Work for a year then take two years off? Or retire earlier? Again, I didn’t say that people wouldn’t work at all. I said that the barrier to obtaining a personal autonomy is too high in a society where providing the essentials of life has been largely automated.
We keep people working by making it had to survive otherwise (high rents that don’t represent the maintainence/construction costs etc).
People can't help themselves. I don't think we're very close to retiring, it's just not in our social coding.
Today, to live free of work, you need about $500,000. There are groups of people dedicated to achieving this (FIRE / Moustaches). Then you live somewhere cheap, make sound investments, and live off of $25k / yr. In the right places, less than 1/4 of that will go towards rent.
If our primary concern as a society was escaping work, we'd be better at it. Most of our modern economy goes towards making things better, not cheaper (phones, transportation, entertainment, etc.).
We're already at a point where as a society we have the tech to live off of 10 hour work weeks. But we'd have to focus our economy on making a low standard of living cheap, instead of focusing it on raising the standard of living.
I can absolutely understand, if we aren't capable of producing anything of value, forcing us to work doesn't do any good for society beyond putting every working age person in a skinner box.
My issue is more that I'd be putting a lot of trust in the government to provide for me for (avg lifespan - X) years of being a net drain on the system.
Ultimately, I don't think it's a choice I'll get to make though. Taking it to the cynical conclusion, I'd be better off with living a few years of living off BI before the government killbots come compared to working those same years and then getting killbotted.
I don't see why everyone needs to work in order to keep the economy going. Suppose in the future we've managed to completely and fully automate all the work that was done by humans in 2014. Shouldn't we be able to maintain the standard of living of 2014 indefinitely, with no human "work" to speak of? (Assuming, of course, that our standard of living in 2014 is sustainable to begin with.)
I propose working only for half a year. More inline with humanity roots.
This also will rise price of labor so rich clueless speculators won't have resources to waste other people lives on futile endeavours, will incentivise more automation, sharing(think OSS) and less burocracy without social disorder from people losing "jobs".
I don’t think we’re close to doing all the work, and I don’t want to automate all work. I want to automate away jobs. Those things society relies on from everyone to function.
The point is that a society that requires everyone to work all the time sucks for a lot of people - particularly those at the bottom. We can and I believe should build a world where working a job is optional. I fully expect people would still work a lot, but it would be optional in the sense that their basic needs (food, shelter, clothing, access to computers and internet) would be provided to them by society.
It is certainly possible to build this. And many people want it. The key, I think, is to build the system based on voluntary interaction. Find people who are willing to help support others and then have those people collectively drive the cost of that support down through engineering.
I’m not trying to eliminate work. You can never eliminate work. I want to eliminate jobs.
You seem to be assuming that a certain portion of the population needs to work, and the rest of the population doesn't really need to work.
This is just not true, at least not in the timeframe of months/years that we're talking about. Or at least, not true while continuing to enjoy a fairly modern lifestyle.
I mean, we can definitely get rid of anyone working in education, for example. And get rid of anyone working in anything that helps with education (e.g. software for education, etc). We can also get rid of anyone working in entertainment. Or tech. That is definitely doable. It just means a huge portion of the population can't do 90% of the things they do all day (i.e. jobs aside, how much time do people spend watching TV, on the internet, etc?).
Why would everyone stop working? If you were given the choice, would you just sit around and eat M&Ms and watch tv all day? Or would you work anyway?
Consider your examples. Who would grow the food? Farmers. Because people would grow food anyway (and do), whether or not they get paid, because it's intrinsically rewarding. Building houses? Jimmy Carter is rich and 90-odd years old and builds houses. Med school? Maybe people want to be doctors?
The jobs that are at risk in this model are the jobs that have no intrinsic value to the individual other than the paycheck.
My god it’s so true. I’m a robotics engineer and I’m an advocate of what I call “reduce the human cost of living to zero” through automation and democratic arrangements. The idea being that we can make it cost very little for society to support non-working people, such that work is not compulsory for survival. It’s similar to a basic income but it’s universal basic services where we try to get the marginal cost to zero (we can IMO make it cheaper than a basic income).
I get so many people telling me “but people would be miserable, they need work to be happy and have purpose.” UGH YES I agree, but I never said I would ban employment! I just want people to be able to take a year off now and then, or work half time, or volunteer or do non-capitalist work and be fine. People seem to think that if we weren’t desperate for employment we’d just sit around bored all the time. That’s not what wealthy people do! Human beings are far too creative to just sit around and do nothing. Eliminating compulsory work is about increasing freedom. We’re smart enough to find something good to do with that freedom.
I talk to people about changing the world so work is optional, and people are really attached to the idea that everyone should work all the time. Our world is sufficiently productive (a trend I expect to continue rising) that we could offer a modest life to everyone regardless of how much they work. Or more conservatively, we could build a world where everyone has 8 weeks of vacation a year or could take 6 months off every few years.
I believe this is doable from a technical perspective and it’s the problem I’m trying to devote my life to. We ultimately need to build optional societies where people who choose to join can opt out of consumerism, a major driver of our need for endless work.
My vision is for systems of robotics that are totally open source (modifiable and royalty free) that can create the basic goods for survival. Then groups of people fund corporations with bylaws like a constitution that guarantee rights to shareholders. The machines provide for the people and excess goods are sold to a market to support growth of the community.
I think something like that in the future is one very useful aspect of a society where unnecessary work is over and regular people get to enjoy the benefits of modern productivity (instead of a small percentage of the population enjoying that while most people miss out).
But in general when I talk to people I find that the hardest idea for them to grasp is the idea that we could all work less and things wouldn’t collapse. We just need to alter the distribution of wealth so that everyone benefits.
If I were working in a field that required an able body I might agree with you but I'm not performing manual labour, society would get just as much value from me overall if I had my retirement now and spent my 40s and 50s writing code instead.
It's already silly that I'm spending my 20s and 30s writing code.
Plus the code I write doesn't do anything for society's survival. We could just about switch the entire tech industry to maintenance mode, cut jobs by 90% and society would get along just fine, as long as we figure out a way to distribute necessities like food and housing without money.
The same can be said about an enormous chunk of the workforce. We're forced to work for survival but the jobs we perform aren't truly necessary, they're ultimately derived from an illogical and unsustainable obsession with growth.
Most of society doesn't _need_ to be working at all and society would get along just fine if it wanted. It just doesn't want to.
Sure - I know a guy who retired from trading in mid 40s and is now a math teacher because he likes that. But if our society relied on people working because they chose to (as opposed to needed to) we probably wouldn't have one.
That's one thought experiment I conduct - imagine we find out that a comet is going to approach Earth in 6 months. My main problem is us having to deal with 6 months of chaos (since nobody will be working) rather than instant annihilation.
What about the people who enjoy working? The dignity of receiving an honest wage for an honest day's work? The satisfaction for providing for their family? For some people, their work is the only thing that keeps them in shape. My father, when he was no longer able to find work, and now after looking for 10 years is too old, literally sits on the couch for 16 hours a day watching television and smoking cigarettes. He would do anything to work.
This thinking on here that we are doing humanity this huge service by automating all their pesky little maniacal jobs away is insane, and it needs to stop. There is more than one world view out there.
You're missing the entire point, which is that people don't have options because not everyone is privileged enough to be able to take time off to look for a job, or go any time without a paycheck.
Also, a lot of the work with growing food could easily be scaled back and done by people with plenty of time to spare for their own lives, or even partially automated. We're already quite a lot more efficient than before. There's no reason we have to have people suffer shit jobs just to live.
It's not about being forbidden, it's about all the meaningful work being automated. Sure, anyone in an ideal post-work world would be able to pursue whatever hobbies or interests, but work wouldn't be the same for humans, as nobody needs a person to work.
We keep people working by making it had to survive otherwise (high rents that don’t represent the maintainence/construction costs etc).
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