Imagine you have tomorrow off. And the next day. And the next 30 years. It sounds pretty awesome. But maybe sitting around all day, binge-watching HGTV and picking nacho-cheese Dorito crumbs out of your chest hair doesn’t thrill you as much as it thrills me. Fair enough, you can do whatever you want. You can do something that approximates what we consider to be “work”, but it would be strictly voluntary. You wouldn’t have to do it in order to earn a living.
If you are feeling particularly ambitious you could write poetry, plant a garden, learn Thai cooking or sloth-husbandry. If you really want to do something that seems like traditional work, you can shovel coal into a blast furnace all day, or harvest beets, or go push the “next” button at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Once you divorce what you choose to do from what you are required to do, almost everything becomes more fun. Except the beet thing. Who the hell wants to do that?
I believe that a world like I am describing lies in the near future. I say this not because we are such a brilliant species. I mean, look around you. We are absolute total freakin’ morons. This isn’t some utopia born of our brilliant and cooperative efforts to create a better society. This work-free world will come to be because we will soon have no other choice.
The simple fact is that we are going to be forced to reimagine the whole concept of working for a living for one simple reason. Fifty, or thirty or ten years in the future, we simply won’t have enough jobs to support a jobs-based economy.
Historically, individuals perform necessary tasks (or at least tasks that are in demand. I’m not sure that Jazzercise Instructors are, strictly speaking, necessary) in exchange for money which they use to support themselves, or buy weed, or both. While there have been ebbs and flows in the job market, including some fairly serious depressions, over time there was a balance between work that needed to be done and people available to do it.
However, technology is on a path to permanently change that. Through a combination of robotics and artificial intelligence, most of the tasks that need doing will be done by non-humans. This is already happening. In many manufacturing plants, products that used to require dozens or hundreds of laborers to make now only require 5 or 6 supervisors and technicians to achieve the same result. Soon, those technicians will themselves be replaced by machines or computers.
Machines build cars. 3D printers are now building houses. Most banking and much shopping is now fully automated. It is already possible to drive a vehicle with no person behind the wheel. Soon, all cab-drivers, Uber drivers, as well as those who drive trucks, ambulances and those little cars that Shriners like to tool around in will be quaint relics of a bygone era.
Supermarkets used to require dozens of workers checking out groceries at the cash register. Now, most supermarkets have self-check out lines, and soon, all stores will have scanners that just record everything we leave the store with and bill our accounts without us having to interact with anybody. This is already happening on the highways where toll-takers are soon going to be as obsolete as blacksmiths. Although, I still do have “blacksmith” as one of the jobs I’m seeking on my Linkedin page, just in case.
But even in the next quarter century, restaurants, bars, factories, some schools and most service providers are likely to require zero human beings to do what they do. Other vocations, such as construction will only require a few people to program and supervise the machines we’ve created. Millions of jobs will be eliminated, and it’s not like they’ll be replaced with new jobs. Technology will do those too.
Everything from cooking to surgery will be done robotically. There are even sex robots being produced that have actual personalities and speak to you like a real person…or so I’m told. They can be ordered from a company in Phoenix and are freaking taking forever to get here!!…Or, so I’m told.
Robots will be doing just about everything we pay people to do, faster, cheaper and safer than the humans they will replace. Maybe this will take 10 years, maybe 50. But anyone who thinks this is not inevitable isn’t paying attention to what is already happening on a grand scale.
And all of this is happening while we are still in the infancy of robotics and AI. Of course, we will always be in the infancy of any technology, given that most technology is only a few decades old and there are, hopefully many thousands of years yet to come. And as technology, and particularly AI continue to improve exponentially, it will render our current economic system more irrelevant and unworkable by the day.
So what will we do while everything is being done for us? What will we do when the paycheck-for-work paradigm is longer be sustainable? Is there an alternative? Yes there is. Is anyone brilliant and tall enough to figure it all out? Well, since you asked…
The option I’ve been contemplating is what I call the “Fictitious Workplace”. This model would continue to pay people for work now done by machines, just not directly.
So lets say in the old economy, I could earn $50,000 as a welder. But now a robot named Mort, after my Uncle Phillip (don’t think about it too hard) does the welding instead. But there is no need to pay Mort. He doesn’t eat, or have a house, and only rarely needs weed.
But yet, the value-added of Mort’s work is the same as if a person did it. So, the person who wants the construction done, would still pay the same price. But neither Mort, nor anyone else at the company would need a paycheck. And there would be no need to the company to earn a profit. Instead, the money would go into a central repository to be aggregated and used to provide a universal, livable wage to everyone in that society.
People would still have the option of earning additional income by doing things that couldn’t be done by robots. Examples might be such as certain forms of entertainment or art, or possibly psychotherapy or public-policy makers. But imagine how much better society would be if people could focus on writing novels or forming bands rather than selling suits at Macy’s or driving a garbage truck. And if you either did not wish to or couldn’t create something that people would want to buy, you still could live quite reasonably off of your guaranteed universal income.
This system would eliminate most economic turmoil, There would be no more recessions or inflation and poverty would be a thing of the past. Bruce Hornsby would have to find something else to sing about since barking “Get a job!” at someone would only be met with confused stares. The incentives for theft and robbery would be greatly curtailed, significantly reducing crime.
There would no longer be a need for people to work their fingers to the bone at poor-paying, menial jobs. The robots would work their fingers to the bone, and then, every 90 days or so, those fingers would be replaced, and the guy who thought it was a good idea to put bones in robot fingers would be fired. But he wouldn’t mind, because his income was guaranteed.
I understand that there are flaws and unanswered questions in this plan. There are tweaks required and things that need to be worked out. But it does seem that we should actively begin thinking about and planning for the society we know is coming, so that it is the best it can be when it arrives.