A World Without Work
15th December 2015
In the past few years, even as the United States has pulled itself partway out of the jobs hole created by the Great Recession, some economists and technologists have warned that the economy is near a tipping point. When they peer deeply into labor-market data, they see troubling signs, masked for now by a cyclical recovery. And when they look up from their spreadsheets, they see automation high and low—robots in the operating room and behind the fast-food counter. They imagine self-driving cars snaking through the streets and Amazon drones dotting the sky, replacing millions of drivers, warehouse stockers, and retail workers. They observe that the capabilities of machines—already formidable—continue to expand exponentially, while our own remain the same. And they wonder: Is any job truly safe?
The Atlantic is a leftist Voice of the Crust but it has some damned fine writers, who tend to ask the right questions even when their answers are, more often than not, the same ‘progressive’ pap.
Futurists and science-fiction writers have at times looked forward to machines’ workplace takeover with a kind of giddy excitement, imagining the banishment of drudgery and its replacement by expansive leisure and almost limitless personal freedom. And make no mistake: if the capabilities of computers continue to multiply while the price of computing continues to decline, that will mean a great many of life’s necessities and luxuries will become ever cheaper, and it will mean great wealth—at least when aggregated up to the level of the national economy.
The major question mark regarding automation is, not how robots are going to be producing all of these goods for cheap, but how the people who need these cheap goods are going to earn the money to pay for them.
But even leaving aside questions of how to distribute that wealth, the widespread disappearance of work would usher in a social transformation unlike any we’ve seen. If John Russo is right, then saving work is more important than saving any particular job. Industriousness has served as America’s unofficial religion since its founding. The sanctity and preeminence of work lie at the heart of the country’s politics, economics, and social interactions. What might happen if work goes away?
Bear in mind that an automated world doesn’t need a lot of manual labor, and that ‘knowledge work’ doesn’t leave a lot of demand for the half of the population who are, by definition, of less than average intelligence. In a world where people, in large part, define themselves by the work that they do, what happens when there isn’t any work than anyone wants them to do? Even if they have sufficient worldly goods, through government benefits or whatever, a brief glance as the sort of path many heirs of great fortunes take suggests that a disturbing number of them will wind up drones and slackers.