The engineers at Intel are thinking about the future, and they've hired sci-fi writers to help them imagine what the next few generations of chips will need to do. We're talking about cars that drive themselves and space stations with AI -- and, of course, about a future where robots do most of the work:
In one of the stories in "The Tomorrow Project," a couple dash from Paris to the south coast of France to provide an injured relative with a blood transfusion. They travel in a car that navigates and drives itself. Medical information is wirelessly beamed to the vehicle's dashboard and into mobile-phone-like ear studs. In another story, robotic automation has rendered jobs a thing of the past, and one human ponders what to do with his free time.
What to do with your free time. Imagine that.
Got me thinking about Player Piano, the first Vonnegut novel (and the first one I read, back in high school). In Vonnegut's world, there are rich, educated people who control the machines -- and then there's everyone else, poor and frustrated and marginalized because there's no meaningful work to do.
Seem familiar? Sound a little tiny bit like our jobless recovery?
Let me suggest something radical, something that a few futuristic writers have discussed but that's no longer part of our national political consciousness. We may soon be heading for an economic system that involves massive structural unemployment. There may not be a need for as many human beings to do as much labor, particularly manual labor, as there has been in all of the history of civilization. That's not necessarily a bad thing -- but it will require us as a society to be willing, at a certain level, to divorce labor from income.
In other words, we'll have to accept that the productive wealth of society will have to be distributed in part on the basis of need, not just on work. I know that sounds awful Marxist, but it's also the only way a post-labor world can actually work. It's that or massive starvation and global warfare.
This stuff wasn't all that crazy a generation ago. In 1973, with Nixon in the White House, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote "The Politics of a Guaranteed National Income," and he wasn't remotely a commie. But with the "end of welfare as we know it" and the Reagan-Bush II tax cuts and the worship of wealth that passes for civil discourse in the United States today, it seems hard to imagine how anyone can talk seriously about giving people money -- for the long term, for life -- even if they aren't employed in compensated labor as we know it today.
The dystopian novels like "Player Piano" assume that there's some inherent value in labor -- that people who can't find meaningful work that requires skill and pride and offers the rewards of craftsmanship -- will become morose and depressed. That's only true if you assume that work and pay are connected in a 2011-style model. There's plenty of good work to do in the world; shit, I could put 200 people to work today, researching and writing articles and reports that would add to the base of civic knowledge and do at least some good for the world. I just can't afford to pay them. There's so much else that the world needs -- work that can only be done by humans and that will enrich us all, but that has no "value" in the modern economic paradigm. That is, it's good work -- and nobody will pay anyone to do it.
I'll give you a good example: San Francisco alone could probably use 500 full-time people to take care of seniors. I don't mean people with medical training; I mean people who can cook and clean -- and, more important, sit around and talk to lonely single seniors, give them company, make their lives more full. There's absolutely no economic model for that work right now -- the seniors who need it can't afford to pay for it, there's nowhere near enough government money (thank you, tax cuts) and no conceivable private-sector role. Good, meaningful work that needs to be done. Lots of qualified people around with no jobs. No functional way to pair them.
Now, you ask me, we raise taxes profoundly on the wealthy and big business and create government jobs to do all the work that needs to be done. Redistribute enough wealth and create enough public-sector employment and we'll be able to keep modern capitalism going for a while longer.
But we also need to start thinking about the post-labor world, about whether we want people to "ponder what to do with their free time" (which isn't such an awful thing) and then think about good uses for that free time (acknowleging that there will always be some freeloaders who get money and don't do jack shit for anyone) -- or whether we want large number of people to starve in the streets because there's no paying work.
When robots do the labor, who gets the paycheck? If it's the small class of people who own all the robots, we're looking at a pretty damn ugly future.