What Happens When Work is No Longer Necessary?
Imagine a world of almost total automation. A world in which going out to dinner with friends might involve telling your 3D printer to make you a new shirt, then taking the stairs ( because your watch is saying your steps are low for the day ) down to the curb where a self-driving car called by a ride service is waiting for you. While riding to the restaurant, you select a table for 5 with your mobile device, share the reservation with friends, and choose your meal. Upon arriving, a robot waitstaff seats you and brings you meals cooked with unrivaled precision by a robot chef. Each of you is given a perfect caloric balance and each meal is infused with nutritional components that your health app told the restaurant you needed more of. You are single, so the glasses you wear automatically ID other persons within the restaurant with whom you might be a romantic match. As both persons receive these match notifications simultaneously, the automated encouragement to chat together is strong and you end up adding a sixth person to the table. After dinner, the group decides to play a round of miniature golf. Because the global weather management systems have scheduled precipitation tonight, you all head back to your apartment where everyone loads up a virtual golf program and a course is selected. Maybe even one that you have spent some time custom crafting yourself. A few other friends join you virtually, showing up as avatars so real that it is almost as good as them being physically present.
Now, a question. In what part of the description above was there mention of work being done by humans? It could be inferred that humans were necessary to build the apps you used, design the shirt you printed, and provide the operating systems for the robots serving you; but those are all high-skill, high-education, positions. Building the robots that run the restaurant is done by other robots. Your shirt was made by your printer. The car you rode in was manufactured by machines and transported by self-piloting boats and trucks to its destination. In this world, a partial list of currently human occupations that have been completely replaced includes: driver ( taxi, bus, subway, etc ), cook, waitstaff, valet, nutritionist, matchmaker, meteorologist, and retail worker ( miniature golf attendant, clothing store clerk, etc ). What do we do when we dramatically reduce available work opportunities while continuing to expand population?
Why do we work?
Humans work because, in order to justify our right to consume resources, we must show that we provide value to society. Our value is based in our ability to provide survival, convenience, entertainment, invention, and/or safety for others. As a species, we have worked out an ingenious method of rewarding productive members for their contributions according to the size of the value provided: money. Are you performing tasks the vast majority of others are capable of performing? You won’t get paid much because you’re entirely replaceable. However, if you are performing tasks that are highly specialized, difficult, dangerous, or undesirable, you will find yourself being paid more. You are more valuable and less replaceable to society. ( A side note: your pay/benefits package at work is an exact representation of how much your company values you. Remember that when it’s time to negotiate a raise or benefit-package change. Your boss might say a lot of nice things and spend time praising your work, but your actual value to the company is represented by your pay/benefit package and nothing else. ) Our system of divvying out various amounts of money for various representations of value is not perfect and can be gamed or abused, but it’s the best system we’ve invented so far.
Survival is guaranteed.
The human race is very near to completely overcoming several challenges that have plagued us since our dawn as a species, including both scarcity and frailty. While there are persons who might argue that we are stripping the earth of finite resources and will run out eventually, the fact is that we are currently at a level of sufficient technological advancement so as to be capable of guaranteeing food, clothing, and shelter to every human on earth for quite some time, regardless of their productive value to society. Further, medical technology is sufficiently advanced that it can cure most diseases. Soon, humanity may even solve aging. We currently have the capacity to provide for those who are completely useless to us, meaning that the necessity of justifying our right to consume resources no longer exists. In other words, the base motivation for work no longer exists.
Convenience is automated.
Need transportation? Call a ride service. Don’t worry, there won’t be a human driver you have to deal with, it’s a completely automated vehicle. Your cook? A robot. Maid service? Completely mechanical. A great many previously human-filled occupations based on giving convenience to the upper classes are either now being or are soon to be entirely automated and assigned to machines. The good news is that eventually everyone will be able to afford a kitchen robot to prepare their guaranteed food within the confines of their own personal shelter. The bad news is that a tremendous number of people will be displaced from their jobs. Will a company need an accountant when all incomes and outlays are instantly recorded to balance sheets and tax-filings are prepared automatically via algorithm? And if a company does not need an accountant, do you really think any individual household will need one? Investment bankers are already largely beholden to algorithms that govern trade decisions. Who’s to say that an entire global monetary system could not be run entirely by computer systems ( in fact, one already exists — Bitcoin )? At the same time we are exiting the age of scarcity and achieving the ability to guarantee survival, we are also making convenience massively more available while displacing a tremendous proportion of our workforce.
Is existence inherently valuable?
With the dramatic reduction of our need to provide for survival, convenience, and other types ( including both entertainment and safety ) of work, do those who once filled such occupations but have been displaced by automation and algorithms have any inherent value? Is there any reason to keep these people around? By the old rules, the answer would be no, but it has been some time since we followed those old rules. Most 1st world countries distribute some sort of social welfare to persons who are not currently productive to society. This welfare is distributed based on an individual’s perceived needs, not their contributed value. The amount of welfare deserved by unproductive persons and the requirements these persons must meet in order to qualify for it are often hot topics in political debate. Those who produce often feel pulled down and unable to enjoy the fruits of their labor because they must provide sustenance for those who do not. Those who do not produce feel mistreated, seeing that producers have more than they and arguing that every person has inherent worth and therefore deserves not just guaranteed survival but also guaranteed convenience, guaranteed entertainment, and guaranteed safety.
If simple existence is considered valuable, how valuable is it? And is value reduced by consumption? Is an individual who consumes 3000 calories of food each day less valuable than an individual who consumes only 1000 calories of food each day? If neither individual is productive, a strong argument could be made that this analysis would be true. Are non-productive individuals permitted desirable residence locations? Or are they stacked into high-rise apartment complexes in central Kansas? How many non-productive individuals should be permitted to exist in a single city, country, or region at any given time? If the population grows above this point, what should be done about it? While technological advance and automation may be capable of building a permanently sustainable population, that population will always have a maximum limit. What happens when that limit is exceeded? Many of the challenging questions we currently answer through distribution of earned value ( money ) will emerge as supremely complex challenges if value is not earned, but rather inherently exists. The most challenging question of all will be “who gets to make all of these decisions?”.
What does the future look like?
At its darkest, our future involves a strict, controlling government that must authorize birth requests, dictates caloric allowances, and assigns housing. Non-productive humans become cattle kept on massive ranches. While boredom and purposelessness lead to rampant crime and delinquency, it is all contained within sealed districts. Population is controlled through euthanasia, sterilization, or worse. Conversely, productive humans are granted almost unlimited freedoms and are considered a sub-species entirely above non-productive persons. Interaction between the two groups would be minimal.
But there are other options. Science has discovered ways to store data within DNA-type structures. Body heat creates usable energy. What if non-productive individuals were granted wages for allowing their bodies to be used for data storage and energy production? Work would no longer be required, but these human beings would continue to be utilized for societally beneficial purposes. They would produce value as products rather than workers. Further, virtual reality might provide such persons with purpose as they explore artificially created environments and perform ultimately meaningless, but fulfilling tasks. Perhaps some of these tasks are even meaningful components to research studies or data management activities. For those not interested in acting as living data storage or battery packs, humanity might start building generation ships for galactic exploration and settlement. Moon colonies would, of course, be first … but eventually giant self-sustainable ships meant for travel outside of our own solar system would send humanity throughout the universe and give them purpose in the exploration and colonization of diverse, far off worlds. These concepts are far off, but we should be thinking about them now because the alternatives are not pretty.
While it is true that we as a species have reached the point of guaranteed survival and convenience, it is also true that the value of providing such guarantees will never be zero. Even in an economy of plenty, some plenty is more valuable than other plenty. As such, concepts such as universal basic income ( often abbreviated to UBI ) that assume inherent value in a human’s mere existence, are flawed. Instead, our challenge is to find methods by which humans who no longer need to work might remain valuable to society as products rather than as workers.
Conclusion
This piece is a simple and abstract exploration based entirely in theoretical thought and conjecture, but the threat of having massive non-working populations in our new future is real. I am sure there are other ideas out there on how to solve this challenge. If you have any, please share them with me. It’s an issue I’m very interested in.
