Basically people think they work in order to provide for themselves. Our basic needs are actually pretty modest. We need food, shelter, medical care and a few other things. Providing these things is not super expensive. Even before you factor in automation.
Farmers still exist but as a part of the working population, they are a tiny percentage. The medical sector is comparatively huge but also not that large. Automation is likely to cut employment in both sectors a lot. Likewise construction work seems to require a lot of manual labor today but is something that can probably be done by robots already.
However, what automation will do is complete the transition of most work being entirely unrelated to those basic needs. That is already the case if you think about it. I look at most government jobs as a form of UBI. We're basically paying for people to do unnecessary work very slowly and inefficiently and we're taxing everyone to do it. There is no logic in this other than UBI. There's going to be a lot more of that. UBI as such seems to go against the morality that dictates people have to work for a living. But mocking that by making people do completely pointless things seems entirely acceptable.
If you automate most governments, they'd be a lot more efficient and you'd end up with millions of unemployed bureaucrats. Here in Germany, where they are perpetual paper fetishists, that would probably raise unemployment to double digit percentages. These people do absolutely nothing that adds any value; rather the opposite it seems. Bureaucracy is actually holding back economic progress. It's gotten to the point where "digitization" is a big topic in the current government; though they tend to end up waffling a lot when explaining what that actually means.
> I look at most government jobs as a form of UBI. We're basically paying for people to do unnecessary work very slowly and inefficiently and we're taxing everyone to do it. There is no logic in this other than UBI.
This is a vicious slander against an enormous number of hard-working, underpaid, and extremely conscientious people who work in government. It's nonsense and you should stop it.
There is always a need to improve any system or organization and government agencies are no exception. We should constantly be learning how to make government systems work better to achieve policy aims. Because they are constrained to behave, for the most part, with moral and ethical concerns foremost rather than sociopath motivations celebrated in private business, they do operate under many constraints that can slow them down. But that's a feature, not a bug.
The big-L Libertarian dogma that government is theft is complete nonsense and should not be endorsed by any reasonable person.
I'm not a libertarian. If anything I'm an admirer of efficient governments in e.g. Estonia, Finland, or Sweden. Especially Estonia seems to really put other governments on the spot in terms of doing things swiftly, efficiently, and pragmatically while not compromising on quality of governance. Estonia is a well run country with an extensive social system. Most interaction with the government is digital.
I live in a country (Germany) where the government refuses to automate such jobs as handing out a paper with a number to people that come into the building for the privilege of waiting for their turn of having another person push a button to cause a piece of paper to roll out of a printer such that they can rubber stamp it an give it back to me. If you need such a piece of paper, which seems to be a regular thing, you need to pre-book an appointment for this around two months in advance and book a time-slot of roughly one hour. I'm not making this up, I've gone through this process several times. It's annoying, it eats up time, and it only serves to prove a fact that they are supposed to administer to themselves.
Sure, there are hard working people as well but they are outnumbered by people not doing a whole lot that are stuck in processes that actually don't make any sense other than to generate more work that also doesn't need doing.
This article makes the argument that all humans really strive to have more time for self-improvement. That's clearly not the case. The only kind of freedom we need is freedom from the existential fear of needing to be employed to live. We can already at least partly achieve that, simply by moving more of our lives to a DIY model - which, in turn, would leave less time for self-improvement.
I keep looking for ways that automation's benefits can be shared more democratically, but this essay sheds no light. The concluding paragraph, in my view, restates a well-worn plaint:
> With automation, the plutocrats get the increased efficiency and returns of new machinery and processes; the rest get stagnant wages, increasingly precarious work, and cultural kipple. This brave new world is at once new and yet the same as it ever was. Accordingly, it remains as true as ever that the project of extending liberty to the many through the transformation of work is only incidentally about changing the tools we use; it remains a struggle to change the relations of production.
Farmers still exist but as a part of the working population, they are a tiny percentage. The medical sector is comparatively huge but also not that large. Automation is likely to cut employment in both sectors a lot. Likewise construction work seems to require a lot of manual labor today but is something that can probably be done by robots already.
However, what automation will do is complete the transition of most work being entirely unrelated to those basic needs. That is already the case if you think about it. I look at most government jobs as a form of UBI. We're basically paying for people to do unnecessary work very slowly and inefficiently and we're taxing everyone to do it. There is no logic in this other than UBI. There's going to be a lot more of that. UBI as such seems to go against the morality that dictates people have to work for a living. But mocking that by making people do completely pointless things seems entirely acceptable.
If you automate most governments, they'd be a lot more efficient and you'd end up with millions of unemployed bureaucrats. Here in Germany, where they are perpetual paper fetishists, that would probably raise unemployment to double digit percentages. These people do absolutely nothing that adds any value; rather the opposite it seems. Bureaucracy is actually holding back economic progress. It's gotten to the point where "digitization" is a big topic in the current government; though they tend to end up waffling a lot when explaining what that actually means.