
A world without work - npalli
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/395294/?single_page=true
======
methodover
I really enjoyed reading this article.

I've been thinking quite a bit about work recently. I'm just about to turn 29,
and by all accounts I'm fairly successful: I graduated college with a
worthless liberal arts degree just as the Great Recession was beginning. After
an unsuccessful attempt at copywriting for a couple years, I managed to learn
programming. A few years after that and I'm the leader of the engineering team
at 12-person startup that looks to be pretty successful.

And yet I'm as unhappy now as I've ever been. And it sucks. Why can't I just
be happy with what I have? I've got a steady job, I've got a pretty good
income. Why do I feel so awful about my own life?

I've suspected for some time now that work itself is the problem. I'm trading
in the best years of my life, my focus, my attention, my time, _my life_ for
money. That's the nature of this transaction. I'm trading in this short life I
get for cash. I feel like a prostitute.

Honestly I'm sitting here with tears in my eyes thinking about it.

And apparently I'm not alone in how I feel about work. From the article: "A
2014 Gallup report of worker satisfaction found that as many as 70 percent of
Americans don’t feel engaged by their current job."

I think the truth is that work is an ocean of human misery, unfulfilled dreams
and wasted lives. I think a vast majority of us waste our youth, our time, our
energy in fields that we don't give a shit about, when in a better society
we'd be able to work on the things we do care about.

~~~
oliveira12345
This.

Basic income would pay for basic needs, and let people devote "free time" to
more personally-satisfacting-activities: open-source programming, studiyng new
interesting fields, etc...

The mere fact that in today's professional career there is little oportunity
for a 40-50years to work on a completely-new-unexperienced-field is an clear
example. There is a point in time after which a job converts from ilusion-and-
motivation into delusion-and-economic-compromise. And that's blocking people
from growing and fully apply their capabilities to reach higher achivements

~~~
tolmasky
Basic income will probably result in even more antagonism towards immigrants.
As Milton Friedman said, "It's just obvious you can't have free immigration
and a welfare state".

I feel immigration to the US is too restrictive as it is, let alone what it
would become if it meant giving everyone a paycheck. You basically have these
options:

1\. Restrict immigration (perhaps you are OK with this, I am not. I feel
immigration is one of the fundamental things that helped this country succeed,
and that we should be moving to make it MORE open, not less).

2\. Allow immigration but not offer basic income until you are a citizen. Now
you have a classist system. If you were born in the US you are part of the
citizen caste, that is guaranteed income from taxes (a nobility if you will),
if you were born outside the borders you must work for your income here. Sure,
eventually you could be "admitted", but it seems weird that an 18 year old
would be allowed to do whatever he wants but someone just entering the country
with three kids would be forced to work.

3\. Offer basic income to everyone that comes in, have no restriction, and
default immediately.

If you think Americans are xenophobic now, just wait to see their attitudes if
basic income ever passes.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
Good points there.

I feel this is a bit too early for basic income. That change will come to pass
naturally when society will be able to continue to exist and function normally
even if almost nobody will work. That would require some pretty hefty
advancements in AI and robotics.

Basically, I don't see struggle-free basic income without the robots doing all
the work for us.

~~~
digikata
Basic Income won't come naturally, look at how difficult a 40 hour week / 8hr
day was to bring into existence. Basically, widespread strikes were required.
The baseline productivity of the world is already sufficient for basic income,
and/or increased leisure vs work weeks - the only thing that advanced
automation might to in the future is make the disconnect between historical
economic assumptions and modern productivity unavoidable from a political
standpoint.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-
hour_day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day)

------
Einstalbert
I've had friends lose jobs in Amazon warehouses over their aggressive research
and development of an all-machine packaging line. They do work now that
requires the precision of a human hand and eye, but that job may also go the
way of the assembly line. His only hope is that custom carpentry's demand by
rich celebrities wanting the "premium" afforded by the work of a Human over
the static of a machine.

When I look back at people who invested their lives in the future of mankind,
and their predictions in something like the year 1960, it's interesting to
note just how incorrect they were. Communication boomed over transportation,
for example. Knowing that, I try to think of the ways the future will be so
impossibly different than my present. A world without work is one of those,
and I hope it angers and confuses every currently living generation enough
that we wish we would have made it a reality sooner.

~~~
notahacker
A world without work was a pretty common vision in the 1960s. And the 1860s

But humanity has a remarkable capacity to invent new outlets to fill our
waking hours as we redeploy resources used to make stuff to make _other_ stuff
or sell stuff. We didn't have (or foresee!) social media managers or video
game designers in the 1960s. And software doesn't just make our production
efforts scale, it makes our consumption scale. You can fit far more lifestyle
apps on your phone than chairs around your table, and a couple of decades back
few people would have foreseen _mobile phone apps_ as a category of product
that needed people to make, still less an industry reportedly topping up the
paycheques of a million Europeans.

I'm not seeing the developed world's desire for more stuff reach satiation
point, and if anything desire to subsidise unemployment is trending in the
opposite direction.

~~~
zzalpha
Hell, modern theory has it that the pyramids were in essence a type of
stimulus program to keep folks busy and fed (and no, they were not in fact
slaves)!

~~~
stock_toaster
I would love to see a return to investing in and updating some of the physical
infrastructure that has degraded over time.

In the USA there are a huge amounts of bridges that need updating/repairing,
dams needing repair (or removal), roads needing repair, dilapidated school
buildings needing updating (as well as energy efficiency updates), etc. There
seems like TONS of work to be done to refresh our aging physical
infrastructure.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Not just the US. And not just maintenance. _Creating_ good infrastructure is
one of the best of all possible investments.

The problem isn't that there's no useful work; it's that the genius of the
current economic system - the one where it's every individual for themselves,
and there's no such thing as society - is incredibly bad at deciding what
needs to be done to make the future better for everyone.

So education at all levels is mediocre, infrastructure is deliberately
crippled for profit, there's no systematic planning for the future at all -
and people in work are still spending huge amounts of time on essentially
pointless activities.

It's an organisational and political problem, not a technological one.

Actually it's more of a psychological problem. Getting humans to learn
deferred gratification _as a species_ turns out to be exceptionally hard.

------
falcolas
Some interesting points - I would have the following questions for the author
(I didn't see them answered)

How many of the ills observed in non-working adults are due (at least in part)
to the culture of "your value is based on the job you hold"?

How many people sit around watching TV because that's what they can afford to
do, or because their peers are unavailable at the same times?

How many teens revert to crime because they need money, or don't have other
affordable opportunities for entertainment available to them?

1977 is a time very different than today; what differences in attitudes and
activities can be attributed to the climate of 1977?

What can we learn from these examples to make the coming change in employment
levels work out better now than it did 40 years ago?

~~~
waxymonkeyfrog
Hi Falcolas, this is Derek Thompson, the author of the piece.

1\. The quick answer is that we don't know how much of the misery of not
working is from the financial shortfall of unemployment, vs the failure to
meet a cultural expectation to work, vs some inherent need to feel productive,
because it's just very hard to tease out the difference in reliable studies.
How, eg, would you test this for prime-age adults at a time when income is
tied to work and there is a cultural expectation that everybody work?

That said, my best guess is that about half of the psychological misery of
losing a job and being unemployed comes from the non-money stuff, like being
bored and failing to meet a cultural expectation to work. (This is distinct
from people who choose to stay home with kids, who have chosen to immerse
themselves in an essential activity and often feel great pride -- and stress!
-- in these jobs, even though they're not compensated with income). As I said
in the piece:

"The post-workists argue that Americans work so hard because their culture has
conditioned them to feel guilty when they are not being productive, and that
this guilt will fade as work ceases to be the norm. This might prove true, but
it’s an untestable hypothesis. When I asked Hunnicutt what sort of modern
community most resembles his ideal of a post-work society, he admitted, “I’m
not sure that such a place exists.”"

2\. The fact that unemployed men seem to be _less social overall_ suggests to
me that their rise in leisure is about more than the daytime unavailability of
peers. Because otherwise, wouldn't they just go drinking with buddies every
night? This suggests, to me, some shame of being unemployed that leads to
self-imposed isolation. In any case, the misery of unemployment suggests that
we're just not very good, as a culture (and particularly men), at finding non-
screen-based things to do with our time when work goes away.

3\. Crime has fallen by A LOT in the last few decades so I didn't want to go
too deep into predicting a rise in crime at a time when violent crime seems to
be in structural decline. That said, for young, less educated black men, there
are a variety of barriers to their participation in the labor force including
racist bosses not wanting to hire them, an abundance of low-paying service
sector jobs that seem feminine (they're in health care, government, and
education), and the cultural and economic allure of the black market and gangs
in some areas. This is a really short summary, but I think the allure of gangs
and crime is very complicated.

4\. One of the biggest differences between 1977 and today is certainly the
decline in crime. Crime didn't spike during the Great Recession, surprisingly.

5\. I thought that's what the piece was about! :) But seriously, the section
labeled Government: The Visible Hand tries to address this question (or at
least this question as I understand it) head on.

~~~
benaiah
2\. I know this is anecdotal, but when I was unemployed I often didn't
socialize because I simply couldn't afford the luxury. Many social activities
are fairly expensive, depending on your area, friends, and preferences.

~~~
falcolas
Yeah, this came to mind as well. A night at the pub can easily run even a
conservative drinker $20+, doing this every night (even when working) would be
hard. And those costs appear in other activites as well - renting a
field/equipment to play ball, renting a bowling lane, green fees for golf,
tickets for events...

~~~
markyc
hiking, biking/rollerscating, enjoying a picnic, having friends over for
card/board games, having a lan party are also valid and cheap/free
alternatives :)

~~~
benaiah
None of the things that you mentioned, card games excepted, are particularly
cheap unless you already have the equipment, and some not even then.

~~~
markyc
I regularly practice each of them and barely spend any money

hiking: I just do light hiking, and all I need is a couple of sandwiches, a
backpack and my boots. And plenty of water. Plenty of hills/mountains around
helps, that's true

biking/rollerscating: you can get a decent used bike for about $100

picnic: just the food, and you need to eat anyway

board games: unless you need to switch the game every week I'd say you're
covered with about $50 per year. We mainly play Settlers of Catan and Chess

lan party: I guess it depends on the games, we don't do this much anymore, but
we're pretty old school when we do (CS, Starcraft 1, Worms World Party)

There's probably lots of other activities like that, for example we play
soccer/foot tennis on a public field, and all it costs us is the price of the
ball

~~~
Retra
I'm unemployed right now and I won't do any of those. Here's why:

Hiking: Buy boots and suitable clothes. Fuel to get to suitable location.

Biking/Rollerskating: Buy equipment. Fuel to get to suitable location.

Picnic: transportation supplies. Fuel to get to suitable location.

Board games: Expensive. Fuel to get to suitable location.

Lan party: Buy games. Fuel to get to suitable location.

All it costs is fuel, utilities, rent, and food. For someone with no income,
that is _all_ I can spend money on, and it has to be justifiable. Not "Oh, I
play board games every once in a while", because I don't want to have to pass
up on a job interview because I stupidly spent my transportation money on
board games. Or whatever else.

~~~
cactusface
Why doesn't a bike save you a lot of money on fuel? Keeping a car on the road
is expensive, you can save on insurance too. Also you can take the bus. I
know, it's a pain.

~~~
Retra
I'm not going to sell my car until I have a permanent place to live.

------
Sideloader
"The paradox of work is that many people hate their jobs, but they are
considerably more miserable doing nothing."

This is true in *today's culture of work. Unemployment, even if a person was
laid off due to their employer going bankrupt, is still seen as a personal
failing. And unemployment for most people means a race against the clock
before savings dwindle (if they are lucky enough to have been able to save for
such an emergency). And prolonged unemployment and the uncertainty and drop in
status that comes with it can be demoralizing and depressing, especially for
people who have little prospect of finding a satisfying or at least decent
paying job. The people that sleep and watch TV are likely doing so because
they are under psychological stress. Our culture fetishes work to a degree
that would make a Marxist blush and unemployment and not working is punished
by society on many levels.

But if the culture of work changes over time and not working in the
traditional sense no longer means destitution, stigma and loss of status,
well, who can say for sure not working at an unsatisfying job will result in
misery and lazing around doing nothing.

------
zzalpha
I find it presumptuous that the authors lay depression and so forth at the
feet of unemployment and not the obvious: poverty.

If folks could live, unemployed, receiving mincome that supported a reasonable
quality of life, is there a reason to believe these various effects would
still be a major issue?

~~~
ams6110
I am not a sociologist or psychologist, but I do not belive humans can handle
significant idle time in a socially productive way. Look at the disaster zones
that are most public housing projects.

Humans evolved needing to work to survive. It's in our nature to become
restless and sociopathic if we have nothing to do.

~~~
chc
Public housing projects are almost by definition some of the most impoverished
areas. To attribute the problems of slums to boredom seems misguided.

Additionally, I don't think the idea here is to encourage idleness. It's about
people not needing to either beg an existing profitable business to take them
in or create one ex nihilo in order to survive.

Just the idea that the alternative to jobs is idleness shows a strange
conflation of ideas. We define "work" as that which we hope will earn us money
— we know an activity is work because of a totally extrinsic factor. There are
people in our society who are paid a king's ransom to literally play games,
and there are people who do back-breaking labor without anywhere close to fair
compensation, and this is all work because they make their living doing it.
But if somebody (say, a painter) doesn't have customers or an employer, that's
not work, and thus it looks like idleness, no matter how engaged they are in
the activity.

------
VLM
Cultural observations: Lots of people currently believe in the idea of go to
school, get degree, get great job, and work hard, get ahead or at least don't
get downsized. Today we laugh at people in my grandfather's generation who had
weird employment ideas like lifetime employment at one firm, college isn't
necessary, and no women allowed (well, we laugh at dinosaurs like that outside
silicon valley where its still prevalent, etc).

Cultural analysis and conclusion: Generation AJSKGJ, or whatever the marketing
people will call tomorrows kids, are highly likely to laugh at our ideas like
the previously mentioned "school/degree/job" or "work hard get reward or at
least not punished" axis of evil.

We have other weird cultural hangups that'll likely look weird in the future,
its hard for us to understand how nationalistic foreign cultures (nazis,
communists, etc) in the early 20th century were all into promoting the nation
ahead of their citizens, yet today we see corporations as the only important
members of our culture and we're mere resources to be thrown away at their
whim, this is likely to look equally weird in the future. Or how about
endlessly describing boring old corruption as holy capitalism, thats going to
look totally weird to people in the future.

~~~
frandroid
> no women allowed (well, we laugh at dinosaurs like that outside silicon
> valley where its still prevalent, etc).

The Valley has its own social obstacles to women's employment...

------
Hoasi
This is reminiscent of David Graeber’s essay “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit
Jobs” [http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/](http://strikemag.org/bullshit-
jobs/) and its commentary on the Economist
[http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/08/labour-m...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/08/labour-
markets-0/)

------
CapitalistCartr
What if the new capital is creativity? The new model for "work" is OSS?
Replace money with creativity in the definitions of capitalism. Material
possessions are socially discounted; creating new designs, new originals the
new currency to excel.

If so, the first classes we now cut in schools: advanced mathematics, chorus,
art, music, etc. are the areas we need to emphasize the most.

~~~
daodedickinson
Read Veale's The Creativity Myth. What you call "creativity" can be automated
much like anything else. Emphasizing creativity would work for an extra couple
of decades at most, so there's no sense in building, say, brand new
educational institutions around it. Check out the N.Y. Times article
announcing the creation of the Camp Fire Girls (co-invented by Gulick, a co-
inventor of basketball) - there was a panic then about automation and the
problem was not solved, it has just been continually deferred as the pace of
change increasingly wreaks havoc on our ability to prepare children for
adulthood. When the buzzwords of today's companies are "innovation" and
"disruption", you may translate them to "unpredictability", "chaos", and
"social insecurity". No one even tries to design to rightfully earn a place in
a human being's short life cycle - Silicon Valley designers often enough end
up making dopamine squirrels for poor toddlers on touch screens. The designers
then heed warnings against giving their own children screens, ban TV's in the
home, and send the kids to an unplugged school. Fewer are able to escape the
swathe of the indefatigueable machine. Have we made some thing more clever
than ourselves? Yes and no, but the no shrinks. Perhaps instead some could
follow Kant's idea of treating humans solely as ends, never as means, a sort
of human-centered chauvinism or "humanism". Or one can conclude that if
machines lack human flaws, and out perform homo sapiens at their supposed
virtues, they deserve the future. New genders, new sexualities, new body
images, these might get some attention economy for a few, but they must be
rewarded by a mass of bored, a creativity economy is the fame and long tail
economy we already have. The assimilation of new distinctiveness will approach
instantaneousness. And computers can be reformatted much more easily because
they have no "self" to worry about or reinforce.

~~~
daodedickinson
Edit since edit feature fails: Read Veale's The Creativity Myth. What you call
"creativity" can be automated much like anything else. Emphasizing creativity
would work for an extra couple of decades at most, so there's no sense in
building, say, brand new educational institutions around it. Check out the
N.Y. Times article announcing the creation of the Camp Fire Girls (co-invented
by Gulick, a co-inventor of basketball) - there was a panic then about
automation and the problem was not solved, it has just been continually
deferred as the pace of change increasingly wreaks havoc on our ability to
prepare children for adulthood. When the buzzwords of today's companies are
"innovation" and "disruption", you may translate them to "unpredictability",
"chaos", and "social insecurity". No one even tries to design in order to
righteously earn a place in a human being's short life cycle - Silicon Valley
designers often enough end up making dopamine squirters for poor toddlers on
touch screens. The designers may heed warnings against giving their own
children screens, ban TV's in the home, and send the kids to an unplugged
school, but fewer are able to escape the swathe of the indefatigueable
machine, or have any coherent and ever-presebt religion or philosophy. Have we
made some thing more clever than ourselves? Yes and no, but the no shrinks,
not only as the machine gets stronger, but as it weakens us. Some instead some
could follow Kant's idea of treating humans solely as ends, never as means, a
sort of human-centered chauvinism or "humanism". Or one can conclude that if
machines lack human flaws, and out perform homo sapiens at their supposed
virtues, they deserve the future. New genders, new sexualities, new body
images, these might get some of the attention economy for a few, but they must
be rewarded inequally is a mass of the bored; a creativity economy is the fame
/ long tail economy we already have. The production and assimilation of new
distinctiveness will approach instantaneousness. And computers can be
reformatted much more easily because they have no "self" to worry about or
reinforce. People just won't learn fast enough.

Camp Fire cite:[http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-
free/pdf?_r=2&res=9F00E...](http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-
free/pdf?_r=2&res=9F00E6DE1E3CE633A25754C1A9659C946396D6CF)

~~~
ZenoArrow
Creativity can be automated? Yes, you could automate parts of it if you
wanted.

However, you're missing a couple of points. Firstly, creativity is enjoyable.
Not because of some grand need to push culture forward and/or keep people
entertained, just because it's fun to create.

Secondly, you're implying that culture will move in a unified direction, or
that we'll all consume the same culture. We won't. There's too much of it to
take it all in, and there's no reason to suggest that all tastes will align.
Culture will grow chaotically just like it always has, the main difference is
that we'll have more time to explore it.

------
mirimir
While this is a very interesting and insightful article, it might be useful to
add a broader historical/anthropological perspective. I'm not qualified to do
that. But it's my understanding that development of agriculture and animal
husbandry, and much later industrialization, drove huge increases in human
population.

In part, of course, that was driven by the abundance of food and so on. But
there was also the need for workers. So as machines displace workers, one
might expect human population to gradually decrease, perhaps back to neolithic
levels.

The challenge, then, would be to have that occur as humanely as possible.

~~~
agumonkey
Also increase in comfort and development is correlated with smaller children
number, so an hyper modern world may have smaller population "momentum".
There's a statistician with a TED talk about that. Maybe that one
[http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_y...](http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen)
I cant recall.

~~~
mirimir
Right. I have no children, that I know of. I never much wanted to focus on
money, and raising children didn't appeal to me as a hobby or avocation.

~~~
agumonkey
You may be a niche though. Some people did want kids as part of the family
tradition, but not too much so they could play the career game. In a world
without work, people wouldn't have that dream so how would they fill the void.
Maybe a little bit more children (goes against my previous argument), or art,
social bonding, travel.

------
ilaksh
"Work" connotes a class distinction. Class is part of this.

Subjugation of workers and caste are the origin of the current system.

Who owns the machines? Who owns the land?

Does a human being have a natural right to live? To own his own small plot of
land?

Are humans just like common animals, to be yoked or corralled?

Fundamentally the intellectual framework is driven by patronage of the highest
caste which cannot help but maintain elitist, regressive, Darwnian, Malthusian
worldviews to rationalize the inequality.

The life-giving moneyflow is primitive and its volume arbitrary and should be
replaced by something more sophisticated, but there is no actual reason it
could not be returned to its previous high rate if we make the right
psychological adjustments.

Sustainability doesn't require halting development, it just needs smarter
systems, like putting real science into economics or better adoption of common
operational data exchange.

~~~
oldmanjay
I'm interested in your view concerning one of the axioms that I infer
underlies your political thinking. What do you consider equality, and what do
you consider the reasoning behind considering it a desirable goal?

~~~
ilaksh
A human has a natural right to the minimum necessities of life. Owning a small
plot of land to provide for oneself should be one option.

Owning a huge plot of land or controlling access to another person's minimum
necessities is unequal.

The alternative is the default, primitive, animal that must fight to survive.
Until this supposition that we must prove our right to exist falls from
popularity, civilization is a myth.

The underlying assumption is the understanding that human is greater than base
animal, starting with comprehension of the noosphere and what that entails.

------
drzaiusapelord
Machines create value, if we socialized that value, we could easily implement
a minimum income for everyone and have work be strictly a part time or
hobbyist thing. Or "work" will become a strange mix of fighting for social or
knowledge capital and other non-monetary value while machines do all the crap
work we used to do before. I'd rather be judged at a co-op poetry slam where
my social capital gets hurt if I lose than losing my home/car/savings/income
if I lose at my job.

Capitalism has a built-in end game: extremely efficient automation. We're
walking this path now and have been since steam power. Smart, cheap, and
general purpose robots are probably where this all ends.

~~~
rcarrigan87
Does capitalism have an ending? Maybe we can envision some kind of ending on
earth. But what about when we start colonizing other planets?

What new jobs begin to be created as we step outside earth.

~~~
VLM
Never forget Balkanization or fragmentation. For example 90% of the population
has been permanently kicked out of big city coastal real estate and will
never, ever, live there or own property there via hyperinflation in real
estate prices.

Yet, the sun still rises in the east and 90% of the countries population lives
on, under different goals and interests.

Its highly likely crony capitalism as we know it will never end and income
wealth inequality will increase until almost no one owns everything, but as
long as everyone else is alive, they'll just play a different game. Getting
ahead of that trend is likely to be very useful. This gets into weird sci fi
alt-future world "whuffie", etc, but when the game gets weird, the results get
weird.

You can see echos of this in historical academic studies during economic
depressions, here and otherwise. Once the economic system fragments, people
figure out other things, in the old days, barter, for example. Or crime. In
the future the NYSE and NASDAQ will likely continue to operate, yet be utterly
irrelevant to maybe 99.999% of the population, who will consider craigslist,
uber, or some new startup that doesn't exist to be the real "the market".

(edited to add, I really screwed up the above paragraph by failing to mention
the NYSE will never go away, much like the once universal giants of the past,
gold trade still goes on, fur trade, spice trade, virtually everything but the
slave trade keeps right on running, just no longer important to much of anyone
anymore)

Anyway the point is a good long term place for a startup to be is post-
business as usual. As per the famous gawker article, startups trying to
replace "mom" for rich coastal yuppies are very popular, but the future is
likely owned by a startup that replaces the existing commodity trading system
for most people, or replaces retail, or replaces package delivery or ...

~~~
Animats
_" the NYSE will never go away_"

It went away years ago, after a merger with Euronext and a few more mergers.
The parent company, ICE, is in Atlanta and owns 23 exchanges. The NYSE trading
floor is a stage set now. There are still some people there, but they're using
computers. The webcam feed is no longer available.

Here's a picture of the NYSE trading floor from June 2015:[1] It's now a quiet
co-working space for traders. One guy on a tablet, a few on desktops, two
people talking, one walking, many empty seats. That's the NYSE today.

All the real action happens inside several data centers in New Jersey.

[1]
[https://usatmarkets.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/wall_street-...](https://usatmarkets.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/wall_street-6-2-15.jpg?w=1000&h=582)

------
nosuchthing
It seems like the mass amount of money dumped into alternative advertising
models is increasingly pushing the 'Attention Economy'[1]. Video games
designed by behavioral psychologists to be addicting, compulsive, and time
consuming [2].

Advertising IS attention economics, but now it's being said we're reaching
peak advertising and that the attention of the masses is saturated.

Amazon recently begin experimenting with paying writers based upon feedback of
single pages being viewed long enough. [4]

I could only hope for the money previously allocated to garner everyone's
attention for brand recognition may now be channeled into further product
development and research, as it's becoming harder to rely solely on brand name
identity with easier access to information on alternative products and review
websites like anandtech or thewirecutter. Although I have a hunch much of that
development will be into building more invasive advertising and attention
economy games - [5]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Economy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Economy)

[2] [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/21/candy-
crus...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/21/candy-crush-angry-
birds-psychology-compulsive-casual-games-mobile-flappy-birds)

[3] [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/magazine/angry-birds-
farmv...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/magazine/angry-birds-farmville-
and-other-hyperaddictive-stupid-games.html?_r=0)

[4]
[https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A156OS90J7RDN](https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A156OS90J7RDN)

[5] [https://vimeo.com/14533403](https://vimeo.com/14533403)

[6] [http://pastebin.com/jJZVxfRm](http://pastebin.com/jJZVxfRm)

------
ChuckMcM
Nicely written[1] and not as hyperbolic as others but to buy in you have to
get past this:

 _The job market defied doomsayers in those earlier times, and according to
the most frequently reported jobs numbers, it has so far done the same in our
own time. Unemployment is currently just over 5 percent, and 2014 was this
century’s best year for job growth. One could be forgiven for saying that
recent predictions about technological job displacement are merely forming the
latest chapter in a long story called The Boys Who Cried Robot—one in which
the robot, unlike the wolf, never arrives in the end._

This paragraph does an interesting double switch and it is that switch that is
important. It is demonstrably true that throughout history, displaced workers
have cried the warning to other that soon, their jobs would be on the block
and what would they do then? And through out history that doesn't happen. To
understand why that doesn't happen you have to understand the causal
relationship between work and spending.

People spend money, how they get that money to spend, whether it is waiting
tables at a restaurant or Daddy's trust fund doesn't really matter, it gets
spent for "goods and services" (which we'll just call goods). And other people
figure out ways to provide desirable goods in order to attract someone to give
them money in exchange for that. But no where in that transaction is there a
specific "job" there is only money and goods.

Take for example blacksmiths and auto mechanics. In the 1850's there were lots
of blacksmiths and perhaps a handful of auto mechanics. In the 1950's there
were lots of auto mechanics and a handful of blacksmiths. So what happened?
People started driving cars, stopped riding horses, they spent money to get
goods and services for cars, stopped spending money to get goods and services
related to horses or wagons.

Conceptually, people spent part of their money on transporting themselves and
their stuff around. Other people provided goods and services around
transportation technology in support of those people. As the technology for
transportation evolved, people who provided goods for the previous technology
found fewer and fewer customers, people who provided goods for the new
technology found more and more customers. Net of everything else, same
"number" of employed people, but the way in which they were employed changed.

They important bit is that not spending, that kills jobs for everyone,
changing technology just moves around who can find employment and who can't
but the number of jobs stays about the same.

The third vector is productivity, which is to say when it took 10 people to do
X units of work toward producing a good or service, and now it only takes 1
person, that is a productivity gain. You can pay that one person[2] twice as
much as any of the other 10 people and come out ahead. So more productive
implementations win over less productive ones. But even with productivity
gains, when you're now spending perhaps 20% for the same goods, you now have
the 80% you are _not_ spending on those goods available for still other goods
and services. So 9 "jobs" get eliminated in one market and 9 more different
jobs get created to supply the other stuff the now freed up money can be
applied toward.

The key here is eliminating certain jobs does not lead to unemployment in the
large, but eliminating spending does. You lose jobs in a recession because
people spend less, you gain them back more slowly if technology change has
created dislocations (like it did in the Steel Mills.) But if a robot takes
away your current job, it doesn't mean there doesn't exist another job you
could do.

So economics aside, there are very real social justice issues around
retraining and making available resources when conditions cause problems, but
the luddite view that there won't be any way to earn a living, or that we
won't want to or have to, is not well supported by the evidence.

[1] Not something I often say of stories in the Atlantic

[2] Remember, it is money seeking goods not "jobs"

------
hamoid
"many people hate their jobs, but they are considerably more miserable doing
nothing"

Why assume we can either work or do nothing? Of course doing nothing sucks!
What about doing something instead?

Could the problem be that most people have been trained to do what they're
told, instead of being creative?

------
anon4
Weird how the article keeps reusing the word "paradox". I don't think it means
what they want it to mean.

 _The paradox of work is that many people hate their jobs, but they are
considerably more miserable doing nothing._ \- if you haven't found out how to
live your life without the framework of work, then yes - you will feel
miserable. The work routine is pretty useful in that way - it fills up your
time and you don't have to define what you want to do yourself. Kind of like
the difference between someone serving you bland food, but food you can rely
on to feed you to some degree vs. you having to cook for yourself from raw
ingredients you chose.

 _Whether or not one has artistic ambitions as Schubert does, it is arguably
growing easier to find short-term gigs or spot employment. Paradoxically,
technology is the reason._ \- this is still not a paradox. You could insert
"ironically" in there and it would be about as good a choice. And their choice
of just "technology" sort of reminds me of this short segment
[https://youtu.be/VGj5EffwnDg?t=6m3s](https://youtu.be/VGj5EffwnDg?t=6m3s)

------
nothing
When I was a kid, I instinctively felt (did not have any kind of intellectual
ability at that age) that I was in a trap. I can NOW supply language to my
instincts. That instinct gradually grew into a concept - or a non-concept -
and at 35 while still not sure what IT was - started saving, saving and more
saving. In a country with high interest rates - that helped. I finally quit in
2010 at 50 - exactly 50. I spent the last 5 years doing absolutely no work for
money. I never felt that I was missing out on anything at all. And I am sure I
will never ever have to ask for help outside my family - unless of course any
one of us is struck by an expensive disease. But then what that mostly would
mean is physical pain. So we are now getting mentally ready for pain.
Preparing to endure unendurable physical pain, which I personally have never
experienced before. I do not feel like I am prostituting myself. That takes a
lot of misery out of my system. I never ever switch on the TV, but spend a lot
of time reading random stuff off the net.

------
wehadfun
Only read very small part but author talks about Youngtown and says that when
the local steel industry went bust suicide and assumingly criminal behavior
increased.

To me this is because of loss of income not so much the loss of having to
report to work. Does the article talk about why loss of income was not pointed
to as the reason for the problems?

------
woodchuck64
The best kind of work is flow: immersed in an activity with energized focus
and involvement, seeing progress, learning and achieving goals. That just
isn't a concept that machines or automation can take away. But, yes, it does
seem like virtual reality will step in to offer this if actual reality has no
more to offer.

------
ianstallings
I honestly don't think this will be much of a problem because frankly most of
the work we do _today_ is not essential for living. We busy ourselves with
busy work. Ideas have become the product. And since we are so unhappy when
we're not working towards something, we'll simply invent something new.

------
roneesh
Can the author expound upon his encounters with universal basic income and his
decisions on how to include it in the piece? I see that it's mentioned in the
piece as something that can assuage the financial loss of work, but not the
loss of civic cohesion or meaning in people's lives. However I feel that this
idea was not an alternative the author seriously investigated, if you're still
commenting can you confirm?

Did you encounter any deep exploration of what even a basic $1000/mo.
guaranteed income might mean for people lacking work? What guided your
thinking in how to approach this aspect of dealing with a post-work future,
did it just feel too different, or another topic entirely?

Thanks for commenting here and thanks for the great piece!

------
sktrdie
I strongly believe in universal basic income and that being forced to work is
a form of slavery. I also believe that if you let people do whatever they
want, sure you'll have 90% or more just doing nothing all day, but you'll have
those 10% doing something great. Also, capitalism is really not that great!
Builds societies that nurture exclusion, self-interest and survival of the
fittest. In 100 years, when robotics has automated pretty much everything
(this is inevitable), we'll look back at these days and laugh about how we
used to build societies where people worked most of the day, rather than just
_lived_ most of the day.

------
cfonger
For years we've claimed that we're on the brink of a world without work.
However I believe that this claim is fundamentally flawed because it goes
against Parkinson's law, which we've seen to be consistently true.

We naturally try to gather more material wealth, and this involves having a
system where we give bigger rewards to those who work harder and smarter. No
matter how much we eliminate menial tasks, we will always find more ways to
spend our energy to reward those willing to do so.

~~~
x5n1
Has little to do with work and a lot to do with sociology and economics. If
you are paying someone, make them do shit. That's what good managers do. And
then when this happens the expectations go way up alongside that... and now
everyone is a whiny baby that wants things RIGHT NOW!

------
ScottBurson
Here's an interesting counterpoint, arguing from economic evidence that at
least in the last decade or two, downward pressure on wages doesn't appear to
be primarily the result of automation:
[http://prospect.org/article/it%E2%80%99s-not-skills-gap-
that...](http://prospect.org/article/it%E2%80%99s-not-skills-gap-
that%E2%80%99s-holding-wages-down-its-weak-economy-among-other-things)

------
orionblastar
When I worked I would automate reports using Visual BASIC and Crystal Reports.
I would create an MS-Access database at first to prototype the app, and then
migrate it to MS-SQL Server later on when it went to production. I even made
an ASP 3.0 based web app that could export the report to RTF, PDF, or TXT
format for review on a mobile device.

That was 1997, and people who did the reports by hand ended up being fired. I
felt sorry that I wrote a series of apps that cost people their jobs. My
coworkers struggled with Crystal Reports because all they knew was Visual
BASIC and Crystal Reports has a scripting language based on Ada. Something I
learned in college as I attempted to learn as many programming languages as
possible.

None of the apps I wrote used AI or were using robots, but they got the job
done faster and more accurate than a human being would get them done. At most
I called it business intelligence because I used accounting and statistics and
other things a business would use to make decisions.

But I worked too hard and the stress was too much and developed a mental
illness in 2001. Ended up on disability in 2003. Been in a hole and trying to
get out of it so I can one day go back to work.

I'm in my 40s now, have a huge gap in my resume, and basically I am
unemployable because I am old and mentally ill. Over the Opal CoC debate I got
contacted by a woman who seems to be in the same area but she is a former sex
slave that was trafficked at a young age and escaped and fought to clear her
record so she could work and now she is in her 40s and learned how to program
and freelances to earn money to keep a roof over her head. When managers and
HR pull resumes, they throw away the ones with gaps in them, they want to hire
people in their 20s, they don't want a person with a mental illness or in her
case was part of some past human trafficking in the sex slave market. There
are some people who are unemployable until the IT market is reformed.

When most of the jobs are gone, I expect there to be some sort of social
program like a basic income that is paid for by taxing the companies who use
robots and AI and automation instead of people to do work.

There are a class of poor people who cannot afford a used PC and an Internet
connection to learn how to program to be able to apply for the jobs. They
cannot even afford good clothes for an interview.

I wanted to form my own company that helps out people who are unemployable and
see what they can do. Provide on the job training and mentorship to get them
up to date with modern technology and programming. I think there is a key need
to provide jobs for people who normally wouldn't get hired due to gaps in
their resume, their age, a mental illness, exploited in human trafficking and
overcame it, etc.

------
kavehkh7
it may be way in the future or it may not ... but combination of advance
robotic, AI, nano-Tech and BioTech can easily eliminate the need of 99.9% of
the workforce. But, the journey and social unrest may be so bumpy that could
push the human race backward ... or it may reach to 99.9% point in which there
is really nothing for billions of people to do. In that case either a small
number of people will rule the world and the rest will be in poverty and
misery and pain; or it will be a golden age and all will focus more on science
and spirituality - not religion but true spirituality to expand human
consciousness ... for sure until then the road will be very bumpy.

------
metasean
Obligatory link to Manna by Marshall Brain -
[http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)
(different chapters explore different possible outcomes)

------
crimsonalucard
What's the alternative to this world? A world where 99% of us work and 1%
don't?

