I saw this bouncing around Facebook, and I would like to endorse the underlying philosophy:
For those of you still using text-based browsers (hey, remember Lynx?), here we have Buckminster Fuller making a point about work and responsibility in a high-tech society. Namely: maybe people don’t have to work. Maybe, if machines become really good at producing the basic necessities of life, rather than bemoaning a loss of jobs we should celebrate our liberation from the toil of labor.
As a practical matter, I recognize that this might be hopelessly utopian. It amounts to saying that we should have fairly high taxes, and redistribute most of the money as a minimal income to every person. Nothing wrong with working and earning additional money, but everyone would get their personal share no matter what, and in principle that might be enough to live on. Maybe John Rawls was pointing toward something like that, but the social will is nowhere near making it happen. I can even imagine a utilitarian argument against it, based on the supposition that letting people learn and loaf and enjoy themselves rather than working for a living would lead to less innovation and competition, which in turn would make the world a less enjoyable place. I’m not sure if that’s right, but it’s at least non-obvious that work should be gradually phased out.
But nevertheless the spirit is admirable, and that’s what I want to endorse. There’s nothing morally wrong with the idea that people should spend their time in non-productive pursuits rather than working to earn extra income. It’s not “socialism,” since we’re not changing the free market or the ownership of the means of production. It would just be nice to live in a world where people did challenging things because they wanted to, not because they were forced to in order to survive. Maybe someday.
I don’t think the argument, “if we didn’t work, then we would all get fat and lazy”, is true at all. And I have proof. People get fatter, drunker, and dumber as we look back in history. They also did WAY more work. Progress from the early 20th century to the present and even in that small time period you can see that people became smarter, happier with life (less drunk), and extremely attractive; all while doing less work.
I would also like to mention that the concept that ‘a person “agrees” to do a job in return for payment’, is a pretty loose statement. Look at the world right now. A large portion of the world’s population “agrees” to do it for that amount of money because they’ll literally die in the street if they don’t do something to bring in money.
I also agree with what GM is saying: this is a system that is not sustainable. Nothing can increase forever. The concept that ‘business is bad if we aren’t making more money than we previously were’ is one of the biggest problems in the world right now. The only solution to that is to actually start colonizing planets. I don’t think we’ll be able to do that before the current system fails.
Actually, this situation existed in New Zealand (Aotearoa) before the Brits arrived there. The Maori could just walk down to the ocean and grab fish to eat, the climate was so mild that clothing and housing needs were minimal, etc. And the result was the most warlike people ever on earth. They had nothing to do but fight each other.
Point is, SOME would use their lives to learn and think, but some would just get drugged out for life, or worse.
False hope. Some people will always have certain mission critical jobs that are not optional, even if they just manage the network. Once you have an edge, you have to deal with it.
Just curious if anyone else has had their post disappear.
I have a feeling if you mention work too many times and add a link you might get caught in the spam filter.
Maybe it was just a glitch on my machine.
“I can even imagine a utilitarian argument against it, based on the supposition that letting people learn and loaf and enjoy themselves rather than working for a living would lead to less innovation and competition”
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I can’t disagree more: check the motivation and outcomes of hackerspaces.
It’s an interesting subject (thanks for posting it), but previous commenters have already expressed most of my thoughts on it. I’ll just add this anecdote: I was somewhat of a workaholic in my career as an engineer, and it was a satisfying life – as long as I had decent bosses. Then the Jack Welch hires and management policies trickled down to my level and one day I had to ask myself, “Do you want to die rich, or happy?” – but that’s another long story. Anyway, between my vested GE pension and Social Security more money comes in than goes out, but I miss the challenge and sense of accomplishment that technical work gave me. (I have invested a lot of time in making game “mods”- mentioned by a previous commenter – which are distributed for free over the Internet, with usually several downloads a week, but it doesn’t feel as useful, partly because the average maturity level of the gaming community is not high.)
Speaking of SF scenarios, there are also those in which the AI robots who take over all the necessary tasks eventually ask themselves, what do we need these humans for? Poetry? We write better sonnets.
I’m not a believer in strong AI being possible at least any time soon. But I do believe automation will soon make many well-paying jobs requiring medium skills obsolete. So we will need to find a new way of organizing labor or simply to start paying people whether they work or not.
I think the other problem which will be a double whammy on the social and economic will be the increasing lifespan. Medical breakthroughs will likely extend by decades current lifespans.
More people living longer, less work for people to do. This looks like a major problem that will play out in this century.
http://broadspeculations.com/2012/03/28/why-the-future-needs-us-part-i/
Please, Sean, do tell how exactly taking the produced goods from the people that actually produced them and giving them to the non-producing people is not socialism?
It would be all right by me if I didn’t have to work 10 hours a day while doing a PhD, but since nobody is actually suggesting that they do my work and I get paid, I do not particularly endorse such people’s demand to have a part of my paycheck to loaf around.
As for the demand for menial jobs shrinking, as other commenters have whined in excruciating detail, it is most demonstrably not. The demand for people that don’t want to work however, is. Is that a bad thing though?
LOL – such nonsense. You cannot suspend evolution – organisms with different DNA will compete and/or cooperate only to the extent that it ensures their survival.
Every utopian society assumes a “benevolent force” which enforces the utopian rules. That includes socialists, libertarians, and so forth. The reason utopian societies do not exist is because the “benevolent force” does not and cannot exist, it is composed of the very same competing/cooperating individuals that it is attempting to control.
Any workable society has to confront these two facts, and the best we can do is to harness the competitive/cooperative instincts of everybody, politicians included, by writing down the “rules” in a constitution, a body of law, whatever, and trying to impress a respect for those laws. In other words, competition must be harnessed, not eliminated. Every society ages, as the survival instincts of the people comprising the “benevolent force” kick in, and the laws are watered down, ignored, circumvented and reinterpreted. When the vote is rendered pointless, we are done. We haven’t reached that point yet, despite the most determined efforts of both the Republicans and Democrats to deny votes to all but their constituents, citizens or not.
I don’t understand why Sean cannot apply his great analytic abilities to the science of economics, to see that the above proposal is not even sophomoric, it’s kindergarten stuff. I’m not an economics expert, but anyone can see that with the above proposal, all menial jobs openings will be unfilled. If everyone gets, say, $25,000 per year free and clear, why take a $20,000/year menial job, of which 70 percent is lost to taxes, in order to pay people who settle for the $25K? So now the price of a big mac goes thru the roof. The price of everything requiring menial labor goes thru the roof. The cost of menial labor goes thru the roof. Your guaranteed $25K buys you nothing any more. By guaranteeing everyone $25K for free, you have guaranteed that $25K is worth little or nothing. There is no free lunch. Anything free is worthless. I don’t care how many wonderful computers and machines you devise to eliminate menial labor, you will not do it, you will only redefine the meaning of menial. By giving everyone $25K for free, you have defined the economic value of $25K to be zero.
So naturally the dumb-ass answer is to fix prices so that $25K actually provides something. Now you no longer have a free market. Oh, wonderful, declare the socialists, but now the “benevolent force” will have to assume the responsibilities of the free market. All of the information (“price signals”) that can be gleaned from the free market will be gone, to be replaced by a “benevolent force” which must peer into the economic needs and habits of every individual in order to set prices. And if they get it wrong, there will be a black market. Black markets are extra-legal entities run by people who must provide their own enforcement of their market and are comfortable doing so. Otherwise known as organized crime.
And still, they will get it wrong, because the people comprising the “benevolent force” are subject to the same survival instincts as you and I, except they now have an enormous amount of power in their hands. The emphasis will be on force, not benevolence. How’s your utopia working for you now?
LOL – such nonsense. You cannot suspend evolution said FrankL … i say BINGO … just what you have to do … suspending it is not stopping it … check the data again frankie boy … if you cannot think of a machine better than man to make man better … think again … like i wrote before it is not necessarily to make man ‘better’ -we are good enuff now- it is to make man less of a prick, less of a bastard/an animal with toys-dangerous toys- but still an animal … of course i am not talking about me being one of you animals … but if i can almost encompass all of infinitude at the young age of 61 … others can … not an infinitesimal part of spirituality needed … pure logic only … logic is above humanity doncha know … not any spirit nowwhere to be found … believe you me i looked .. everywhere … logic is all you need … fuck love what did they know …
Probably we should get there gradually. The 7-day weekly cycle is a bit arbitrary, so we could try a 6-day cycle – 4 days work, 2 days off, then a 5-day cycle – 3 days work, 2 days off. This would have the bonus of allowing more employment, and if done sensibly, wages could probably be maintained over the long-term.
Maybe some alien society on a planet far away has found the optimal schedule and would find our long 7-day weekly schedule to be quite barbaric.
This is why I love Sean Carroll. Out of the box thinking. Sean, here is an interesting primer on guaranteed basic income: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income#Difference_between_basic_income_and_guaranteed_income. The Nixon administration floated an idea like this way back when. Friedman also thought somewhat similarly in his concept of the negative income tax. Yet liberals champion it today, such as economics blogger Mike Konczal: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/11/thinking-utopian-how-about-a-universal-basic-income/
This is an interesting idea, one worth thinking about seriously, because considering it seriously requires substantial insight into human psychology, group dynamics, human variability, and a host of other issues. It is also subject to the scientific method — numerous attempts to build exceptionally cooperative societies have been made over the years, so one can study why they have all failed for groups larger than, say, a few hundred, once natural competitiveness and resentment of “freeloaders” or “exploiters” are no longer minor issues.
Are certain menial jobs really immune to automation, and thus a fatal weakness of Sean’s utopia as Frank has suggested above? Well, pretty much by definition, a menial job requires little creativity or other special attributes unique to humans, so presumably if the motivation exists to automate, a way can be found to do so. I suspect that will be done anyway in the foreseeable future, simply because continuing advances in computer intelligence and robotics, coupled with the profit motive both by automation producers and consumers, make it very attractive. Where there is a will (and profit motive), there is a way… In some grocery stores I use, many people already would rather do a self check-out than wait a few extra minutes for a store employee to do it for them. Long ago most people (in California) decided they would rather pump their own gas than pay 10 or more extra cents per gallon for someone else to do it for them. People will adjust to elimination of menial jobs if it means their funds go farther.
What I don’t see taken seriously in Sean’s post or the comments thus far are the unintended consequences of such a shift. Here are just three examples:
1. Education inequality. Wouldn’t the idea of a guaranteed income just exacerbate the intellectual inequality and opportunity that already exists? If many children and adolescents decide at an immature age that school isn’t important because the society will support their “have fun” lifestyle (already a significant problem), they eliminate many future opportunities. Sure, people can go back to school once they “see the light” later in life, but we all know that’s easier said than done (and requires a highly motivated person, one who probably wouldn’t have skipped education in the first place). And assuming the state doesn’t take over child raising in Sean’s utopia, what kind of example and motivation would uneducated parents offer their children in pursuing an eduction? We already know that limited education tends to persist for generations. Many future poets and artists will lack the education to pursue their dreams, by default in such families.
2. Too much idle time. While many people would have no trouble filling their time with personally satisfying or constructive activities, many others wouldn’t. Expect significant increases in: gang activity (“sense of meaning”), vandalism, destructive thrill seeking and destructive drug abuse (all ways to combat boredom), for example. Doesn’t the living environment in some notorious public, inner-city housing projects offer insight into what we could expect to happen on a larger scale in Sean’s utopia, at least when people migrate to high density housing to save money?
3. Unsustainability. It’s hard to see how Sean’s utopia wouldn’t lead to a gradual loss of economic competitiveness and economic decline with respect to the rest of the world unless the rest of the world adopts the same model. Hopefully this is self explanatory — there are plenty of countries in the world which are hungry for economic advancement, where the option of a life of leisure is completely untenable and worthy of derision. Sean’s utopia would almost certainly not be sustainable for that reason alone, given that no country is sustainably self sufficient (if only for need of natural resources). Moreover, if very talented people see their economic opportunity as too limited (due to taxation or other means of redistribution), why wouldn’t there be a brain drain when they emigrate?
It looks to me like the workability of the idea requires a different kind of human than the kind that has evolved thus far on Earth.
Since nobody seems to have noticed: B. Fuller was a certifiable crank. This idea belongs in the same place as his “tensegrity” and all the rest of his bullshit.
I endorse your endorsement, and my experiment confirms your realistic viewpoint:
http://www.unitaryflow.com/2013/09/buckminster-fullers-romantic-lie.html
Marty – I agree with most of what you said. Regarding the automated grocery line, there is still the menial job of installing them, maintaining them, and having a person standing around teaching people how to use them, and making sure people aren’t neglecting to scan some items.
I think the reason the attempts to build exceptionally cooperative societies fail at about the few hundred level is because this is about the maximum number of people that one person deal with on a personal level. Beyond that, intermediaries must be found. The human brain can only deal with at most a few hundred personalities. About the size of a large hunter-gatherer tribe, just what we have needed to survive up to X years ago. Not coincidentally, it’s about the size of most legislatures.
It’s also the size of a small rural town. You can look the town drunk in the eye, someone you know, and you know when he/she really needs help, and when you are just being played. People’s reputations are based on personal contact, and there are many insights and behavior modification tools available as a result of these relationships. But if you live in Los Angeles, how do you deal with the town drunk in Podunk Idaho? You don’t, you might think you can deal with them through a third party, some member of your legislature tribe, but that’s where things break down. You don’t have face-to-face knowledge of the Podunk drunk or the politician, and the politician doesn’t have face-to-face knowledge of either of you, and the human intuition and tools are gone, replaced by manipulated pixels on your TV/computer/newspaper. The socialists refuse to understand this and keep trying to build a big-city mega-society based on small-town tribal values but without the tribal tools, and every attempt to “fix” things leads inexorably to a corrupt totalitarian society. George Orwell saw this. The libertarians refuse to understand that a purely individualistic society will break into tribal size groups which will then fall prey to larger, less individually oriented groups. The answer lies in the mess in the middle, and like you say, it requires substantial insight into human psychology, group dynamics, human variability, and a host of other issues. But oh, never mind, that requires too much thought, a real buzz killer. Its so much easier and exciting to be a simple-minded tool, a cheerleader for Bush or Obama, or to sign up for some idiotic kindergarten utopian ideology that bears little relation to the real world and how it works.
I think Fuller failed to predict just how incredibly productive civilization could become through technology, and how coveted occupations that once required direct human participation would turn out to be. The sad fact is that a fair proportion of the population has little to contribute with their leisure time that would increase overall happiness and wellbeing. Idle hands and all that. Once upon a time, the average Joe was still needed to make stuff that everybody wanted. People like him were valued and could feel valued. Now they’re stuck in menial service industries like fast food, stocking the shelves at Wal Mart, etc. They have no opportunity to make more of themselves and derive some satisfaction from that because we don’t really need them to do much else. Machines do it all now. Far better, far cheaper, far faster and in volumes Fuller probably could have scarcely imagined. The enemy is the opposite of people inventing tasks to keep humans busy. It’s productivity, which increasingly makes it harder to come up with anything edifying for large swaths of the population, who expect something like the American Dream, to contribute. Only the most talented and/or ruthless can prosper in a world with more people and less need for them. Let them play instead? Fuller projects to much of his own brilliance on others, I’m afraid, and I don’t think that would go very well at all. I rather tend to imagine billions of corpulent, supine drones in diapers with wifi implants watching virtual gladiatorial combat via OHMDs to fill their boundless leisure time. Which, of course, would be marginally better than the real thing.
If you pay money to people to do no work, they spend it. How good is that for an economy?
One cannot spend the money one has to pay to others who do not (wish to) work.
Money for nothing is MTV, not economy.
No matter how advanced our technology gets, we will always need to spend a lot of time and effort in rearing our children–something no AI can do as well.
Great subject and “the spirit is admirable”. Great comments, incl. GM and Malcolm Sparks.
The quickest path to such an objective is for there to be the right to living space. This removes the primary cause (other than food) for life’s struggle, territory. For that right the cost is birth control (male and female). The rest will take care of itself, particularly as with todays solar energy thrust, our entire existence can be powered (effectively) to the energy consumption level to which we have become accustomed in this computer centric world.
I am with Buckey all the way having argued for many years the “right to not ‘work'”. In saying this it is important to make the distinction between indolence, work, and freedom of occupation of time. Highly motivated people have no understanding of “bone idle”. Not working does not mean becoming idle, it means, in the context of this subject, “having the freedom to be active in ways not primarily focused on earning money”.
I am currently developing a living system based on this very notion. I judge the “liberation from the toil” to be fully achieveable, even in a market driven world, without destroying the planet in the process (long distance air travel for the masses excepted). On that last point though checkout the performance of the eGenius in this article
http://blog.cafefoundation.org/?p=8226
400 klms at 180 kph on 43 kwhrs for 2 people in a vehicle with neglible maintenance requirement, also consider the VWXL1 for land transport (Bio Diesel fueled at 5% to 10% of current vehicle fuel consumption very achieveable) or the Stealth Bomber eBike.
Rooftop solar for everything domestic and small business. Accept a basic shared living space of 200 square metres, AtivQ computers and smart phones all around with fast internet access, and you have provided much of what we accept to need for our “essential” modern human needs, ego’s aside, at a level that enables freedom of choice of cerebral occupation.
“The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense in earning a living.”
I think this statement just comes from ignorance of today’s job market compared to the job market of the recent past. In the middle of the twentieth century people with little or no education could go into high tech jobs by the hoards. Today even highly educated people just out of school cannot get into these fields because of lack of work experience.
We have raised a new generation of scholars to flip hamburgers. How would the ancient Greek philosophers feel if society told them that it was then their primary duty to plow the fields or act as their personal butler?
Sean,
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Re is this socialism? You’re conclusions are simplistic. In Marxist theory, the means of production have primacy. It is that which determines social tensions, social classes, laws, morality etc – the whole superstructure, as Marx called it.
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With revolutionary machines that could provide for all with no labour, I struggle to how social tensions or classes could exist. As such, a state of communism would be realised, with a revolution in superstructure following the revolution in technology.
I agree that technology, combined with ample available energy, has the potential to provide a baseline where every person has their basic needs of food, water, shelter and intellectual stimulus met. I still struggle with how to devise a means to give every person a sense of personal accomplishment and satisfaction which I think are core components of Bentham’s happiness measure. I do think that the advent of smart technology does provide a path to achieving this in a non-invasive way. There are obviously a lot of moral questions and dilemmas associated with “artificially” providing people with lives they can be happy with, but you look at the amount of misery that can be avoided you think we should try. The hardest issues is of course the “anti-social” drive that some people would want to eliminate, but actually is an essential component to human personality and creativity. How do we preserve what makes us human, including those elements that can drive us to negative consequences, while at the same time retaining our notion of individual free will and self determination?
As far as wealth and power, these in general can not be eliminated in a general sense, since they are an expression of competition and will. Our competitive nature and our desires are the currency of human accomplishment, so whether we measure these things with $ or not is irrelevant to some degree.
Andrew – Communism will NEVER be realized until competition among the members of society is eliminated. Until then, it is a scam, designed to prey upon the tribal instincts of people to put wannabe autocrats into power. Competition will never be eliminated until the genetic differences between members of society is eliminated. Until that happens, evolution will proceed, any new combination of DNA or that is better able to “game” the system will flourish.
Consider the eusocial insects (ants, bees, certain wasps, etc.) – an almost perfect communist society. Every member of the hive except the reproductive queen and the drones are sterile and have almost all of their DNA in common. They cannot, and they need not, compete – competition is pointless.
Consider the human body – another almost perfect communist society of individual cells. Their DNA is exactly the same, reproduction is absent or tightly controlled. Cells cannot and need not compete, and if the DNA is “damaged” and a group of cells go rogue, its usually called cancer and is destructive to the entire organism, including the rogue cells themselves.
And still, competition is not eliminated, its just that the individual ant or cell is not the unit that is being selected, it is the hive or the human organism. The hive and the human organism must compete against other hives or organisms. A communist society will have to compete against other societies, communist or not. And that means the individual ants or human body cells are entirely expendable. A honey bee dies if it stings, a human leukocyte dies when it has absorbed enough pathogens, but so what? These sub-units had no individual identity, no individual future.
The hunter-gatherer tribal unit is closer to socialism because its members are more closely related, share more of the same DNA. The head of the tribal unit, the chief or whatever, cannot act in a purely selfish manner because that will put his/her DNA in jeopardy, assuming that a reproductive advantage is gained by being a member of a tribe. In a genetically diverse nation-state like the USA, this is not true, and selfish behavior on the part of the ruling class is an evolutionarily productive enterprise, including preying on people’s genetically ingrained propensity to tribal behavior in order to acquire power.
Communism will never be realized until reproduction is under central control. Any socialist or communist utopia which ignores or fails to realize this is doomed. Liberals are so enamored of the theory of evolution simply because it flies in the face of the hated organized religion model, and then they proceed to ignore its implications and buy into the snake-oil utopia that wannabe autocrats are selling. They think that “memes” or ideas are the only thing controlling us and our tendency to compete, and if these memes can be controlled, the job is done. Wrong.
Libertarians prize individualism above everything. That’s fine, if you want to be the equivalent of a colony of bacteria, or a housefly in the ecology of human societies, and you may flourish, but you will be at the mercy of any more highly organized society that takes a particular dislike to you as an individual. You will be killed or domesticated, resistance is futile.