The End of Work

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, in 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.

recommend book⇒The End of Work

paperback

hardcover

ISBN13:

978-0-87477-824-3

978-0-87477-779-6

publisher:

Tarcher

published:

1996-04-16

by:

Jeremy Rifkin

Rifkin traces the trends doing more with fewer people and ever increasing unemployment. Eventually machines will even undercut even the 6 cent an hour third world labourers. We are moving toward corporations without any workers. Corporations and automation are creating immense wealth, but they are not doing anything to help share it, the exact opposite. They are creating an super elite and a super poor class.

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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:

You massively create new jobs.
You give people more free time.
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:

Work for a wage.
Work producing a service or good and selling it to others.
Already have money and loan it out for interest.

What might we do in future?

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.
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.
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.
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.
The means of production are owned by the government.
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.
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.
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.
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:

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?
Money is a scheme to track how much each member of society has consumed relative to his production.
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.
Money is a religious observation (counting tokens like counting rosary beads) done whenever goods and services change hands.
Money is a way of tracking the privileges of social class in a society too large and anonymous to track them directly.
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

“Buy land, they aren’t making any more of it.
~ Mark Twain (born: 1835-11-30 died: 1910-04-21 at age: 74)

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

recommend book⇒The Theory of The Leisure Class

paperback

hardcover

ISBN13:

978-0-14-018795-3

978-0-8488-1659-9

publisher:

Penguin

published:

1994-02-01

by:

Thorstein Veblen

This is one of the most amusing books I ever read. It is funny by being so on. He coined the terms conspicuous consumption and conspicous waste to explain modern status displays.

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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:

Knowledge. This won’t have quite the same punch it does now because you can ask questions of your toaster even more easily.
Spiritual development. The more airy fairy the humbug the better.
Travel adventure. The more you rough it, the higher your status.
Skill at sports.
Skill at playing a musical instrument.
Knowing people, hosting fabulous theme parties where all the famous people come.
Hosting a popular TV show. Anyone would have the means to broadcast, but not everyone would have the talent.
Decorating the body and surroundings in a clever way.
Busyness. The more frantically occupied you are with your leisure activities, the higher your status.
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.
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.
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.

Brueghel

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.

Solution

The end of work throws the Protestant work ethic on its head. You can’t very well blame people for being lazy when the world no longer needs 95% of them to produce wealth. It would be preposterous to let everyone starve simply because there is no longer any need to toil to produce wealth. We have to start allocating people goods whether they work or not. One possible way to do this is with a guaranteed livable income, a government cheque of taxable income everyone gets in the mail each month. At tax time it all gets sorted out how much of it you actually get to keep. You can dispense with most social welfare programs since there is no need to monitor who qualifies. Everyone qualifies. If there are remaining highly unpleasant jobs, like unplugging sewers, they will have to be well compensated. No one will take them just to survive. People would still form companies/organisations/charities and work just as they do now, but they would do it out of the joy of work, not out of desperation survival. This work would be optional. Companies could exist for a social purpose, freed of the need to make a profit or pay their employees. People would work there because the employees believed in the company or for the joy of working. Think of is as freeing the slaves — the wage slaves.

The Spiral

As I see it, this crisis [the great depression] differs in character from past crises in that it is based on an entirely new set of conditions, due to the rapid progress in the method of production. Only a fraction of the available human labor in the world is needed for the production of the total amount of consumption-goods necessary to life.
~ Albert Einstein (born: 1879-03-14 died: 1955-04-18 at age: 76)

Our money systems are just away of automating the allocation of scarce resources and demand for maximal labour, much the way we did things in cave society. They are flummoxed when confronted with an oversupply of either labour or resources.

When a corporation introduces technology, this creates pain and gain. The corporation fires workers, thus handing them 100% of the pain, and keep 100% of the gain in reduced costs for themselves. This creates increased unemployment. The extra pool of workers reduces their value, depressing wages. To make ends meet these people must work longer hours, perhaps at two jobs. This creates even more unemployment by soaking up two jobs per person.

The middle class is thus increasingly unemployed and decreasingly paid. This means they can no longer afford to buy as much as they used to. This means the elite, who own the means of production, start to lose money, because they have been systematically eliminating each other’s customers.

One way out of this spiral, favoured by 80% of Canada’s economists, is a guaranteed annual income, (sometimes called negative income tax). The elites are panicked by the notion of transfer of their funds to others, but it is really just to correct an instability that is creating an exploding wealth gap and collapsing middle class. It just restores the same sort of wealth distribution that was so pleasant for all in the 1950s.

recommend book⇒The Parachute

paperback

ISBN13:

978-1-55263-734-0

publisher:

Key Porter

published:

2007-06-15

by:

Sinclair Dumontais and Patricia Claxton

A satirical novel about how capitalism destroys the middle class on which it feeds.

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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

Someone Is Stealing Your Life by Michael Ventura 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.
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.
The Life of Riley: A look at just how easy life on welfare is.
Essays on the Guaranteed Livable Income
Comer: The Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform, a left wing economics think tank.
Canadian Action Party: a fringe Canadian federal political party that has economic reforms of the banking system as planks.
The bright side of unemployment

For Man Must Work: National Film Board of Canada documentary

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