To The Gods Of The Marketplace
Rudyard Kipling Predicts The Future of Work
If I woke up one morning and said the poet, Rudyard Kipling may have predicted the effects of technology on our socioeconomic world, would you think I’d completely lost it? Well, I guess I have because that’s exactly what I am saying.
So yesterday, I was reading The Little Book of Cliches by Alison Westwood and in the part where she talks about Shakespeare’s O brave new world phrase, she goes on to say it was also used in Rudyard Kipling’s 1919 poem titled The Gods of the Copybook Headings, and quoted this passage:
And that after this is accomplished,
and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing
and no man must pay for his sins…
Wow, I thought… and the words that stuck with me were:
- new world begins… and,
- all men are paid for existing.
Why? Well, because I live in the 21st century and I’ve heard a lot about the jobless future where robots do all the work and humans just laze about doing nothing. No seriously, books like Jaron Lanier’s Who Owns The Future and Martin Ford’s The Rise of the Robots have done a lot to promote the idea of a jobless future. Interestingly enough, both books suggest that the solution to the employment problem posed by smart machines is something called a Universal Basic Income.
A basic income (also called basic income guarantee, citizen’s income, unconditional basic income, universal basic income (UBI), basic living stipend (BLS) or universal demogrant) is typically a form of social security or welfare regime, in which all citizens (or permanent residents) of a country receive a regular, liveable and unconditional sum of money, from the government. The recipient is not required to work or look for work, and the payment is given independent of any other income.
—Wikipedia
Hmm… sounds awfully similar to Kipling’s new world where people are simply paid for existing, wouldn’t you say?
So does this mean that the poet with an ‘age-old unfashionable wisdom’ (according to his editor, Andrew Rutherford) peered into our world of smart machines and reasoned that people wouldn’t need to work any longer? Did Rudyard Kipling really predict our need for a Universal Basic Income?
Unfortunately, apparently not! So oops, 🙊 apologies if my headline was a little misleading; Wikipedia attributes the origins of the idea of a basic income to a couple of men who lived in the late 1700s. So Rudyard’s 1919 poem shows quite clearly that the lines in question weren’t really inspired by original thought. Or maybe they were and he was simply projecting past ideas into the future, where it seemed more realistic that people would no longer need to work as much for a living. On another note, the poem also stated:
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man…
To me, this reinforces the idea of a jobless future without the need for physical labour, just as it was for Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, before the fall of man.
Whether or not Mr Kipling (the poet that is… not the one that makes exceedingly good cakes) did predict the necessity for a Universal Basic Income due to human labour being made redundant in the future, one thing is for sure: the Gods of The Marketplace are paying attention and in fact seem to agree with him.
So what do you think? Was Rudyard Kipling a prophet as well as a poet? Or was he just an old English imperialist who, like me, (minus the imperialism) simply liked to ramble on and on about his thoughts and ideas, until he made a point he thought was valid? Do let me know!
And for those who really aren’t into the techy-businessy-stuff, here’s the actual poem in full.
