2013-03-12

Why I am trying to reduce jobs

If a politician told you he's trying to reduce the number of jobs in the economy, you'd probably not vote for him, and consider him a lunatic. However, here's what me and Paul Țiței have come up with, for improving everyone's lives:
Make everyone unemployed.

What is our reasoning? How could this possibly have any good effects? How would this work?
Well, we believe technology is going to be so disruptive, so efficient and useful, so ubiquitous that it will replace all jobs. There'll be robots doing every menial job there is. After all, why couldn't they, or why shouldn't they? See one of my earlier posts to convince yourself.

Nobody will have to work again. Only the people who enjoy doing something will do it. There'll be learning,  There's going to be a utopia. Socialist revolution anyone? Honestly, I think social democracy is one of the best ways of governing (hint hint - the Nordic model).
When I study (computer science, which is one of the hardest fields to automate), I sometimes motivate myself by thinking, "a lot of people will lose their jobs because of me, and it's going to be the best thing that happened to them".
Stop looking down on people who lost their jobs. Their job was among the most easily automated ones. They were automated out. They spent an important part of their life practicing for something that they'll not be able to do. People are competing with machines, and machines are way more competitive. What does 3D printing mean for carpenters? Automated trucks for freight drivers? Scientist robots for scientists, for crying out loud!

Once nobody has a job anymore, we will have been forced to find a better political model, that will unify us and provide for us, using machines. Everything will be for free (or perhaps, given limited resources, meritocratic). Perhaps, money will become alike tokens of merit - karma, and will be only used for donations. The world will become a better place.

The moral of the story: take out someone's job!

2 comments:

  1. What about education?
    "ALL men by nature desire to know." I don't believe that. How many will desire to learn CS, for example, if they do not hope for a better paid job?
    I am absolutely convinced that the future will be like, but I think we must find a method to stimulate education,otherwise we will live in a total ignorance.

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    Replies
    1. Agreed. People are curious by nature, but curiosity is (usually) limited to a superficial understanding of things, an idea about how things work. There can, however, be other incentives to learning. There are countries that have a culture of learning, so to speak, where knowledge is admired, and this might motivate people to learn.

      I don't know if the world will ever be fully automated or not, but I'm sure it can't occur until a human-level artificial intelligence is reached, and that's going to take a while (if we ever get there in the first place). In the meantime, utopias like Dan is imagining are a childish dream. Also, Dan is not the first to think of this (obviously), and was most likely inspired by Zeitgheist, a series of documentaries filled with wild claims backed up by false facts.

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