Busted utopia: work, rest and play in the near future

by Tim Dunlop

“All experience, in matters of philosophical discovery, teaches us that, in such discovery, it is the unforeseen upon which we must calculate most largely.”

Edgar Allen Poe

This is a story about a possible future, about the sort of work we will do and the sort of world we will live in. It is about a world that is likely to exist, if not in your lifetime, then within the lifetime of your children, as developments in robotics, 3D printing and artificial intelligence come online. It is about the sort of world we are slouching toward as technology pushes us in a direction that is simultaneously putting at risk the basic circumstances that allow for a comfortable, first-world existence, while also creating a strange new world where what we think of as work, rest and play has been transformed beyond recognition.

It could end well or it could end badly, depending on how we act now.

To understand the argument, the first thing we need is a bit of context. So before the robots take over, let’s look at how we got to where we are.

The material conditions of what we in a country like Australia, (or the US, or Iceland) think of as a normal, decent life, are largely an artefact of a particular set of social and economic circumstances that arose in the West from about the end of World War II. The hours we work, the money we earn, the things we can do with that money, the age at which we retire — the very notion of ‘retirement’ — the services that we expect from our government, were, by and large, formed within this period.

Broadly, those circumstances are: a manufacturing-based economy that directly and indirectly employed large numbers of skilled and unskilled people in such a way that they were able to enjoy a reasonable level of financial security and had the means to afford a given standard of material comfort.

All of this was underpinned by a welfare state in which government managed the major risks and needs associated with an economy based on capitalist growth. Health and education, financial support when you were unable to get work, and an income when you retired were its major pillars, and these were not “entitlements” as it is now fashionable to label them, but the material expression of what most citizens saw as the whole point of government.

This had nothing to do with any particular affection for government per se, let alone with a national commitment to collectivism. It was rather the practical realisation of a belief in positive personal freedom. It held that there is such a thing as society and we are all better off, and freer, when the state aims at some basic level of equality of opportunity and outcome.

But the welfare state and the redistribution that went with it was also an attempt by the wealthy and otherwise well-situated to ameliorate the inequality of which they were beneficiaries so that they could preserve those benefits. After the slaughter and misery of two world wars, the citizens of the West could no longer be fobbed off, and by embracing a welfare state, wealth redistribution and a broad commitment to equality, elites in the these nations were trying to head off the sort of revolution of which the rise of Chinese and Russian communism were emblematic.

The mixed economies and welfare states that arose were far from perfect — they were still largely predicated on white patriarchy and exploitation of the former colonies of the imperial West, for instance — but compared with what had existed before, this bravish new world looked almost utopian. Capitalism was entrenched as an engine of growth and therefore of prosperity, but it was still understood to be a servant of society, not its master. Policies were set to achieve particular outcomes (like full employment), not set according to the presumptions of economic models.

Growing prosperity brought with it challenges to key social institutions and practices. As the writer Ellen Willis has said, the sixties were mythical but they were also consequential. They launched genuine changes to notions of family, religion, women’s role, race, and recreation, (especially as the latter related to drug taking). Willis notes:

The expansion of the American economy after World War II produced two decades of unprecedented prosperity, which allowed masses of people unprecedented latitude in making choices about how to live….

As a result a growing minority — particularly among the children of the upper middle class — felt free to question the dominant social arrangements, to experiment and take risks, to extend student life with its essentially bohemian values into adulthood rather than graduate to professional jobs, nuclear families, and the suburbs….

What most counterculture opposition to capitalism amounted to was this minority’s anger at the majority for refusing to make the same choice.

This “liberation” was always contested, especially by those who had the most to lose from the new, freer social arrangements. But it took a halt in the growth of economic prosperity to allow the forces of conservatism to push back with any force. That is to say, the backlash against “the sixties” and the liberation it represented were in part driven by the sort of white, male privilege that drives much of Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s current social agenda, but it was also tied to the retreat of prosperity. The irony is not lost on Willis who notes, “Ah, dialectics: if an increasingly conservative capitalism has propelled the seventies backlash, it was a dynamic liberal capitalism that fostered the sixties revolt”.

The ramifications of this “backlash” are apparent in the rise of the so-called culture wars, ongoing arguments about everything from abortion to national history that have become the favoured political ground of elites who are also wedded to the idea of market liberalisation, privatisation and the rest of the neoliberal agenda.

As commentator Dani Rodrik says, “A politician who represents the interests primarily of economic elites has to find other means of appealing to the masses. Such an alternative is provided by the politics of nationalism, sectarianism, and identity — a politics based on cultural values and symbolism rather than bread-and-butter interests. When politics is waged on these grounds, elections are won by those who are most successful at ‘priming’ our latent cultural and psychological markers, not those who best represent our interests.”

The oil shocks of the seventies were the first major sign of the end of the presumed abundance on which Western, middle-class prosperity was based. Particularly in the US — where the commitment to the welfare state had the shallowest roots of any Western democracy — the owners of capital began to reassert values and nostrums that challenged the workings and presuppositions of the mixed economy and the welfare state.

So the manufacturing jobs that had sustained the middle class and on which the post-World War II prosperity had been built began to be shifted overseas, to low-wage regions, as capital sought a better return on investment and sought to punish a labour movement that continued to seek what they saw as their fair share of the profit they helped generate. This export of jobs was great for the developing world and was the source of the rise in prosperity there (China alone shifted millions out of stark poverty with its market reforms), but it was the beginning of the deindustrialisation of the West and the rapid spread of the rustbelt everywhere from Hamburg to Detroit to Geelong.

As ever, as economic circumstances changed, so too did social relations. As industry globalised, a professional layer of managers and technocrats arose, a group Milovan Dijas and others have called “the new class”, and they insinuated themselves into the heart of these industries. This prosperous strata of managers, because of their professional, international focus, started to weaken, or even break the bonds of commitment between themselves and their countries of origin. Why, they asked, should I pay taxes for services I don’t use (health education, transport et al) in a country where my roots are shallow?

The whole notion of citizenship and reciprocal obligation, of any sort of a social contract, not only weakened but seemed positively anathema to the progress of the careers and vision of a good life favoured by this new class.

By the time of Reagan and Thatcher, and in Australia, of Hawke and Keating, government itself was being redefined as the problem. We were being told there was no such thing as society and that freedom equated to choice in a marketplace. Industry regulations, unionisation, government ownership and the services government provided were recast as dead weights upon the alleged entrepreneurial hand of business and the alleged aspirational values of the middle class. A narrative was born — or more accurately, reanimated — and it was powerful, sweeping up not just the conservative parties of the world, but those of the centre-left too. Indeed, for those on the left who had eschewed the notion of living in or raising traditional families, and who had abandoned religion as any sort of unifying social force, work itself became the lingua franca of middle-class acceptability. The obvious ties between the centre-left of politics and the labour movement reinforced the tendency to latch onto work and employment as a unifying mantra. In recent times, this was particularly noticeable in the person of former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard, who, along with education, elevated work to the top of her list of personal values:

…I believe in the importance of hard work; the obligation that we all owe to ourselves and others, to earn our keep and do our best.

Life is given direction and purpose by work. Without work there is corrosive aimlessness. With the loss of work comes a loss of dignity.

But Gillard’s late embrace of the protestant work ethic was still decades off. In the meantime, a sort of market fundamentalism was rising from the ashes of postwar Keynesian prosperity.

With the collapse of the Soviet state, the world not only lost an oppressive regime, it lost an intellectual bulwark against what we might most simply call neoliberalism, or maybe OECD capitalism (a term used by Wolfgang Streeck). Market, market uber alles became the chant. With it came a rebirth of the sixties counter-culture, but this time it was firmly lodged within a market and consumption framework. Willis captures something of its nature when she notes:

[D]uring the dot-com boom, enthusiastic young free marketeers fomented a mini-revival of sixties liberationism, reencoded as the quest for global entrepreneurial triumph, new technological toys, and limitless information.

This entrepreneurial liberationism still dominates today, though the Beatles’ Apple Records is now Steve Jobs’ Apple Corporation, and bright young things with revolution in their eyes don’t start rock bands but tech startups and app companies.

The very idea of anything “collectivist” or “social” or “socialist” was now tainted by association with the Soviet state which had failed miserably at both an economic and a human level. The idea that we could aspire to a social condition of our own making, outside of the allegedly miraculous organising power of the market, became laughable. It went further than that: the idea that collective human action and decision-making could work for the common good was not only discredited, it was recast as evil, a slippery slope to totalitarianism, the road to serfdom.

Utopia was struck from the map.

What’s more, as Thomas Piketty sets out to show in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the wealth accumulated by the new class (supermanagers, as he calls them) became ever more concentrated as it was passed on as inheritance amongst the families of the one percent, or the one percent of the one percent. That is, when the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth, wealth becomes more concentrated and, logically, inequality increases. Income based merely on wages from labour — the way most of us earn a living — dwindles.

What we have been living through since about the seventies, then, is a massive realignment of the philosophical and material conditions of Western civilisation. To call this a transition period is to presume that there is some sort of end in sight, that there is some sort of rest point looming, a settlement where the questions posed by the present are answered. I doubt very much that it makes sense to think in those terms. It is transition all the way down.

And the nature of the transition is structural; that is, the changes that are happening are built into the very fabric of how wealth is created and how work is done, and it is this fact that we have to get through our heads.

This is why what is to come is different to what has happened before. The worldwide economic stagnation flowing from the 2007 global financial crisis is not simply another trough in the usual economic cycle, but a break from what has gone before, from what we think of as “normal”. The essence of the way we construct work — the sort of paying work that underpins all our discussions and presumptions about “standards of living” — is fundamentally changing. In part this is to do with the shift in wealth creation from manufacturing-type industries to finance and technology — neither of which need much in the way of paid labour. As sociologist Saskia Sassen explains in her book Expulsions:

The globalization of capital and the sharp rise in technical capabilities have produced major scaling effects. What may have been minor displacements and losses in the 1980s, such as deindustrialization in the West and in several African countries, had become devastations by the 1990s (think Detroit and Somalia). To understand this scaling as more of the same inequality, poverty, and technical capacity is to miss the larger trend….

People as consumers and workers play a diminished role in the profits of a range of economic sectors. For instance, from the perspective of today’s capitalism, the natural resources of much of Africa, Latin America, and central Asia are more important than the people on those lands as workers or consumers. This tells us that our period is not quite like earlier forms of capitalism that thrived on the accelerated expansion of prosperous working and middle classes. Maximizing consumption by households was a critical dynamic in that earlier period, as it is today in the so-called emergent economies of the world. But overall it is no longer the strategic systemic driver that it was in most of the twentieth century.

But this hollowing out of the middle class, the disappearance of even the need for the sort of jobs that have sustained a substantial middle class, is only part of what is happening. What we increasingly have to reckon with is the coming metamorphosis of production, specifically in regard to 3D printing and robotics. Yes, this is where we start to get speculative, but bear with me. This isn’t actually science fiction.

In China at the moment, there are 3D printers that can “print” out ten houses on a block of land in twenty-four hours:

WinSun Decoration Design Engineering built the houses in Shanghai using four giant 3D printers, which are each 10 meters (33 feet) wide and 6.6 meters (22 feet) high, according to Chinese news agency Xinhua. They produce a mix of cement and construction waste to construct the walls layer by layer, a process much like how a baker might ice a cake.

“We purchased parts for the printer overseas, and assembled the machine in a factory in Suzhou,” WinSun CEO Ma Yihe told the International Business Times. “Such a new type of 3D-printed structure is environment-friendly and cost-effective.”

Google’s driverless cars also sound like science fiction, but they are here now, all-but ready to take over our roads. The barriers to instant implementation are not technological but legal and regulatory. What happens when insurance companies insist on scaling up the use of these cars because they are so much safer? What happens when governments, for the same reason, realise that the advantages outweigh the costs of changes to infrastructure and the like, as they are likely to do on the basis of savings in healthcare alone? Every industry from freight to panel beating to taxis are going to be affected, and we will have a whole slew of jobs that will simply disappear or require far fewer people to fill.

Impossible? Too far off to worry about? By all means be sceptical, but while you are scoffing, I’d just like to send a quick hello to all the elevator operators, service station attendants, film projectionists, telephone operators and milkmen out there.

We have gone through these stages before, where one category of jobs has been replaced by another — agricultural living by industrial employment; industrial jobs by service jobs; service work by cultural work — but at each stage, the number of people able to find work in the new dispensation has been less than what has gone before. The new technologies that are right around the corner are going to be this process writ large.

Some make the argument that automation, robotics and other technological advances won’t destroy jobs, that they will just force most people into lower paying, menial work. That is hardly encouraging, but there seems to be some truth in it. As Michael Osborne, who is Associate Professor in Machine Learning at the University of Oxford, told the radio program Future Tense recently:

…we tried to find out what exactly it is that humans are still much better at than machines, so what are the characteristics of jobs are that are relatively safe.

And the three bottlenecks we found were: social intelligence, so the ability to interact with other humans in an intuitive way; creativity, where again you have to have a deep understanding of what it is that humans want from a creative task in order to effectively perform those kind of roles; and then finally and perhaps more surprisingly the ability to manipulate objects in unstructured and cluttered environments.

In other words, the fact that it is hard to teach machines to “manipulate objects in unstructured and cluttered environments” means cleaning jobs are safe, the Roomba notwithstanding. As Osborne says, “For 50 years or so we heard people claiming that any day now we would have robotic house maids that would be capable of cleaning our house for us, and what we find is that actually that’s not going to be the case, that actually cleaners who are required to interact with objects and the cluttered environment that might be your home, are probably safe for the time being.”

Great.

But even this limitation is rapidly being transcended. UC Berkeley Professor of Engineering Ken Goldberg explained in a recent piece in Medium that cloud computing combined with robotics is already creating robots that interact more successfully with “unstructured environments” by talking to each other and checking their knowledge against the vast data banks stored in cloud-computing environments:

Consider Amazon, which has to rapidly fill thousands of orders for books and other products, packing boxes with items that can be located all over huge warehouses. A company called Kiva Systems designed a new type of robots to address this problem. The robots move around storage racks filled with boxes of items. There can be hundreds and thousands of them in a warehouse, and they increase efficiency amazingly. What makes it all work is that these robots are all talking to each other. They are constantly communicating. They work together to coordinate traffic patterns, and if conditions change, like one robot finds a bit of grease on the floor, it instantly alerts the others to avoid it.

In other words, the robots — already existing robots that are already replacing human workers — are learning from each other and thus making human involvement even less necessary.

So just how vulnerable is work of various kinds — the absolute foundation of our place in the world and our standard of living — to obsolescence?

A 2013 Oxford University study by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne looked at 702 occupations in the United States and concluded that within the next twenty years, “about 47 percent of total US employment is at risk” from technological advances. The authors argue that jobs in transportation, logistics, as well as office and administrative support, are at “high risk” of automation but that even work within the service industry is vulnerable. They say, “We identified several key bottlenecks currently preventing occupations being automated,” but that “[a]s big data helps to overcome these obstacles, a great number of jobs will be put at risk.”

At the moment, the tendency is for the technology to hollow out the jobs market. That is, work at the extremes, at both high-paying end and the low-paying end, is relatively safe, and it is middle-income jobs that are most at risk. Such developments almost inevitably mean fewer jobs for almost everyone. As Brad Plumer pointed out in The Washington Post:

The job market appears to be increasingly polarized, with high-paid and low-paid occupations growing quickly, while middle-class jobs are disappearing. And on top of that, median wages have stagnated over the past decade.

Plumer quotes Joshua Lerner of the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis who says:

“Where we have seen slower growth is in the middle. [L]ower middle-wage jobs account for about 40 percent of all occupations in 2012 yet account for just 26 percent of the growth. [U]pper middle-wage jobs, account for another 19 percent of all occupations and 0 percent of the growth. This, by definition, is job polarization.”

And as you can imagine, given what we are about to go through in terms of automation, robotics and artificial intelligence, the elevation of work to the centre of the centre-left’s philosophy is likely to cause something of an existential crisis. So the question I’m concerned with here is, are all these developments a bad thing? Is it not possible that we could be on the verge of the sort of prosperity and liberation that has been the driving force of social progressives for most of the twentieth century? Is it possible to imagine a world of plenty and of minimal work? Is it realistic to imagine such a world where material benefits are fairly evenly distributed?

In his book A Revolution in the Making: 3D Printing, Robots and the Future, author and political commentator Guy Rundle is at pains not to will into existence some overly rosy scenario of a post-work paradise, but he also finds it hard not to at least contemplate the positive possibilities that arise from this handmade technical revolution:

[T]he tenor of this short book is that while utopian visions of a wholly new material future are wrong — utopian visions are always wrong — there is far more reason to believe that such new technologies offer the possibility of a radically progressive social, economic and political transformation than the pessimism of the moment would suggest…

[The] new technologies, and new ensembles of the control and application of them, could make epochal and historical changes to two of the most fundamental challenges of this age, and of all ages to date: they could liberate the entire human species from brute domination by nature’s most life-denying forces (those of hunger, extreme climate and disease), but could do so while offering an alternative to the routinised drudgery and waste of life that passes for work for much of the population in much of the world today….

Given how much the issue of boredom, drudgery and alienation had occupied the twentieth century, the degree to which it simply disappeared as a consideration, as people celebrated the economic miracle of globalisation, was astonishing….

It has started to be possible to do stuff — some pretty big stuff — with some very basic tech. But much of what is to be imagined is not the technology that services increasing levels of luxury, domination and privilege, but that which liberates us all….

[W]ith these new technologies there’s a different type of excitement, one that comes from an understanding about what the new technologies could do as a form of social and economic innovation, the way that this might solve some of the problems of a global society in which more than two billion people lack access to basic technology, and the prosperous West is beset with growing inequality and economic dysfunction.

Who on the progressive side of politics could not allow themselves at least a little twinge of excitement at the possibilities? And Rundle’s book is full of examples of the sort of technology that might just make such future possible, from robotic surgeons to self-replicating 3D printers that can use the mountains of scrap plastic the first world has dumped in the third world to “print” out basic household items at almost no cost. Printers that can print out their own solar power cells and replicate themselves.

As Fox Mulder used to say, I want to believe.

It is the very fact that there are no givens here, that there is no pre-set path to either utopia or dystopia — that the future is unknowable — that means we are going to have to make choices, and that means politics.

Unfortunately, politics — in the sense of being a force that can claim some authority and representative value meaningful to the public — is in decline in the West. As political scientist Peter Mair points out, there is a void at the heart of Western democratic governance as the state has retreated, led by the mass political parties, and various governing functions have been handed over to non-political national or pan-national organisations in the belief that technocratic expertise is superior to deliberative processes that include the broad citizenry. Everything from the European Union to the Reserve bank of Australia to the American Fed are examples of the way of which politics is specifically removed from decision-making processes and given over to “independent” experts in the name of “efficiency”. In his book, The Political Bubble: Why Australians Don’t Trust Politics, former Labor leader Mark Latham is typical of those who want to take this process further, and he posits the creation of “independent regulatory bodies” to usurp parliament’s role in areas including climate policy and taxation.

This sort of thinking is typical of a political class that has lost faith in itself and in the citizens around them. It is an analysis that passes itself off as realistic but it is actually defeatist. Part of the argument of this book is that in the workless future that is hovering on our near horizon, such an abnegation of political responsibility is unsustainable. Unless we want to devolve into some sort of winner-takes-all survival-of-the-fittest Mordor of haves and have-nots, then government becomes more important than ever, not less. Nobody understand this better than the tech companies themselves. Corporations like Google are not only shaping the future with their hi-tech developments such as driverless cars and drones that can deliver the things we want to our doorstep in real time. They are actively pursuing governments to ensure that the legal and infrastructure framework that best benefits their new toys is well and truly in place. As Oliver Burkeman noted in a recent article in The Guardian:

Since July, [25 Massachusetts Avenue in Washington DC] has been home to Google’s expanding political lobbying activities: a staff of 110 now works there under Susan Molinari, a former Republican congresswoman for New York. Ten years ago — the year it went public — Google spent a mere $180,000 on lobbying; as of this August, according to the Wall Street Journal, it had spent $9.3m in 2014 alone…

Washington politicians are well accustomed to being treated to steak dinners by lobbyists (and receiving campaign contributions from those they represent: Google gave $1.1m to national US political candidates in the first half of this year). But Google’s lobbying reaches much further. If you are, say, an Illinois lawmaker pondering a bill to stop people wearing Glass while they’re driving, you may find Google lobbyists reaching out for discussion; if you’re in a position to influence legislation on driverless cars, you may find yourself being taken for a spin in one. There are Google policy teams in Brussels; in Berlin, site of many battles with the German government over privacy; and in many other cities, including London, where the team is headed by Sarah Hunter, a former senior adviser to Tony Blair.

If we-the-people don’t want to be left behind, if we don’t just want to be units slotted into a future the tech corporations are already shaping with the assistance of our elected representatives, we have to start lobbying governments on our own behalf. We have to reinvent politics.

But let’s skip ahead a bit and consider the other aspect of what these technological developments mean for the future of government itself. How does government even work in a future where cars drive themselves; where houses and the furniture and implements in them are printed out by a machine in the garage; where robots perform surgeries better and more reliably than the most highly trained doctors; where we can take space elevator to a space station 96,000 kilometres above the surface of the earth; and where the massive wealth generated by financial algorithms flies around the world, across borders, at the speed of light? What even is government in such a world? Does the state just wither away? Does all that is solid melt into air?

At the end of his book, Thomas Piketty proposes an international tax on wealth administered by some sort of pan-nationalist authority as a way of breaking the inequality spiral that his research detects. But as Benjamin Kunkel says in his review of the book, “Socialist revolution frankly seems more likely”:

[I]n his (Piketty’s) account of the 20th century ‘it took two world wars to wipe away the past and significantly reduce the return on capital’; redistribution was mainly an after-effect of hostilities. If the democratic control of capital has such scant precedent, how plausible can it be in the future? Citizens in the capitalist democracies of the mid-20th century felt strong identifications with starkly different political parties. Depoliticisation over the past generation is understandable, as parties of left and right converge towards the same vacant centre. (Piketty himself stoically supports a French Socialist Party even more cringing and feckless than others in Europe.) A recent study calculated that in the US the top 10 per cent of the income distribution enjoys an effect on political outcomes 15 times that of the remaining 90 per cent. Other countries are plutocratic to similar degrees.

How are the executive committees of the ruling class in countries across the world to act in concert to impose Piketty’s tax on just this class?

Good question, but one we have to grapple with if we want to avoid some sort of socialist revolution (do we?).

One possibility that is already being discussed seriously is the so-called Universal Basic Income (UBI). This is a system whereby the government would provide everyone — regardless of their overall income — with a minimum basic wage. Such a system would put a universal safety net under everyone, so that with or without work, they would have the wherewithal to survive at some sort of minimum standard. As inequality in western nations grows, the UBI is attracting supporters from across the political spectrum, regardless of the sorts of medium-term technological and structural changes that I have discussed here. Almaz Zelleke, a visiting scholar at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Policy, has said, “The left [likes it] because basic income provides economic security for all Americans. The right can get behind it because it’s a form of economic security that doesn’t interfere with market forces as much as other forms of social security, such as raising the minimum wage.”

Indeed, UBI will soon be the subject of citizen-initiated referendum in Switzerland, while various citizens’ groups and organisations are pushing for a Europe-wide unconditional basic income. India has already conducted large-scale, long-term trials and the results have been positive.

Nonetheless, in the sort of jobless future that is one of the possibilities arising from the sorts of changes I am talking about, the Universal Basic Income would have to be much more than basic. And in fact, the idea that a UBI is simply a rightwing Trojan horse aimed at getting rid of other forms of welfare — from public education to universal healthcare — is a real possibility.

Still, these are the sorts changes we are going to have to contemplate as the jobs that support the middle class disappear. Unless we want to vanish into extremes of wealth and poverty, governments are going to have to manage the shift to worklessness.

Are we foolish, then, to think that the state is likely to save us, a position which is necessarily the default setting of the left? Undoubtedly. But as long there is still some democratic ballast in the ship of state, then it is a risk worth taking. And I think there is. Besides, it seems to me a safer gamble than the one those on the right implicitly make which is that, sure, inequality may rise, safety nets may fray, I will increasingly be left to manage my own risks — from unemployment to aging — but I — and the ones I love — will always come out on the right side of those equations. The concomitant libertarian idea that, hey, even if we don’t, then it is still right and proper that I fend for myself rather than rely on government-mandated redistribution, is generally made from a position of security. Maybe such people will have the courage of their convictions and accept their place at the bottom of the pile in market-mandated poverty, but who knows? In the end, as she lay dying, even Ayn Rand accepted Medicare to pay for her cancer treatment.

The bigger point is that as work begins to disappear, structurally vanish, such security is far from a given.

Still, I’m happy to admit my faith in democratic renewal might be entirely misplaced. As I have noted elsewhere, the general population’s trust in government and its ability to make rational decisions on behalf of the nation as a whole is hardly strong:

Thus we see popular disquiet reflected in various opinion polls, including a recent survey by the ANU. They found that our faith in democracy as a form of government has declined from 86 per cent in 2007 to 72 per cent now, and that only 43 per cent people thought it made a difference as to which party was in power.

A similar poll by Lowy Institute found only 60 per cent of people think democracy is the best form of government, and that figure drops to 42 per cent for those aged between 18 and 29.

More telling are actual voting figures. As was reported on Lateline:

Nearly 20 per cent of eligible voters effectively opted out of last year’s election. That’s about three million Australians who either didn’t enrol to vote, didn’t show up to vote or voted informally.

Such democratic disillusion is common throughout the world. What’s more, there is reason to believe that the state is already starting to learn the wrong lessons. Under the guise of protecting us from terrorism and of making sure our tax dollars are spent wisely (economic efficiency), all sorts of dreadful things are happening.

If you think like a state, self-preservation is built into your DNA, which is why even with the massive push to what is ironically called smaller government, precipitated under the threat and rhetoric of neoliberalism — with its privatisation, globalisation, reduced role of government in running the economy, reduced ability to raise taxes from corporations — governments haven’t really got smaller. They have instead shifted their focus onto the things they can control and those things tend to be matters like border control, public surveillance and the ability to discipline and punish via the welfare system. Having redefined services as entitlements, governments are now using those services as weapons of pacification against a citizenry aware that the good times of plenty are not just over but unlikely to come back.

So if work really is the basis on which we construct our self-identity, as those like Julia Gillard attest, then what happens when the work disappears?

Well, it’s Utopia or bust. By which I don’t mean that we should kid ourselves that some sort of paradise is waiting for us in the near future enabled by 3D printing and cloud computing, but rather that unless we put Utopia back on the map, embrace the positive potential the new technologies offer and realise that there is an alternative to the market-based inequality that is slowly strangling our chance of a decent existence, then we are condemning ourselves to a future that is likely to be nasty, brutish and long. If there is the chance that we can step off the neoliberal treadmill that promotes an economic system that destroys the very social relations its supporters claim to honour, then it is worth the attention of the left and any progressive democrats out there. Too much of liberalism is driven by a concern with regulating the lives of poor people, and anything that may allow us to break out of that mindset, is worth taking seriously. For that is problem with the system we currently have: the social relations and values inherent in a market-based system tend to create inequality while also blaming those left behind for their own plight. The poor are constantly accused of laziness, of being leaners rather than lifters, while the well-off are excused from any sort of social responsibility as their material success is cited as all the evidence you need of their intrinsic goodness. As the author Herman Melville once observed in another era of massive inequality: “Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.”

There is a final point: none of this can be separated from the question of climate change. As the biosphere degrades, and as governments fail to coordinate and act, we get a glimpse not only of how our current economic systems contribute to environmental disaster but also how difficult it is to break out of existing social and political habits. Our failures on climate change should inspire us with nothing short of dread about our ability to deal with a workless future. At the same time, these low impact technologies might actually be our last best hope of dealing with climate change itself.

Paradox is second nature to this discussion.

My feeling is we need to embrace the potential. Yes, we need to reject utopian joy-mongering, but in so doing we need to be careful not to throw the baby out with bathwater. The technological opportunities may present alternative social arrangements that breaks us out of the market-based view of society that has colonised the minds of most policy makers and political leaders. If we can’t imagine a better way, then we might as well throw up our hands, welcome our new robot overlords, and get used to an us-and-them world where the chance of decent, middle-class life has all but evaporated. For what remains true is an observation made by Norbert Wiener in the 1950s, talking about the early days of the computer and technology revolution that continues to this day. In his book The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society Weiner wrote: “Let us remember that the automatic machine, whatever we think of any feelings it may have or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.”

That is a future into which we should not go gently.

Rebecca Solnit’s book River of Shadows documents the transformation of time, space and work that happened with the advent of the transcontinental railway and the invention of high-speed photography in the mid-nineteenth century. The confluence of these events was something I wasn’t particularly aware of, but the beauty of her book is to extract and examine their precise intersection — in the persons of Eadweard Muybridge and Leland Stanford — and to hold the moment up to the light and let it dazzle us. Her thesis is probably too poetic to reduce to a governing thought, but her contention is essentially that the modern world began when both photography and transcontinental rail travel radically altered our perceptions of time and space. As she says:

In the course of the nineteenth century, time ceased to be a phenomenon that linked humans to the cosmos and became one administered by technicians to link industrial activities to each other.

…First the railroads, then the networks for distributing energy, food, and basic goods drew people further and further into the system; and more and more of them became employees of such systems. The independence of the frontier and the subsistence farmer retreated further and further. This was the moment in which many Americans first began to feel like cogs in the machine.

What I find arresting in her discussion is how it is related to the sort of discussion I am having here about possibilities of not just a post-industrial future, but a future in which work is no longer the measure of human identity. Should the new technologies of 3D printing, robotics and artificial intelligence actually bring about the workless future that threatens us with either extinction or liberation, wouldn’t this be tantamount to falling back through time and finding ourselves in a universe once more linked to the cosmos? Wouldn’t we have got back to the garden, or at least realised Karl Marx’s wish to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner…without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic”?

The technological dream is ultimately to transcend the technology, to be freed from the demands of drudgery and repetitiveness and realise, instead, something intrinsically human.

The question that arises is less whether such a world is possible but whether we could actually live in it. In a workless future, isn’t there the chance that we, born and bred of the machine age, will become just as discombobulated without our schedules and our second hands and our divisions of labour as the Indians of the plains or the Aborigines of the bush were when Europe and all it stood for landed on their heads?

The transformative power of these technological developments is not that they can make neat stuff in a cheap, cool way, but that they have the power to reinvent the material conditions of a good life. That is, they can create a post-market, zero marginal cost environment that disrupts totally the material basis of production in such a way that liberates people from the drudgery and uncertainty of wage labour, of living to work rather than working to live. What high-speed photography and railways wrought in the nineteenth century, 3D printing and driverless cars might just put asunder in the twenty-first.

For years we have been told that capitalism is so inevitable that it is almost natural. We have been told that we have reached the end of history and that markets have won, that government intervention and human attempts to control economies are inevitably counterproductive. We have been told that when it comes to capitalism, there is no alternative.

What these new maker technologies suggest is that maybe there is.