Why the Future Is Workless - Brossura

Dunlop, Tim

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1742234828 ISBN 13: 9781742234823

Casa editrice: Univ of New South Wales, 2016

Riassunto

Even as the robots gather on the near horizon this book argues we have choices about the manner in which we greet them. A world without work as we know it could be a good thing.The landscape of work is changing right in front of us, from Uber, Airbnb and the new share economy to automated vehicles, 3D printing and advanced AI. The question isn’t whether robots will take our jobs, but what we will do when they do. The era of full-time work is coming to an end and we have to stop holding out the false promise that at some magical moment the jobs are going to reappear. So what does our future in the brave new world of non-work look like? In this timely and provocative book, Tim Dunlop argues that by embracing the changes ahead we might even find ourselves better off. Workless goes beyond the gadgetry and hype to examine the social and political ramifications of work throughout history and into the future. It argues we need to think big now, not wait until we’re in a dystopian world of mass unemployment and wealth held in the hands of a minority.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Tim Dunlop is a writer, academic, author and entrepreneur. He has a PhD in political philosophy, and has written extensively on politics, the media and the future of work. He has observed at close hand the casualization of workforces in journalism and universities and has been involved in a number of innovative businesses, including most recently, a new-media startup. He was the author of two of Australia’s most successful political blogs, The Road to Surfdom and Blogocracy, and is the author of The New Front Page (Scribe 2013).

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Why the future is Workless

By Tim Dunlop

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

Copyright © 2016 Tim Dunlop
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-74223-482-3

Contents

Introduction, 
The past of work, 
The present of work, 
Will a robot take my job?, 
Will an app take my job?, 
Basic income, 
Three paths to the future, 
Workless and work less, 
Acknowledgements, 
Selected reading, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The past of work

If any man or woman, able to work, should refuse to labour and live idly for three days, he or she should be branded with a red hot iron on the breast with the letter V and should be judged the slave for two years of any person who should inform against such idler.

ENGLISH POOR ACT 1552

There's a joke Woody Allen used to tell back in the days when he worked as a stand-up comedian. The routine is a surreal dissertation on his fraught relationship with mechanical objects, involving him calling a meeting with all the appliances in his apartment and asking them to behave themselves better. It is a nice little allegory of our relationship with technology, and it is easy to imagine that if Allen were writing the piece today there would be references to iPhones and Fitbits instead of toasters and clock radios.

Allen's routine ends this way: 'The upshot of the story is, the day my father was fired I called my parents. They replaced him with a tiny gadget, this big, that does everything my father does, only it does it much better. The depressing thing is, my mother ran out and bought one.'

One of the things I've noticed in talking about this topic with friends and family and colleagues is that people get angry about the changing nature of work. Start a discussion about the mind-blowing advances in the technology and most people are fascinated. They get excited about the possibility of driverless cars, or self-replicating 3D printers, or solar rechargeable batteries that can run a house. But start talking about the way robots and artificial intelligence are likely to be able to do many of the jobs that humans currently do and those looks darken. Yes, they are worried about what such changes will mean for their ability – and, more importantly, the ability of their children – to earn an income and to live in the world in a decent way, but their concern goes much deeper than that. When someone says, hey, there's this new 3D printer in China that can print out ten houses on a block of land in 24 hours (and yes, such a printer exists) we are both amazed and appalled. The part of us that wants to fly to the moon or win the lottery is thinking, cool, I am really excited. But another part, the part that pays a mortgage and is proud of the job that we do, is freaking out because we see the writing on the wall – not just our technological obsolescence but also the diminishment of our social significance. We worry, à la Woody Allen, that we will lose our job and be replaced in a more fundamental way by a gadget 'this big'.

There is a paradox in how we perceive the relationship between technology and work. On the one hand we worry about being replaced by robots or similar technological developments. On the other we risk being overwhelmed by the extra work they seem to create. We hate the way a technology like email – or more pointedly, the smartphone – integrates work with the rest of our lives. Many workers now have much more flexible hours than a previous generation, and this is often cited as one of the advantages of these technological developments. But anyone who has experienced these 'advantages' knows that they have a dark side too – we are 'always on' because of the phone in our pocket. We might be able to work from home a few days a week, but that can easily mean answering emails late at night, often from bed. Melissa Gregg, who is a principal engineer at Intel Corporation researching the future of work, has written eloquently on this subject. In her book Work's Intimacy, she talks about the way technology facilitates an infatuation with work:

Across any number of cultural artifacts today, computers and networked devices remain the resilient index of a variety of social changes, from family relations to commerce, even dating practices. But nothing has been more evident – and more absent from political discussion – than the way that online connectivity consummates the middle-class infatuation with work.

Infatuation is the right word here, as it captures the obsessive nature of our relationship with work and with the technology that brings it into our homes.

This combination of a fear of obsolescence and unemployment with the almost equal and opposite concern that the technology is allowing work to follow us home, causing us to work harder and longer, goes a long way to explaining why work has become such a ubiquitous and unsettling topic for discussion. Academic and author Mark Davis noted in an article in the Guardian, 'A few years back everyone wanted to talk about sport or real estate prices. These days there's only one topic: work.' This centrality of work to modern existence and to our everyday understanding of what it even means to be human is so complete that we rarely examine it, but we really need to. Until we make explicit the extent work is woven into nearly everything else we do, we are never going to be able to respond to the huge changes that are likely to occur as robotics, artificial intelligence, apps and information technology change fundamentally what we mean by work or what it means to have a job.

Sociologist Kathi Weeks captures the issue nicely when she says paid 'work remains today the centerpiece of late capitalist economic systems ... the way most people acquire access to the necessities of food, clothing, and shelter ... it is also the basic means by which status is allocated, and by which most people gain access to healthcare and retirement.' Just as importantly she notes, 'the wage relation generates not just income and capital, but disciplined individuals, governable subjects, worthy citizens, and responsible family members.' This aspect of work, the way in which it turns us into manageable citizens, is perhaps the most taken-for-granted aspect of paid labour because it is the least discussed. It is the more-or-less hidden motivation that drives governments – and corporations – to continue to insist that work is central to our lives, and the aspect of a postwork future that most terrifies such elites. A world without work is a world in which it is harder to create governable subjects.

All these functions fulfilled by work in our lives have a history. To understand it, it is useful to distinguish between what I will call 'work' and 'labour'. This distinction is used by the philosopher Hannah Arendt and it is a driving concept in her book The Human Condition. The basic difference between the terms, as Arendt uses them, is this: 'labour' is what we do as a human in the normal process of living in order to survive. Such activities are driven by necessity and must be repeated over and over in order to sustain life. Labour is thus akin to slavery, something that impinges on our human freedom. Arendt discusses at length the way the citizens of ancient Greece freed themselves from labour by the use of slaves. As she says:

The opinion that labor and work were despised in antiquity because only slaves were engaged in them is a prejudice of modern historians. The ancients reasoned the other way around and felt it necessary to possess slaves because of the slavish nature of all occupations that served the needs for the maintenance of life.

In other words, labour placed humans in the realm of animal-like behaviour and so in order to assert their humanness, labour had to be abandoned by citizens and relegated to slaves. Civilisation was precisely that form of life that excluded labour. To be a slave was precisely to be less than human, to be uncivilised, because such people were no longer free not to labour. What's more, labour in this sense was something that happened in the private realm and was not part of public life. Participation in public life was the highest calling of the citizen and so labour was by definition excluded from the public sphere.

Hold these ideas in your head because I want to come back to them and make a bigger point after we talk about Arendt's definition of work.

Work is first and foremost a human activity. It is not driven by the animal necessities of biology and nature in the way that labour is. In fact, work is activity that consciously sets out to alter nature in the name of human desire and planning. Because it involves such design and intention, it is an inherently free undertaking, something done by the citizen, the free man (and in antiquity, it was only men who were citizens, let us never forget) in pursuit of full citizenship and human achievement. Work also differs from labour in that it is public: it involves the creation of a shared world, separate from nature, in which we can coexist and have permanence across generations. Work in and of itself is not part of politics, but what work creates – the built world of institutions and spaces where we may interact – provides the prerequisites of political life.

This distinction between work and labour can be difficult for us to grasp. In many ways it is the polar opposite of how we think about the work we do, the jobs we have, in the 21st century. Not only do we no longer countenance slavery as a way of avoiding labour, we also no longer think of labour per se in such negative terms. Or rather, our material circumstances have changed to such an extent that work and labour in the sense that Arendt uses the terms have to a large extent merged. Arguably, this has lulled us into a sense of ourselves and our relationship with work where we have, at least to some extent, taken on the characteristics of slavery.

Today we hear the expression 'wage slavery', but it was more common in the early days of the US republic, when the founding fathers envisioned a nation of independent yeoman farmers and other forms of self-employed workers, not one of wage slaves who worked for someone else. Ironically, but inexplicably, we less often think in terms of freedom from labour than of freedom through work. So it isn't hard to see why most of us are more likely to be scared of the possibility of machines doing our labour for us – thus the ongoing existential concern about robots taking our jobs – than we are to be excited at the prospect of being liberated from the need to work at all. At the very least, we are deeply ambivalent.

Consider how fundamentally our understanding of work (labour) has changed for this to be the case. We have gone from considering it as something fit only for subhuman slaves, to it being the defining characteristic of human worth. The latter attitude is today almost ubiquitous, and you don't have to look far to find pronouncements from modern-day politicians lauding work and the alleged dignity that comes with it. Consider these comments by former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, a member of the centre-left, the Australian Labor Party:

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.

Athenian citizens would have been appalled at such talk! So how did it come to be that our idea of work and labour changed so radically?

If we are looking for underlying causes, Arendt's discussion of the distinction between 'public life' and 'private life' is crucial. Public life was the world of work, not of labour, of the purposeful creation of a place – both physical and legal – where politics could be practised. It was therefore the highest aspiration of the citizen to exist in this public world because it was the sphere of freedom, removed from the necessity of labour and the animal-like sphere of the private, fit only for the slave – banished from the public sphere; the barbarian – who simply failed to build such a realm; and for women. Private in this sense was understood as privation. Arendt says:

The 'good life,' as Aristotle called the life of the citizen ... was not merely better, more carefree or nobler than ordinary life, but of an altogether different quality. It was 'good' to the extent that by having mastered the necessities of sheer life, by being freed from labor and work, and by overcoming the innate urge of all living creatures for their own survival, it was no longer bound to the biological life process.

And just as work was associated with the public sphere and labour with the private, so too was politics associated with the public sphere and economics with the private. Arendt notices that the separation between economics and politics was taken as axiomatic by the ancient Greeks, and that they would have considered our contemporary notion of 'political economy' a contradiction in terms. Her examination gets a bit technical and confusing, but the significance of this separation isn't hard to see. It means that in that ancient understanding of public action, people (or rather, citizens) invested meaning, including their personal identity, in something other than labour and the need to make a living. It was the very aspect of 'needing' to do these things that tainted them and made them actions that could not to be associated with free men.

What ultimately transforms our understanding of the significance of work and labour is a change in the notion of what was public and what was private. The way this change happens is by the growth of an understanding of life that blurred the distinction between public and private, between work and labour. Arendt therefore talks about the emergence of 'the social'.

The social sphere is 'neither private nor public, strictly speaking' but 'is a relatively new phenomenon whose origin coincided with the emergence of the modern age and which found its political form in the nation-state.' If you think of the family within the private sphere as the focus of economic life in the way I've outlined above, then the emergence of the social sphere happens when people come to conceive of public life as an amalgamation of families formed into a 'society', which is then organised politically into what we call the 'nation'. The development of the social sphere is specifically associated with the appropriation of Church and farming lands that happened during the Reformation. This was at the heart of the economic modernisation that was beginning, and it was that appropriation that introduced the sort of instability – a forever-changing world created because of the demands of productivity – that to this day dominates our notion of the social. The public and the private – the economic and the political – merge, or blur, and as those distinctions disappear, so too does the distinction between labour and work. We are drawn into what we recognise today as our ambivalent relationship to work and employment and thus the origins of the sort of fears that gurgle up when we start to frame our concerns in terms of that persistent question: 'Are robots going to take our jobs?'

In ancient times, work in the home, largely carried out by women and slaves, was devalued not because it didn't attract a salary but because it happened in the private sphere. It was considered worthless because it lacked the recognition and permanence that was afforded to practices that happened in public. The whole point of the built world of public spaces and public institutions is that it creates a place where actions can outlast the mere lifetime of the individuals who enact them. Worth – a kind of immortality – is only able to be realised in full view of one's peers, which is in public, not in private. This creation of worth is precisely why some try and define what they do as valuable in ways outside any remuneration offered. Shelley's description of poets as the 'unacknowledged legislators of the world' or Ezra Pound's suggestion that they are the 'antennae of the nation' – the whole evolution of the Romantic idea of genius – arises from such non-market, public understandings of worth. Now, to some large extent, of course, these values still pertain, but the point is, labour, as it has moved out of the private sphere and into the public, has become the measure of the 'man' and prestige has flowed as much to the high salary as to any other value inherent in the work done. Donald Trump's success as a candidate in the 2016 US presidential race, for instance, was predicated on the fact that he was rich, very rich, and this wealth was seen in and of itself as a qualification for office, beyond any particular formal qualification or experience he had. This is what people mean when they criticise neoliberalism – the dominant economic program of our time – for applying market values to all human actions, reducing them to their market value rather than anything more intrinsic. It is what Oscar Wilde meant when he defined a cynic as someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Something else happens as labour and work merge and they move from the private to the public sphere. Work (labour), because it is now judged by public standards, needs to be measured against some sort of objective criteria, and that is productivity. A distinction is drawn between labour that produces something and labour that doesn't. Over the years, this distinction has become much more fine-grained and Arendt speaks of an initial difference between productive and unproductive labour, which later becomes one between skilled and unskilled work, and then ultimately between intellectual and manual labour.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Why the future is Workless by Tim Dunlop. Copyright © 2016 Tim Dunlop. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Univ of New South Wales
• Data di pubblicazione: 2016
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1742234828
• ISBN 13: 9781742234823
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 248
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile