Re:What the Fourth Industrial Revolution Looks Like
by scrumper on Tuesday April 14, 2015 @03:30PM
(#9376677)
This is a great point but it's not orthogonal to mine. Basic income doesn't provide a framework for self worth; it simply replaces a need to toil for money with a state-provided guarantee of a reasonable standard of living. If you have some side project or external, monetarily low-valued way of spending your time (full-time parenthood, art, a cottage business) then you've solved the worth problem on your own. If you're a displaced factory worker, you now have a new (admittedly nicer) problem.
To your coda, I think a lot of contemporary angst comes from precisely that - a sense that jobs really are basically worthless. Most of us behind a desk have felt that at some point. Even my frontline public servant friends in the military, healthcare, and police report similar feelings from time to time.
We need to move away from the meme that your 'honest work' determines your worth. It was very instrumental in the past, so it's not a surprise we've integrated it culturally, but it makes no sense in a post-scarcity world. Humans do have a need to do something worthwhile, but it doesn't necessarily have to be put inside the current "slave away your life for the right to live" framework of jobs.
Come to think of it, how much of that "good feeling of doing honest work" do people have today, when more and more are employed doing bullshit jobs that are artifacts of various zero-sum games existing in our economic system?