem. You gain esteem simply by persuading other people to give it to you,
and by recording that fact in a globally accessible database. When you go
travelling in a foreign land, even a carpet seller can check up on what your
neighbours back home think of you. It becomes the currency that determines your
social class and the way other people treat you. It replaces money.
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Indolence. We might simply decide that doing nothing at all is highly virtuous,
much the way we used to look up to priests who spent their years muttering to
themselves in their cells. We may decide that since machines can produce, and
only humans can leisure, that goofing off is highly esteemed.
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Space. The higher your status the more space you are allocated. Very high status
people get to live in sparsely populated areas.
The Shopping Mall
I went to buy some screws at Sears. They told me screws were being phased out.
50% of the retail space went to women's clothes and cosmetics. I noticed that
women's fashions is the biggest category of specialty shops in the Metrotown
mall. What's going on? Are women's clothes really ten times less durable than
mens'?
What happens when you extrapolate this trend? Women of the future spend their
entire waking lives wandering shopping malls to buy clothes they will wear only
once.
This is the heavenly goal of consumerism.
In the late 1500s, Pieter Brueghel the Elder painted The Land Of Cockaigne.
It shows the renaissance notion of utopia, fat people lying around eating
chicken legs. Modern day America has already reached this particular heaven
thanks to the efforts of Colonel Saunders. The world is aiming for shopping as
ultimate bliss. If we don't change direction, that's where we will go.
Conclusions
Computers are bringing unparalleled prosperity, but our current greed-based
social prestige/privilege tracking schemes of sharing that bounty collapse it
into fewer and fewer hands. If we don't want to live like the Brazilians with a
huge gap between the vast majority of have-nots and a tiny minority of haves, we
are going to need to make some massive changes in our value systems.
The most likely way our work ethic will crack is that employees will come to
realise they are modern serfs, exploited by corporations. There is no honour in
slavery. They will gradually demand more and more say in how they perform their
work. Work will gradually transform into play.
Man has had to work hard just to survive ever since the invention of agriculture.
No work, no food. But now we have to rethink that ancient wisdom, and find a new
paradigm to share the pie, now that work is losing its value. To everyone's
horror, it will sound a bit like Communism -- everyone gets a slice just for
being alive, a guaranteed annual minimum income.
Links
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Someone Is Stealing
Your Life argues that modern employees are serfs. As employees, most have no
say whatsoever about much of anything on the job. The purpose or service, the
short and long-term goals of the company, are considered quite literally "none
of their business" - though these issues drastically influence every aspect
of their lives. No matter that they've given years to the day-to-day survival of
the business; employees (even when they're called "managers") mostly
take orders. Or else. It seems an odd way to structure a free democratic society:
Most people have little or no authority over what they do five days a week for
45 years.
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The Abolition Of Work Work is the source
of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost all the evil you'd care to name
comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop
suffering, we have to stop working. That doesn't mean we have to stop doing
things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a
ludic revolution.
