Work

 

                                       Work

As I tried to illustrate in my last post, many of the beliefs that we take for granted are not the only way to look at things. 

Take for instance, work. As more uses are found for Artificial Intelligence, fewer people will be needed to work. More and more jobs will be automated. Factories are already making everything from cars to computers with little need for workers. Three dimensional printers can even build houses. It’s getting harder and harder to talk to a person when you call a help line. With self driving cars, soon taxi drivers will soon be obsolete. Even in highly technical jobs like scientific research, AI can comb through mountains of data in minutes when it would take a whole roomful of scientists working for years. During the COVID epidemic, scientists created a vaccine in time to save probably millions of lives. 

The media is full of discussions about how as AI does away with jobs, there will be millions out of work, wandering the streets, homeless, starving, unable to afford health care or retirement. With fewer consumers, companies will fail, economies will collapse. There will be a greater gap between the rich and the poor. And what about the psychological effects? How rewarding is a job just operating a machine, or just being on stand by in case the machine breaks down. 

But why should less work be bad? If you worked fewer hours each day or fewer days each week, what’s wrong with that? You’d have more time for your family. You could do charity work. You could follow other interests. Personally I wish I had had more time when I was younger to play the violin, to write or to hike. It would be nice to get another degree, say in history, or economics. If people had time to follow other interests, instead of just studying for the next day’s work or resting, I think we, as a population, would be better informed; we would probably have more friends, more interactions, and be happier. 

What we really fear is not the freedom and opportunity that would come with less work, but the hardship that would come with less money. Our economic system is based on making money. We value people who have a lot of money. We can’t feed our families, educate our children, or obtain health care without money. Work is what makes our system function, so we have rationalized that work is good in itself. Respect for work is ingrained in us from birth. 

Do the people who work harder make more money? Actually workers with more physically demanding jobs make less money. Do people who work more actually contribute more to society? I think they contribute less, because all their time and energy goes into working. Do the people who make more money really work harder than those who make less? No, they usually enjoy the status and leisure they get with wealth,  and give to charity as a tax write off, or as compensation for having more than they deserve. 

What if we didn’t have to make money to buy food, clothes and lodging ? What if education were free ?  What if companies were incentivized to produce safe products, products that would do the most good, not just those that would make more money. What if people aimed for cooperating with others instead of beating them in some sort of contest? 

I’m not sure of how to reach these goals, but setting them is the first step. Actually we have already started. We have Welfare and Aid to Dependent Children for those who can’t make enough by working to get by. We have Social Security for those too old to work, and we have Medicare and Medicaid for those without enough money to pay for medical care. For starters I think we should provide free education and medical care for all, and a wealth tax to pay for it. Then we should provide a living wage for everyone, regardless of whether or not they work, and lodging. We already have the resources, and have had for years. We have more food than we need, plenty of indoor space for lodging. We have the most advanced medical technology in the world. Why can’t we find a way to share it? We might have to find another way to pay for things, or do we need money at all?