For a large number of people not working is likely to directly lead to literally death. For most people it is not a choice at all.
The fact that starvation is possible in a rich country is by design. It is not a necessary fact of the economy.
Only if nobody wanted anything else but food. Which is nonsense. People want lots of things besides food. And clothing, and shelter. And sanitation, and medical care, and...
What you are calling "rich" countries are countries in which people have way, way more options--where their lives are a lot more than just bare subsistence. And history shows that the vast majority of people want all those options; they don't want to live a bare subsistence life. (If you do, how are you even posting here? The Internet is not possible in a bare subsistence world.) And providing all the things needed for all those options requires lots of work.
Society is designed in a way where non-working people are shamed and considered parasites and anomalies. If we want to transition to a non-working society, this has to change, or the fear of losing one job's to a machine will stall automation.
We have subway drivers despite the tech to automate this job has existed since the 1960s.
I don't see where anyone is making an argument based on any such notion.
I think the reason most people are suspicious of those who don't work for a living is fairness: we all benefit from the many goods and services that our society produces, so we all should contribute our fair share to producing them.
I agree that the market for jobs in our society is very inefficient, which means that many people are unemployed not because they are unable or unwilling to do productive work but because of our inefficient process for matching people to jobs that will actually be meaningful for them. However, no one has any more efficient process for doing that; there are processes that lead to less unemployment in the sense of fewer people not having a "job" on paper, but those processes (as shown by the Soviet Union and China) don't care about the actual job satisfaction of individual people, so they don't solve the problem we are discussing here.
I also agree that industrialization created many "jobs" that actually aren't meaningful at all; the only reason people were used to do them is that nobody (yet) knew how to build machines that would do them. I agree that those jobs should be automated. What should happen as a result of such automation is that the necessities of life--food, clothing, shelter, basic transportation--should get cheaper over time. The main reason this hasn't actually happened in developed countries (or hasn't happened as much as it should--there are areas in which it has) is governments artificially keeping prices high to serve special interests (for example, the US government paying farmers not to grow crops). That is a political problem, not a technical problem.
Even if all the drudge work is automated, however, people will still need to design the machines, make sure they are doing what they're supposed to do, take care of any malfunctions, and update the designs as conditions change. Plus, there are many services that only humans can provide. So I don't think we are anywhere close to having a shortage of work that people will pay other people to do.
This implies that an employee of a firm like Renaissance Technologies should have the same social status as an unemployed welfare recipient; I do not believe this is the case in our society.
No, rather it implies the opposite because the employee is working whereas the unemployed person is not.
Thats your opinion, but it's not something that can be assumed to be true. Its equally likely that you just don't have the education and experience to perceive their contributions as valuable. Lots of people say the same thing about professions they don't respect such as artists, educators, police officers, mental health professionals, dog walkers etcetera. It says more about the person holding the opinion than the profession itself.
This is a common dodge used by professions that don't want to admit how much of what they do is not making any net contribution to society.
It is true that hedge funds contribute to making stock and bond trading markets more efficient, and that is a genuine net contribution.
It is also true, however, that in the course of doing this, hedge funds siphon lots of money from other people's pockets into theirs in zero-sum trades. Not to mention that many very smart people who could be making much greater genuine net contributions in other fields are attracted to hedge funds because of the money-making potential.
The question for society as a whole, as with any profession whose genuine contributions have not so nice side effects (which is just about any profession), is whether the genuine contributions are worth the not so nice side effects. One way society as a whole expresses its judgments about such questions is social approval or disapproval of particular professions based on people's estimate of the tradeoffs.
People's estimate of the value of a particular profession is dependent on their understanding of the profession and how it provides services to other people/professions. However familiarity/understanding is not a prerequisite to expression of social sanction.
> It is also true, however, that in the course of doing this, hedge funds siphon lots of money from other people's pockets into theirs in zero-sum trades.
There's an agent-principal problem here where a trader managing other people's money necessarily understands more about the field than the person whose money they are responsible for.
> Not to mention that many very smart people who could be making much greater genuine net contributions in other fields are attracted to hedge funds because of the money-making potential.
This is probably a sign that entry into this field is artificially limited. When the market rewards people for activity, it is supposed to indicate that activity is in demand. It may be the case that there are structural limitations that prevent the entry of new firms who would then drive profits to the marginal level.
In an ideal world, we would have artisans that could craft high quality bespoke items for a fair price, and a small selection of popular items that suit most people.
This isn’t rocket science.
Modern agriculture depends on the technology that is created by the other 40-70% of the population that works. Additionally you have to compensate the people in agriculture with something for their labor.
> The fact that starvation is possible in a rich country is by design. It is not a necessary fact of the economy.
It's also a consequence of human rights. We have decided that forcing people to work in the field so that other people can enjoy the benefit of their labor without due consideration is wrong.
Iceland is 81.8% and South Africa is 41.7%, according to the table on the page.
Who provides the water? who provides the rest of the inputs for bread?
There are a lot of things that need to be done to provide a basic standard of living, even if 1% of the society are slaves who labor in the fields for the benefit of the other 99%.
My point is that we are far past the point where mere survival requires the whole population to work fulltime.
Collective choices are made with the assumption that everyone should work but we have the means to create an entirely different society.
Its more than comfort, agricultural productivity relies on modern technology. Storage and transport of food relies on modern technology. Modern technology is a society-wide endeavor where many people contribute in tiny ways that all add up to something that can't be replaced by any of them.
> My point is that we are far past the point where mere survival requires the whole population to work fulltime.
Indeed, labor employment to population ratios range between ~40% and ~80% nowadays.
> Collective choices are made with the assumption that everyone should work but we have the means to create an entirely different society.
I think the issue is different than you are characterizing it. Why would a few people work to support everyone else without getting anything in return?
You can sit there and twiddle your thumbs until entropy does its thing, or you can choose to work against it.
You can hunt, gather, and farm. Or you can do something in exchange for credits to get food from other people who do.
I agree you shouldn't literally die if you choose not to work in a first world country, but you should only receive the bare minimum to keep you alive (e.g. a tent, basic medical treatment and a steady diet of government cheese).
Work is voluntary for the rich. Poor people will do the things that rich people don't want to do in order to keep their lives at the level they want.
> Poor people will do the things that rich people don't want to do in order to keep their lives at the level they want.
Yes, that's a fact of life. The things that people don't want to do are still things that (mostly) need to be done.
The author is using the term non-voluntary in a different sense. If all your material needs are met, e.g. housing, food and hygiene — then working to acquire capital is voluntary. The pre-requisites mentioned are the foundation of an abundant society. Obviously someone in India is going to have a far greater need to acquire capital to sustain themselves' than your average metropolitan Australian; such is the wealth disparity that currently exists globally.
Don't get me wrong — I believe work is an important component of our lives'. Indeed it can give us meaning and joy amongst other things (perhaps routine as a fundamental). But what I think this author is trying to illustrate is that our current society as a structure leaves zero room for the disciplines that are either a) unexplored, or b) are creative in nature. If it's the latter then it is a mere pittance of what a full-time employee earns. That is the trade-off.
Given the current state of technology, it seems quite likely that all the actual plans for abolishing work will devolve into a small group of low status, probably socially voiceless, people being picked out and made to do all the work.
We have had the ability to automate most work for two decades. Food, clothes, furniture, electronic devices, all of these could be produced with close to zero human labor. Why don't we?
After exploring a market (agriculture) in order to launch my own automation company, I have come to the conclusion that it is not the tech that we lack, it is the will. A culture change is needed in order to make people realize that a work-less society is:
- possible
- desirable
- is not going to make them poorer
It often coincides with a loss of ownership. If you can't make your own value, and you're letting something else make it for you, you might save yourself labor, but you're giving up your ability to create that value. Yes, the system as a whole will produce more, which is good, but the loss of leverage is an important factor to consider.
There's also a wasting and dependency effect that occurs when too much of a system is automated. If people aren't needing to work on or maintain a system, they don't need to know how it works to use it, pretty much by definition. It's doing the work for them. That creates a dangerous situation where essential systems aren't really understood, and fewer and fewer people end up knowing how to fix things because there isn't the same need to distribute the knowledge of upkeep/understand the work it's doing personally by doing it yourself.
Automation is extremely beneficial, and I'm often frustrated by what seem to be clear cases of not taking advantage of it, but I think what you're saying here over simplifies things.
I think the solution is for more people to learn how to set up their own automation and to automate things without making them too centralized.
> I think the solution is for more people to learn how to set up their own automation and to automate things without making them too centralized.
That's my sad conclusion as well. We could get to an automated society with far less pain and much faster if it was decided collectively though.
Look at car automation: if a city wanted to make automated cars a reality in their streets, there are tons of accommodations they could do: from radio beacons to official maps, standards on how to signal construction work, purposefully designed roads...
Instead, we are trying to design automated cars with the assumption that zero efforts will be made to promote them. Worse: we assume they are going to be so criticized that they have to perform better by a magnitude on day 1. That's making us waste 40 years.
Sorry, but that sounds hilarious. If "a city wanted", it's still people who would need to ensure "to signal construction work". And people don't care. And for other stuff, people would need to pay for it with their taxes. I'm sorry, but as an outsider, I would say the roads (usual roads!) in the US are in "perfect" condition only in California. In other states, it's the usual asphalt-with-cracks, which will turn into a hole when a heavy truck rides it thru the rainy/snow season.
Heck, majority of the world has problems with trash on the streets, and cities can't neither teach their people to not litter, nor clean up timely after them.
Automation benefits cities as well, you know. For instance computers probably drastically reduces the number of manual processing of paperwork. That's tax money you can use for something else.
I disagree. I think we have decided collectively to progress towards automation as fast as possible without unduly impacting people's quality of life.
> Look at car automation: if a city wanted to make automated cars a reality in their streets, there are tons of accommodations they could do: from radio beacons to official maps, standards on how to signal construction work, purposefully designed roads...
I believe there already are official maps and standardized signs in the developed world. I agree that incremental improvement is possible and desirable, I also think people are working on these things already. It is possible that signs could be redesigned to make them easier for machines to read but I'm not sure that's much of a bottleneck.
> Instead, we are trying to design automated cars with the assumption that zero efforts will be made to promote them.
I see lots of effort to promote them, they just aren't technologically ready to perform at scale yet.
We have decided to move all our factories to China instead of automating them. We still have subway drivers despite having the tech to automate subway since the 1960s.
As seen in some test suites and CI/CD pipelines...
For a large subsets of those categories, they already are. That's why, if you mostly buy food that's handled by automation (combines etc.) you can sustain yourself on a $50/month food budget. Similarly for furniture, check out IKEA factory videos to see the degree of automation employed in making cheap furniture. Electronics are mostly also produced by machines, humans do the last stage assembly only (and it's mostly because labor in Asia is just cheaper than sophisticated robots required to perform assembly).
Clothes are more difficult from a robotics standpoint (mostly because, unlike wood, cloth is not rigid/does not retain shape, which makes it insanely tricky to manipulate), so we're not there yet. But, on the other hand, making of the cloth itself, which previously required an insane amount of labor, has been fully automated for a long time.
Basically, once you own a place to live in, you can easily sustain yourself with a very part-time minimum wage job. Make the job pay more and you'd need to work maybe a month in year. Most people don't do that because they want the comforts and pleasures brought by market enough to work extra hours for them (usually up to a full-time job).
Most people won't do the $50/month food unless forced. The Soylent-junkies maybe, so if you're some robotic Western software dev whose sole purpose in life is placed in its optimization to be "productive" in a corporatist society.
Food is a central cultural part of billions of people's lives, provides joy and is a critical component in socializing. Food is more than just plain sustenance unless forced by natural or artificial circumstances.
Because we actually can’t do those things?
If I understand it properly the author suggests we should find the time to play with these things. Who knows what might happen? It will no doubt be interesting.
Our indevidual performance is certainly mind blowing in a play settings. I see "players" do what seems impossible to me every day.
Now consider this, can joy not be had in cooking? I can certainly tell you that I find cooking good food to be a very fulfilling task. Unlike engineering projects I can go from start to finish in under an hour. And it fulfills an immediate and visceral need.
I think that the argument for play is a good one. In engineering I encounter many people who engineer, not for the joy of it (which is spread very thin in many jobs anyway), but for the money. Now imagine if there was no quantitative social status (money) associated with engineering. You would see engineers self select purely on a basis of authentic interest rather than financial status seeking. Would that not bring more promising talent to the table?
Let me now attack the idea of automation from another angle; to claim that we should be able to automate all product is as outrageous as claiming that Atlas holds the earth up. How could we automate everything? Who makes the machine, and perhaps more importantly, who fixes them when they break. You cannot possibly convince me that you could make a machine to fix machines. Again, such a device would be in the realm of science fiction. In reality, even in the relatively controlled environments of factories things inevitably break in unpredictable ways, and there you are, back to needing humans to clean up the mess.
Now, automation does have a place; doing repetitive tasks. But I’d rather order a meal from an expert chef than a robot.
Automatic driving is a very easy task in roads and cities that are designed for it. Instrument all bus lines with ground wires, put a radio beacon on each crossing and sign, a front radar/lidar to detect obstacles and 90s tech is enough to automate a whole city. If it was desired, we would already be there.
Now, like you point out, there are many tasks that bring joy and people would do voluntarily. Said otherwise, there is a non-null amount of volunteer productive work.
Ergo, the goal of automating a society is not to automate 100% of the work, but to automate (100-V)% where V is the amount of voluntary work available.
"But I’d rather order a meal from an expert chef than a robot."
It would be interesting to make a Turing test for cooking. I am sure that there are many robot-made meals that are undistinguishable from chef's preparation.
As for a turing test, we’re talking about a professional chef here. Someone you can take an enormous variety of ingredients to in various forms of freshness or preservation, who can produce something that tastes really good. Theres often a large amount of creativity, improvisation as well as fine motor skills and expert timing involved in the process. It would be a monumental, hugely expensive task to create a machine that could even produce something edible given the same constraints. This just seems so far fetched to me.
I'm not convinced. For example, robots are absolutely terrible at handling cloth tasks (for example, folding laundry). I suspect that handling food, which has complex and unique (depending on ripeness etc.) physical responses to manipulation isn't much easier. Just try to give some in theory simple slicing tasks (such as - slicing an onion or a chicken fillet) to a 7 year old and see how well he does. The robot is no better.
Isn't that the economic reality rather than "the goal"? And doesn't this also put an shade on your original argument that it is "the will. A culture change is needed"?
I haven't worked for 20 years but I work in certain automation, and from what I've deduced it is rather that the V in (100-V)% is quite high, and then there's W = a x V (a is an positive constant) that specify required labour, specialization & investment for automation; which is almost always lower in supply than "voluntary work available".
Everyone agrees these products are inferior in quality to the comparable manually produced offerings.
> Automatic driving is a very easy task in roads and cities that are designed for it. Instrument all bus lines with ground wires, put a radio beacon on each crossing and sign, a front radar/lidar to detect obstacles and 90s tech is enough to automate a whole city. If it was desired, we would already be there.
It's not that easy to redesign an entire city to accommodate a second transportation network. A lot of buildings would have to be modified. Its probably better to approach this task incrementally using the existing road system.
> It would be interesting to make a Turing test for cooking. I am sure that there are many robot-made meals that are undistinguishable from chef's preparation.
I'd like to see a cooking Turing test as well because I disagree with you and this is in fact testable, one of us is mistaken.
Probably because they wonder how those people are figuring out how to eat without contributing to the economy.
But I see an inconsistency in their feeling of injustice, because some people have to work a lot to get comparatively very little benefits from our largely automated economy. Anyone who works should feel like they live a luxurious life. Instead we see a lot of addiction and despair, despite lifestyles that consume huge amounts of energy.
Be careful what you wish for.
subbing out death for aging, which is far and away the leading cause of death, I think this is a good metaphor. The first step is to persuade people that work, like aging, is bad [0], and that abolishing work is a comparatively neglected social cause relative to the harms caused.
We might have to live with work for a long time now, because scarcity abounds; but there's no point pretending that's good, or lionizing work for its own sake. It sucks to work at "a job that slowly kills you" [1], just like it sucks that we get old and die.
[0] https://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html (discussed previously here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24770566)
[1] Radiohead, No Surprises: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5CVsCnxyXg
Not everyone believes that these choices exist. The author offered the POV--although unstated--that the compulsions sufficient enough exist to either fully obfuscate or remove this choice, and you responded with the fact that this choice exists--not why or how this choice exists, just simply the assertion that it does.
That entirely depends on your socio-economic class. I know a lot of rich kids that do no work but live very easy, pleasant lives.
> They have a choice, but the choice is unpleasant. That is not the same as no choice.
A mugger tells me to hand over my watch or get shot. Choice or not choice?
Choice, of course.
A mugging is coercive precisely because the alternative choice (getting shot) is not meaningful.
"free choice" != "choice"
"choice" != "voluntary"
I mentioned semantics for a reason.
> A mugging is coercive precisely because the alternative choice (getting shot) is not meaningful.
Its not really desirable but neither is it wholly without meaning. Some things are worth dying for. For some people increasing the cost of robbery to murder for their assailant is one of those things.
Miserable, but—be relieved!—short. Because you will die without food, and shelter, and the other things which you can't magically summon from nothingness: in the current society, you need to work to get them, or had to work in the past to amass appropriate wealth, or someone else has to do this for you. Few are lucky to be gifted it from their birth. As are those who can get those necessities incidentally from play, without deliberate planning in fear of not succeeding.
That's basically what this philosophical essay has to tell about the (non) “choice” that you are given: you work, or else you suffer. You do have this choice though, for sure. The play is when you don't have to choose.
Assuming I don’t want to starve to death, what are my other options?
I could beg, although that’s still work in the sense that I’d be trading my time for money. I could go around to places that offer free meals to homeless people, but that seems unreliable. And I could steal money or food. That’s about all I can think of.
I suppose that’s technically a “choice”, but only by the most ruthlessly literal definition.
Welfare in most developed countries is enough not to starve and not to become fully homeless. But in many countries, it does not go one inch beyond this. Subsisting on welfare is indeed a very uncomfortable life. But it is not literal starvation to death.
Right, because even that requires someone do work to support people on welfare.
>> Subsisting on welfare is indeed a very uncomfortable life. But it is not literal starvation to death.
It would lead to quick death if we all tried to live that way at once.
I suppose you could add “move to a country with a better social safety net” to the list. But it doesn’t change the overall point, which is that every alternative to work requires you to turn your life upside down.
Oh, yes, absolutely. But this is moving the goalpost. The question was not whether one could stop working without having to make changes to their lifestyle. The question was whether one could stop working without literally starving to death. In most developed countries, the answer is yes. No one really starves to death due to poverty in developed nations anymore.
I am not too familiar with the situation with the poverty in the US. Do people there still die from poverty-induced starvation in the 21st century?
Getting thrown in jail will get you fed without working. But most people would consider that an absurd tradeoff. So we pretend it’s not an option, moving the goalposts in order to have a more interesting discussion about how to stop working without upending your life or withdrawing from society.
I would argue you can already live a comfortable life with a minimum of work (say 20h per week part time at big city minimum wage, $13/hr). For example, in Chicago you could rent a room with heating and AC, cook your own basic but flavorful meals, have healthcare through Medicaid and basic transportation on the bus/trains, thrift store clothing and a cheap cell phone with data plan for internet.
So we concede. smnrchrds wins the point. It's not a point we cared about, though, and we're going to move on to talk about a question we find more interesting: Can a person live a decent life without working?
Here is how I read this:
"Can I live a decent life?" - > Can other people make sure I have what I need when and where I need it?
"...without working?" -> ...without me doing anything for them in return?
Sounds awesome. For me.
The point of welfare is to make not working so unpleasant that a minimum wage job is less work to hold down.
This is true across the whole developed world, the majority of which I have lived in.
I think the question needs to be a little more nuanced than that. Here are a few resources to get you started:
https://hungerandhealth.feedingamerica.org/understand-food-i...
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/27/912486921/food-insecurity-in-...
https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/food-insecu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_States
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/11/23/hungry-at...
https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/54-million-people-america...
Is it? What statistics do you have to support that? And do those statistics track poor nutrition due to poverty as a component, or do they just ignore that?
> more than a third of the country still lives in an area where able-bodied adults are exempt food stamp work requirements.
How many countries allow people to move there for the purpose of collecting public assistance?
Well that's the rub, you don't want to work, you want to eat. The food has to come from somewhere. Even if you were a forager, other animals want to eat the same food.
> I suppose that’s technically a “choice”, but only by the most ruthlessly literal definition.
"Technically correct, the best kind of correct." More seriously we are talking about survival and food. Its hard to imagine a more ruthless domain of inquiry.
How all these things you mentioned are different from having a job: You do not have regular meetings with managers who evaluate your perceived performance against your competitors. No daily standups. Crossfit or not -- your choice. Paleo or not -- your choice. You can take a day off whenever you want to. You don't have to exercise in open space.
Ultimately and quickly it comes down to philosophy and your view of the truth of the world.
Autonomous adults generally aren’t compelled into recreation by an authority.
Haha, well it was quite recently when the mom of a friend of mine (over 18) with a sibling (under 18) made them go do some recreational activity, despite neither of them really wanting to do so. Legally I suppose nobody was obligated to do anything here, but practically speaking I'm not sure how "optional" this was; they basically did as their mom said despite not otherwise wanting to. It's not like families ties instantly break at 18 years old.
Children and young adults who still live with or depend on their parents/guardians are usually under their authority to some extent, even for completely arbitrary things like “go play”.
As we get older and more capable those things usually relax but there’s definitely a transition.
An adult who has full autonomy would probably weigh a decision like you described and decide whether to voluntarily go play with their younger sibling even if it wasn’t play for them. Some will do it, others won’t.
I’ll put it another way. I’m getting older(ish, I’m 38), I don’t have all the energy in the world, but I have a puppy. She loves to play and she benefits from it. Sometimes I just don’t feel up to it. I could always decide not to, my only strict obligations are don’t abuse or neglect her. But I usually play even if I don’t want to, by choice, because I want my puppy to be happy and healthy too. That’s a kind of decision making that most young children don’t engage, and gradually becomes more common in early adulthood and becomes more solid as we get more of our own autonomy.
It’s totally voluntary. It’s just not always play for me. And with that said, my puppy wants a play :)
Work and play are both voluntary to different degrees. You can survive without working, although your existence will likely be miserable. You can also survive without playing, but again, your existence will also likely be miserable. Play is something we prefer to do voluntarily, but if you don't force yourself to play every once in awhile, your life will probably be unhealthy. In that sense, it is not voluntary.
Even if I didn't work, I still have to do things that I don't want to do in order to keep my life at the level that I want. I need to clean where I live, keep myself clean, keep my body healthy by eating healthy food and exercising. Work is just an extension of that. It's a choice that I make in order to sustain or progress my life at the level that I desire.
Calling work non-voluntary reveals more about the author than it does about the system they describe: that they feel that they have no choice. They have a choice, but the choice is unpleasant. That is not the same as no choice. Declaring that you have no choice is a result of the inability to confront the weakness to acknowledge the unpleasant decision.