Particracy Forum

Unless peak oil sends us back to the dark ages, the automation and computerization of both menial and less-menial jobs seems to continue at an ever faster rate. Factory/warehouse workers, taxi/bus drivers/pilots, most nurses, surgeons, janitors, accountants, cashiers, and many other professions may soon be things of the past. What consequences will this have for the socio-economic system and how should we politically respond to these changes? Will new jobs be created at the same rate that jobs are lost? Will it increase or decrease inequality? Should we stop pursuing job-creation as the goal of politics and instead embrace a future of abundant leisure, and if so: how?

Hrafn wrote:Should we stop pursuing job-creation as the goal of politics and instead embrace a future of abundant leisure, and if so: how?

Yes. Hmm... I guess we should start figuring that out.

The global population is constantly increasing. As we grow more efficient, demand for labour hours will decrease. Despite the growing population, we still manage to maintain a surplus of production, i.e. we produce more than we need. It means that we can have all our needs - and more -satisfied without everyone working 8 hours per day. We could start reducing labour hours per person, like cutting 8 hour shifts to 6 hour shifts. The idea of "creating jobs" has come to mean spending money for people to do things that aren't really necessary, but it's just giving them something to do for the sake of giving them something to do.

As we progress, technology does continue to replace labour. We just need to start distributing access to leisure more equally. We should still maintain incentives (more leisure) for persons to produce rather than having everyone doing nothing. I don't know what that will look like, but we'll see.

Sorry, I read the title to this thread and thought you were promoting an indie band or something.

Siggon Kristov wrote:

Hrafn wrote:-snip-

-snip-

The more interesting philosophical question, in my opinion, is what it means for humanity that technology has surpassed us in productivity... Either of you read any Neil Postman?

Zanz wrote:

Siggon Kristov wrote:

Hrafn wrote:-snip-

-snip-

The more interesting philosophical question, in my opinion, is what it means for humanity that technology has surpassed us in productivity... Either of you read any Neil Postman?

Just reading through that page, I see that he does talk about labour and productivity to some extent, but he seems to focus more on media and education when critiquing technology. He also rejects Luddism.

I think we end up going home to watch TV because we're too tired to really do much else after a day of working. I think that with more free time, more persons would have time to write books. Production of art (including music and literature) has mostly really been done by persons with free time, whether it's persons in the affluent class who exploit others' labour with no need to do their own, or unemployed persons who manage to get by to sing about their struggle.

Siggon Kristov wrote:Just reading through that page, I see that he does talk about labour and productivity to some extent, but he seems to focus more on media and education when critiquing technology. He also rejects Luddism.

He does talk most about media and education, but his critique (as I read it) is that humans have begun to order themselves and behave so as to sort of emulate technology, or to value the mechanical in ourselves (an argument that resonates with me still is the nature in which clocks transformed the human understanding of time away from the concrete [human aging, seasonal change] to the abstract [seconds, minutes]). My question in relation to this topic is "What if technology becomes so good at what it does that it essentially makes humanity incapable of emulating it?" What if the abstraction of our creations is so impossible for humans to match that the "real world" is the abstract, and humans become pure creatures of leisure, but without any real understanding of the concrete, anymore, either? (Apologies if this is underdeveloped, I'm writing from work - this is a topic that really interests me, and I can try to expand if you'd like, later).