Seminar notes: Work and unemployment

“This Is Automation,” 1955

“All-Electric House,” 1959

Freeman on “automation”

  • how we are working differently today
  • how the division of labor is depriving us of our freedom

Stranded on a desert island

  • we wouldn’t know how to take care of ourselves
  • shoemakers can’t make shoes

Everything is becoming the same

  • we can’t see the mark of the tool
  • everything is an identical copy of everything else
  • nothing is unique or original

Work has become joyless

  • medieval workers had fun
  • they worked in their own time

We are leaving everything to someone else

  • we don’t play music anymore

Keynes, “The possibilities for our grandchildren,” 1930

Technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor. But this is only a temporary phase of maladjustment. All this means in the long run that mankind is solving its economic problem. I would predict that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is to-day. ‘here would be nothing surprising in this even in the light of our present knowledge. It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of a far greater progress still.

Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or 1n custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society. To judge from the behavior and the achievements of the wealthy classes to-day in any quarter of the world, the outlook is very depressing! For these are, so to speak, our advance guard—those who are spying out the promised land for the rest of us and pitching their camp there. For they have most of them failed disastrously, so it seems to me—those who have an independent income but no associations or duties or ties—to solve the problem which has been set them.

AI and the future of work

Machines and humans working side by side

  • quantum computers

Will we be redundant — joblessness

Technological utopia?

Amazon

  • inventory management
  • make sure things are in the right place at the right time
  • customer service
  • delivery — drones and robots

AI

  • greatly change
  • embrace these changes

Quantum algorithms

  • climate change
  • poverty
  • inequality
  • illness

Actually an ad — Watson

  • personalized data
  • synthesize millions of research papers

Upscaling

  • more sophisticated tasks

AI ethics

  • make sure that they don’t make errors
  • adaptability
  • embracing change

The future of work

John Maynard Keynes, “Economic possibilities of our children,” 1930

  • the essay doesn’t seem to exist …
  • how to manage all our abundant leisure time
  • 15 hours a week per week

We work longer than we ever did

  • work leads to more work

The most productive hour of the day

  • 4 o’clock in the morning
  • the office is to distracting
  • work at the expense of sleep

But growing gap between university educated people and others

  • deaths of despair
  • prisons as the only growth industry

Automation everywhere

Industriousness as US’s unofficial religion

Historical overview

  • 90% of us used to be farmers
  • industrial workers
  • the total number of jobs have always increased

Machines are better at work than we are

  • maybe half of the people can be replaced

Eg. therapists

  • we are more honest when talking to computers

Automation

The horse

  • the horse was becoming more productive
  • plows for farming, etc
  • but the horse became obsolete

We are not that different from horses

  • there are a million BS jobs
  • shop clerks — sales people
  • people who drive vehicles — the single most employed category in the US

What about self-driving cars?

Enthusiasts — post-workers

  • irrational belief in work
  • we are not engaged in what we do
  • bullshit jobs
  • we can care more for family and neighbors
  • there is much more to human potential
  • let the robots do it

Work as purpose

  • the trauma of losing your work
  • a routine — a means of losing yourself
  • work makes us happy even if we are unhappy doing it

The paradox of work

  • we are happier complaining about work
  • we are not proud of having watch Netflix for 10 hours

Artisans were the original US middle-class

  • perhaps returning us to an artisanal culture
  • the internet provides us with resources
  • independence, feeling of pride

The return of a “calling”

  • not for the pay or for the status
  • for the sake of the work itself

Other ways to make due even after an economic depression

Work as replaced by

  • despondency or opportunity

Creative destruction

Replaceable jobs

  • driving jobs — most important jobs for US males
  • sales, cashiers, office clerk, food workers — extremely automatable

Do we need to work in order to happy?

  • losing yourself in a job
  • allow technological change to find their passion

Universal basic income

  • as absolutely necessary
  • but this requires political will — state intervention

Marx, German Ideology, 1845

“In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch that they wish, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”

Universal Basic Income

 

Bullshit jobs

You are paid for doing nothing

  • makes people deeply unhappy

The system we have makes no sense

  • economics is increasingly useless as a discipline

Five basic types

Flunkey jobs

  • people are there to make someone else feel good
  • receptionists

Goons

  • you are only needed in case something happens

Duct tapes

  • you deal with the damage that shouldn’t happen

Box tickers

  • you add and sort out data

Task masters

  • middle-management
  • making people work who don’t need supervision

Twisted idea of the value of work

  • all value comes from labor
  • but most work is not production
  • you maintain things
  • you make a cup once, and wash it a million times

Moral goal

  • to make you a better person

University administrators don’t do anything

IHU Bullshit

Download pdf

Bullshit rubriks

“Quiet quitting”

“The Great Resignation”

“The Great Resignation” refers to the significant and ongoing trend of employees voluntarily leaving their jobs, which started around mid-2021 and continued through the following years. This phenomenon has been observed primarily in the United States but also has implications and similar trends in other parts of the world. It marks a shift in the labor market dynamics and worker attitudes towards employment.

What is “quiet quitting”

  • you are not going above and beyond what you are supposed to do

“Hustle culture”

“Hustle culture” refers to a societal trend that glorifies ceaseless working and striving for financial success, often at the expense of personal health and well-being. This culture emphasizes productivity, hard work, and entrepreneurial spirit as primary values, and it is especially prevalent among professionals, entrepreneurs, and within certain corporate environments and startups.

Work/life balance

Doing what you love, 2005

Connecting the dots

Dropped out and then dropped in

Took a course in calligraphy

  • important for the Mac’s interface

Can only connect the dots backwards

  • believing that the dots will connect somehow

Love and loss, 5:38

I was fired

  • I still loved what I did

Started Next and Pixar

  • awful tasting medicine
  • you’ve got to find what you love
  • if you haven’t find it yet, keep looking, don’t settle

Death

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon leaves only what is important

  • pancreatic cancer
  • clears out the old to make way for the new

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it

  • follow you heart
  • he died in 2011

Whole Earth Catalogue

  • stay hungry, stay foolish

The future of education

The student

The employer

The educator

  • Marc Natanagara

2023 — ChatGPT passed the bar exam in the top 10%

What is learning when computers can do everything?

  • don’t let a good crisis go to waste
  • prevent cheating

Adapt

  • use it

Computers can analyze data much better than humans

  • we must redefine intelligence

Emphasize hands-on experiences

  • active learning

Ask questions about meaning

  • what does it mean to you or to us?

Make connections to the real world

  • give the context

Feeling

  • awareness and empathy
  • AI can’t read the room

Applications

  • apply to new situations
  • think outside the box — computers are the box

This is how we future proof our classrooms

  • but we must revise our understanding of human intelligence

Fully automated luxury Communism

Capitalism is in crisis

  • salaries going down
  • unemployment — underemployment
  • declining profitability

Work is no longer carried out by humans

  • self-service checkout — automated
  • automating the tube system in London — driverless
  • automated agriculture

Progress

  • when automation serves people and not profits

Work a 10 or 12 hour week

“We’ve got to create jobs”

  • but capitalism opens the possibility for a life without much work

Experiencing and developing one’s humanity

But actually it’s a return to our hunter and gatherer life

Unemployment

  • Deutsche Welle — Africa’s youth

South Africa

  • staggering unemployment
  • 50 %

“You have to have connections”

  • offer sex to get a job

The education system fails young people

Create jobs for themselves

90% of jobless Egyptians are under 30

  • 700,000 people are graduating every year
  • 51 million new jobs needed in the Arab world for the next 10 years

Farming as a solution?

  • turn desert into productive land
  • the governments in the region have to come up with creative solutions

India as another example