A Society Without Jobs
The second article in the series.
Read the previous:
The report from OECD researchers [1] aligns with my previous post that kicked off the 8-week research in which the codifiable tasks, or tasks that can be automated by AI, are at risk. As a comparison, the report discusses the difference between the estimated number of unemployment and the number of threatened tasks being lost due to AI automation, which is at 47% of jobs in the US, versus only 9%. This is because, within a job, there are codifiable tasks, which are under threat, and non-codifiable tasks, which are relatively safe. The non-codifiable tasks are, for instance, tasks involving face-to-face interaction.
However, it’s too early to be complacent. With the advances in machine learning (ML) algorithms and robotics and technological unemployment due to massive loss of jobs and layoffs, the researchers and papers discussed in the report also forecast this worrying trend to be likely to exceed the job-creating and growth effect. Therefore, the risk of creating unemployment, or dubbed creative destruction, outweighs the efficiency aspired by the capitalists.
The key difference between the advancement in the AI era as opposed to the dawn of industrialisation, where horse carts were replaced with automobiles, is the point of singularity where generative AI can push into the unprecedented intelligence level, or create new AI altogether. It sounds nihilist and defeatist for me to say this, but I merely echo authors Brynjolfsson and Mcafee [2] in their chapter 3 about Moore’s Law (and more than that, not just about the electronic sensors). To copy the quote at the beginning of the chapter: “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function”, a quote by Albert A. Bartlett, it worries me that we might downplay the forthcoming disaster.
Take Apple products, for example. It’s made possible for a device as small as your palm to pack a toolbox of a digital camera that can surpass your DSLR, connectivity, AirDrop that makes other file-transfer mechanisms stay competitive, and more, because of the exponential technological progress. It’s the essence of product management in Agile methodology, which is to build on the compounding effect of smaller features and releases.
Speaking about compounding, time is indeed the best tool to see the effect of your investment. Not by giving up 30% of your entire net worth to buy a one-off risk-free bond, but by dollar-cost averaging and saving in high-interest rate accounts. Time and the compounding formula will do their magic. Warren Buffett’s investing success story, reiterated several times in The Psychology of Money [3], came from his patience and consistency. We might want to try to single out the most significant factor and end up with different strategies for get-rich-quick schemes. But we forget the overwhelming beauty of compounding. Similarly, humans find it difficult to quickly grasp the exponential function. If the growth of AI, according to Moore’s Law, is rather non-linear but exponential, it’s pretty useless to play catch up.
Now, I ask you a quick question:
If a strain of bacteria doubles in number in their petri dish every day, how many days does it take to occupy half of the dish if the entire dish is populated on the 30th day?
You don’t need to worry about Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow method here, because it’s evident that if the petri dish is full by the 30th day, it’s half occupied by the colony on the 29th day, as it only takes a day to double. From half to one, it takes a day.
In the petri dish example, it’s clear that such a massive development happens overnight. And it’s a low risk (the scientist might record it in their research journal, that’s all). But in our case, as employees (and employers as well), if the speed to multiply is within years, we can be caught shocked and unprepared by the products, as if the preceding prerequisites have not been in our daily lives.
The OECD report posits 3 arguments as a critique of the automation finding:
- The approach still overestimates technological capabilities rather than the actual utilisation of the technology
- The increasing utilisation will be matched by the rate of the workers performing tasks that are complemented by AI, such as monitoring the automation
- The worry is based on our limited imagination of what jobs are possible because AI will likely create more jobs (similar to Autor’s argument)
The paper drives the points even further by arguing that AI may boost competitiveness and productivity, creating more demand for workers. In more abstract thinking jobs, the increased productivity opens opportunities for the rising wages an employee could receive, due to contributing more to their firms.
However, from the last post’s summary of the increasing productivity not correlating to the rising wage (as illustrated by the stagnant growth of median income in the US for middle and low-class workers), I’d rather err on the side of caution and take Moore’s law to heart.
Based on Danaher’s paper [4], the fallacies that imbue the OECD report are detailed below:
- Inelastic demand problem. Just how many workers do you need to monitor or service the new AI?
- The outpacing problem. Given the exponential curve above, how fast do you think you can train yourself, or your employees, to keep up with the advance of AI?
- The historical data problem. Oh, I love this. Quoting Stanford professor Scott Sagan: Things that have never happened before happen all the time. If economic and investing strategies change all the time because investors have feelings, and the future performance can’t be measured simply by extrapolating the historical data, what will convince us that the technological threat (especially automation and AI that haven’t been there 50 years ago) upon work is not the same?
- The winner takes all problem: the big companies that provide globalised services, including physical goods, centralise the income and have a devastating effect towards long-term employment
Okay, buckle up, kids, because things will go sombre from here in this post.
Let’s prepare for the worst, that there is a world without jobs. What could we do?
!!Fun fact: I wrote an online novel about UBI in the prolonged and severe pandemic era. Thank God we’re not in such an era, but the UBI idea should persist.
Zooming out a bit, automation or abstract thinking by AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, a branch of AI) is not the only threat to work. What about our old friend capitalism which I mentioned in the previous post that caused wage stagnation while failing to steward the rising prices so as to keep mortgages and basic needs affordable?
In this paper [5], the importance of a basic income grant is highlighted. To summarise, a few logical and critical reasons why the Universal Basic Income (I shorten it to UBI hereafter) should be an integral part of modern civilisation:
- Ethical reason that no one should live in poverty when avoidable
- To pay compensation for unpaid labour in reproduction and child/family care-taking (to men and women apply, let’s be honest, sandwich generation of my cohort
- Lighter greenhouse gas footprint by design, because of fewer work-related activities
What Good Will UBI Do?
UBI will act as both prevention and mitigation, if and when mass unemployment occurs. Given that AI catalyses this, and late-stage capitalism provides the breeding ground for the perfect storm, it’s too late to start now, in my opinion.
But borrowing the proverb that the second best time to plant a tree is now, let’s assess why this is important to take your attention ASAP.
As mitigation, we saw enough during the 2020 furloughs, that I don’t need to elaborate. As prevention, well, who can guarantee that no more planet-scale lockdowns will happen in the future, preventing people from working and earning their incomes? Even the conspiracy theorists agree.
A UBI will preserve the social fabric as everyone still has access to things that make them human: their basic human needs. Nobody should ever be deprived of it.
UBI will benefit all parties, in prudence. Think about it, in the consumerism economy, without people being able to pay up the racked-up debts that they accumulated for buying tons of stuff in the past, the economy would collapse, as the 2008–2009 crisis taught us. Now, if the unemployment rate hikes, and more people withdraw themselves from purchasing, wouldn’t a stimulus programme be mandatory to restore the economic cycle? At some point, there’s a sweet spot where the techno-capitalists are expected to pay taxes for the basic income to encourage spending, protecting their companies’ values. (It’s an oversimplification, I know, but it’s how the economy works: money is a form of energy)
With a laissez-faire roll of the dice, as suggested in the paper, if we could choose to be anyone from any generation, in any part of history, the average probability suggests that we should choose a world where UBI is a sure package of civilisation, as the odd of being one of the capitalists is relatively lower.
The interesting point from the paper which I agree on is paying UBI in advance (read: before the unemployment crisis is unprecedented — worse than now) tapers out the risk. Workers will adapt to such a lifestyle where UBI supports their welfare, instead of exposing themselves to a sudden shock of unemployment someday (imagine a cold water shower that you do for the first time, I wrote about it here).
In a way, a UBI works like an insurance or fire extinguisher: you pay the premium or buy this in advance, at a cost (risk), but with gaining in ethical and economical terms.
Yes, there are considerations of the moral versus GDP: should we compromise GDP growth over the prospect of paying citizens their basic income? But, then again, it’s a matter of protecting the vulnerable in our society. Even by taxing the rich, the cost should be discounted, since it’s a future cost in the wake of the unemployment crisis.
I will not argue whether taxing the rich or printing money for UBI is an overkill. See the problem with compounding and exponential values above.
Now, the different perspective brings us to the following discussion about imagining a society without work.
Based on the trend we see on social media, and even they go so far as to use the antiwork hashtag, it seems that people dislike their work at a glance. So, does it mean eliminating work and supporting people’s lives and needs with a UBI is enough to sustain our humanity?
I sense something is amiss here because we know that there are occupations that answer people’s higher calling, and those who work in such professions feel and know their work is meaningful. We can’t equate the monetary rewards with the sense of purpose here, as mentioned by Immanuel Kant that persons have dignity beyond price.
I’m Not Antiwork, as Meaningful Work is Essential for Human Dignity
The Kantian vision argues that meaningful work allows people to achieve dignity. Therefore, it’s a primary element in achieving individual self-actualisation [6]. An interesting view from the Catholic philosophy Laborem Exercens says that (summarised): work is a good thing for one’s humanity because not only does it allow them to obtain their needs, but also to achieve fulfilment as a human being.
A quick argument for why dignity is a property of a person? Well, Kant proposes that human beings are capable of autonomy and consequently, self-governance. Therefore, those two properties automatically result in a person being responsible for their self-conduct, very different from other living beings. Since responsibility is part of their identity, a human being should acknowledge that they’re a moral being, and a moral being’s identity comes with dignity in it.
Since many schools of thought in different papers also agree with the view that work is not merely a form of method to obtain someone’s needs, but a tool for reaching fulfilment and identity, work is essential to human dignity. As such, the capital owners should not view workers are just another cog in the economic machine, similar to viewing another bond or lots of shares. Workers’ welfare must be taken into account, not just a headcount as a means to bank profit.
Bowie in this research proposes conditions to apply the Kantian theory about human dignity to management practices that support meaningful work:
- Provide opportunities for the worker to exercise autonomy on the job
- The work scope and relationship must support autonomy and should not undermine rationality
- Provides sufficient salary for the worker to maintain their independence and well-being
- Enables the worker to develop their rational capacity
- Does not interfere with one’s morality
- Does not prescriptive or interfere with the worker’s road to happiness
In practical examples, when layoffs happen, management should involve the participation of the workers’ decisions instead of the one-sided decisions that run rampant (at least in the tech industry, based on my professional network).
Bowie closes the article with the question of whether those workers, who are out of jobs but still sustain because of the UBI, could still find a path to dignity. I’d argue that UBI is not equivalent to removing work. With UBI, when one’s basic needs have been met, a person can focus their time, energy, and effort on their calling that spans beyond the scope of work. Becoming a small business owner, for example, where one has more autonomy to define the scope and type of clients, can also provide the person with a sufficient amount of work to achieve that fulfilment purpose.
As opposed to the Kantian view above, the antiwork school of thought views the erosion of long-term employment as something to be welcomed because they believe that non-work is better. However, as we have discussed it’s the narrower view of work where the type of work itself is degrading and putting our well-being at a disadvantage. Work is still a practical and economic necessity.
There are different cases where UBI can jump in and provide a safety net. While in the prevention and mitigation purposes to equip a worker from losing access to basic needs when a person loses their job, UBI is a great tool to provide financial padding when they look for other occupations or explore different options. Therefore, the idea of UBI doesn’t stray from the meaningful work philosophy of Immanuel Kant. All the more so, with the notion of providing opportunities for the worker to exercise autonomy on the job proposed by Bowie, the UBI is the means to achieve this sense of autonomy.
In another example, in conjunction with the feminist idea of the UBI to support caretakers as compensation for leaving the opportunities in the job market, a caretaker can opt for two ways, becoming a full-time caretaker if that answers their sense of higher calling, and/or opting for lower income jobs (due to fewer hours worked on, if the payment is by hour) while being supported by the UBI.
UBI is the Safety Net Against the Dehumanising Poverty Impact
Now, in the last post, I mentioned a bit about poverty. I promise you that the lesson learned from how the mind behaves under poverty pressure serves as a mirror of how humans decide on the long-term UBI and our lack of comprehension of the compounding effect. From the book Mind Over Money [7], the survey carried out in the UK resulted in an alarming view that the attitude of the populace towards the poor is hardening, with 69% of people agreeing that the poor didn’t try hard enough, and it came down to the motivation of individuals.
Now, back up a second, isn’t this statement triggering enough? What about those who are being affected by technology or capitalistic unemployment? We could be at the other end of the stick, so why the attitudes?
The problem with poverty is it impacts your intelligence, as shown in the book with the example of IQ measurements of farmers before and after the harvest. When money is scarce, the scarcity mindset crowds out other things. Perhaps, this is a good lesson learned for us as well. This also induces another scary mechanics: the short-term loan. When we’ve got enough money, taking out a short-term loan is out of the question. Why would we endanger our future income with high-interest-rate debt repayment? We could just pay in cash and wash our hands. People with less stable income are not at the luxury of such thought, they become risk-averse.
Therefore, resorting to short-term loans, which they assume will not accumulate for a long time, is a sensible choice, given the perspective. The tunnel vision also contributes to the severity of the situation where they need quick cash for basic needs, such as paying for utilities. And with the burden of having to prioritise under a tight budget, we can’t expect poorer people to take out insurance where the premium is expensive.
Speaking about insurance, back to the UBI as the insurance for the collective humankind once the technological landscape doesn’t sustain our work, this is the same thing. We refuse to pay the high premiums at the moment because we’re short-sighted and greedy. It’s different from a poor individual with an objective lack of spending power.
Poverty Impacts Your Cognitive Process
Moreover, there is a cognitive bias called temporal (or hyperbolic) discounting which affects poor people. In a social experiment of whether the subject would wait for another week for a greater sum of money, affluent people rationally wait for another week for a higher sum.
This makes sense as those people have resources in hand, so waiting for another week does not sound like an opportunity loss for them. However, for the desperate, even though a week of waiting can give them double the amount, the poor need the money ASAP, so they receive whatever amount is available at present.
This psychological reason is the background why there is a valuation technique called Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) because money at the present moment is worth more than in the future. Anything that comes in the future feels less significant.
The biological reason is the prefrontal cortex in our brain is affected by the stress level of poverty, corroding our cognitive ability to think about the future.
At this point, I’m sure that a scarcity mindset is more potent than data. If we’ve got enough for everyone and more, and we can save for the UBI, but we don’t do it, it’s because our collective prefrontal cortex is laden with the scarcity mindset that reduces our bandwidth to think wisely into the future.
UBI and Blockchain
The article here [8] provides an in-depth review of how the future of work is in DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations), where earning money is made possible without having to work at corporations. In a simple way, the traditional meaning of work where somebody has to go to an office in a corporation setting will be obsolete. However, the idea of working, or exerting effort to obtain something, still prevails.
How then, is the UBI established in such a model of decentralised independence?
With decentralised ownership, the capital and access to income are no longer hoarded by few corporations. Instead, the economic model has the spirit of distributism [9] which stems from the Catholic social teaching that access to property ownership is a fundamental right, so the means of production should be decentralised instead of centralised/concentrated in plutocracy, for instance, in corporations. Distributism places the key mark on the flourishing of families and property ownership for people to raise their families and contribute to a healthier society.
Distributism views both capitalism and state socialism are deeply flawed, both do not recognise the dignity of human beings as those workers are merely tools. They are not viewed as two different economic systems by distributists because eventually, the capitalists’ concentrated power is able to buy the state, which is largely true based on what we can see nowadays.
I digress a bit here. Since my writing on Substack is primarily on the feminine leadership, healing journey, anxiety, and business, I acknowledge a lot of it has been influenced by the findings that the collective consciousness recognises what’s been wrong with our civilisation.
Imagine body cells that know there’s a tumour tissue among them and trying to dispel the intruder. That’s how our awareness works. With decades being under the grip of exploitative economic systems, with how workers are treated as means of production, our humanity is trying to restore the balance. With the growing cases of auto-immune disorders, chronic illnesses, the epidemic of loneliness, anxiety and other mental health issues . . . don’t we want out?
Do we not want to see a more benevolent earth where we can thrive and flourish in our dignity, not merely be in survival mode?
It’s possible.
I’m a proponent of this distributism idea and decentralised organisations. I’ll discuss about the rise of solopreneurship in the next post, and some parts of the research on the meaningful life in the post-work (or more appropriately, post-corporation) era.
Blockchain revolutionises how governance and economy work as it’s permissionless because smart contracts execute the orders. There’s no single point of failure, unlike in centralised organisations. I’ll not repeat what many other articles have summarised: the difference between a centralised and decentralised organisation.
However, I post a critique here that mostly the web2 or no-coiners people view blockchain as cryptocurrency. They equate blockchain innovation with cryptocurrency, with the end goal of making more money. This is what tires me every time I need to evangelise people about blockchain, because cryptocurrency, while being an integral part of blockchain and tokenomics, is not just a means to accumulate richness.
I agree that if their worldview is limited to a few major coins, of which their volatility can make your heart skip a beat upon seeing your portfolio value one morning. But, what about blockchain as a ledger? Blockchain for a DAO? Blockchain for a tracking system?
The decentralised organisation of people can self-sustain themselves. With the ideas from the articles above, blockchain revolutionises work from working in a corporation to earning as a by-product of an activity we love doing, while the members of the DAO/community have a say on how the organisation is steered. RealmLink is an example where you can play a game and get immersed in it, and the earning is the by-product of your gaming joy.
The UBI might be a by-product of various earning activities, where the collective wins, instead of the centralised entity amassing the revenues and charging high fees for the hustlers on their platforms.
Or, the DAOs can focus on the UBI as the value generation of their organisation. With different organisations, the possibilities are endless.
Distributism also favours a safety net. While the safety net is rooted in the traditional sense of having a plot of land and property where one could live with family members, it does not necessarily mean the funds come from the state.
Distributism restores human dignity to its proper view. Hence, with guilds, building societies, or cooperations, those vulnerable in our society could be protected and enjoy the basic needs of a human being.
I digress again: I think it’s not a coincidence that the slow living practice or ideas of living off-grid rose into the hype on social media alongside the feminine energy posts. Perhaps, there’s a connecting thread among these various topics:
That we are overworked, that the existing economic systems make us sick, and that viable alternatives must be normalised for people to live their lives as dignified human beings.
It’s been too long and it manifests in the declining quality of life, not directly quantifiable in income growth or anything that can be put down on a number-crunching software with a beautiful chart, but the uneasiness is growing deep down in our hearts.
If you’re familiar with the cellular healing modalities, it’s become apparent that the trauma from our predecessors can be passed down in generations. Would a new economic system relieve and heal the economic repression towards humankind?
Absolutely.
The slow fix movement, popularised by Carl Honoré [10], addresses the danger of applying smack dab fixes like a plaster over a perforated water jug. A proponent of taking a holistic view of problem-solving, the sentiment is also echoed in the Mind Over Money book such that giving incentives for poor people is far from an ideal solution. The holistic view must also address how poor families think and build a system around that, instead of giving out money.
For example, to discourage children from poor families from truancy, the incentive scheme must also aim at whether the families have enough money to provide for meals and transport fees in the first place. Therefore, I don’t see the economic and well-being problems as two separate issues at a global scale.
But, how far this new way of building our economic system should go? Will it create a new problem?
Well, just as no system is perfect, we might not know. But one thing is for sure, staying in this exploitative economy is the sure way to prolong the misery. So, why don’t we accept and branch out this new way of living?
Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.
— Milton Friedman.
A Final Thought . . . (on this essay, not the entire series)
To conclude this essay, a society without jobs due to massive unemployment (caused by technology or a capitalistic system) is not about people losing their dignity due to no work being possible to be done. Rather, new forms of earning income and basic needs are open to possibilities, and that’s how blockchain is an ideal solution to base the decentralised ownership in distributism.
Thank you for reading.
Until next time,
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References
[1] ‘The Risk of Automation for Jobs in OECD Countries: A Comparative Analysis’, OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers 189, May 2016. doi: 10.1787/5jlz9h56dvq7-en.
[2] E. Brynjolfsson and A. Mcafee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.
[3] M. Housel, The Psychology of Money, 1st ed. Harriman House Ltd, 2020.
[4] J. Danaher, ‘Will Life Be Worth Living in a World Without Work? Technological Unemployment and the Meaning of Life’, Sci Eng Ethics, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 41–64, Feb. 2017, doi: 10.1007/s11948–016–9770–5.
[5] A. James, ‘Planning for Mass Unemployment: Precautionary Basic Income’, in Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 183–211. doi: 10.1093/oso/9780190905033.003.0007.
[6] N. E. Bowie, ‘Dignity and Meaningful Work’, in The Oxford Handbook of Meaningful Work, R. Yeoman, C. Bailey, A. Madden, and M. Thompson, Eds., Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 35–50. doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198788232.013.2.
[7] C. Hammond, Mind Over Money, 1st ed. Canongate Books, 2017.
[8] ‘the future of work is not Corporate — it’s DAOs and crypto networks’. Accessed: Feb. 14, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://ob.syncvote.com/the-future-of-work-is-not-corporate-it-s-da-os-and-crypto-networks/
[9] ‘Distributism — Wikipedia’. Accessed: Feb. 14, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism
[10] C. Honoré, The Slow Fix, 2014th ed. William Collins, 2014.
