What do we do when there is no productive work for people to do? And we're getting to that point, given that, seven years since the Great Recession began and five years since it technically ended, unemployment remains stubbornly high and only the top 1% (or fewer) are doing better economically. The labor force participation rate began to fall at the start of the Great Recession and has not recovered since then. In fact, labor force participation rate has continued to slide downwards. In essence, there are not enough jobs for everybody who wants one. At present, there is no prospect for that changing in the foreseeable future.
As the video implies, higher education may actually make things worse. Under our current system of higher education, more and more students are graduating with higher and higher amounts of debt. Without decent jobs, they will never pay that back. Without decent jobs, they can't buy a home or a new car or new furniture or most of the other consumer goods, the purchase of which has been the foundation of our economy for generations.
It wasn't just the Internet which killed Blockbuster Video. At the same time that Blockbuster Video was closing stores, Redbox began showing up in grocery stores, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants. In the parlance of the video, robots replaced the blue-shirted workers in the video stores. In many towns nowdays, if there is still a video store, it likely is renting porn out of a back room.
Think of those fast-food places. People go there for sameness. A Big Mac or a Whopper is the same, regardless of where the restaurant happens to be. It won't matter to a lot of people if their order comes out of a slot instead of across a counter. Robots won't drop a box of patties on the floor (and then put them on the grill) or spit in your food. It probably won't be too long before we begin to see the Redbox equivalent of restaurants.
Humans may not be "terminated" by legions of killer robots. But we may be made redundant. What does this means for the future, when more and more people who graduate from high school and college realize that, no, the world isn't your oyster or that they no longer have a great and shining future, but that they have almost no chance of ever having gainful employment?
Will a lot of ceremonial jobs be created, where people go to jobs that essentially will be "stand here and watch the robots work"? Will we have hundreds of millions of people consigned to idleness and poverty? What does that mean for families, when potential parents know that their children's lives will be as bad or worse then theirs live are?
However it plays out, the robots are coming for your job. The job of planning how society will adapt is one that is both too big for any of us and is one that our national leaders seem to be doing their very best to even avoid thinking about.
But it's going to happen, regardless.
See, the idea was, invent machines to relieve the tedium of work, to free us for... and here's where the problem comes in... leisure, or a different type of work?
ReplyDeleteIt's conceivable that automation could free all humans of the need to work jobs and that we'd have the free time to do whatever we wanted with our lives. The thing preventing that is not technology, but the pervasive idea that people can't be allowed to not work. That concept is crucial to the system of capitalism, which is a glorified way of making other people work hard so a tiny portion of people can live that life of leisure.
That tiny portion does NOT want to share the not-working thing. But it's getting more and more inevitable, and capitalism is becoming more and more efficient at concentrating the benefits to a smaller and smaller population, with more and more devastating consequences to the rest of the population.
If we don't lose our technological progress, capitalism is doomed. But the transition will not be pleasant.
Again we come back to the idea of a guaranteed minimum income for an individual...twitching right-wingers foam at the mouth at this idea, "Takers! Takers!".
ReplyDeleteIt's more workable to reduce the workweek by dividing the jobs, but them you need to educate the workforce, and those capitalists will be damned if they want to pay for that either! If the currently system of purchasing a Congress continues, the results will be painful and deadly...but In the end the final act will likely be the same. This era is/was likely the last hurrah for capitalism...
Gentlebeings, I give you:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com/
Which you can download for free and covers this in depth and was written some 5 years ago or more.
Obviously we need to start requiring any machine that replaces people...to pay Social Security for the rest of the population. The term is externalities
I've been thinking, in a haphazard way, about a generally workless society. Interesting. Frightening. However, STEWART DEAN, is brilliant! Obviously, the corporate person should allocate Social Security, Medicare, and pension funds for every computer and bit of technology that replaces a human worker. Clear, simple, and obvious. Thank you, sir!
ReplyDeleteJay in N.C.