A world without work is coming – it could be utopia or it could be hell
Opinion
A world without work is coming – it could be utopia or it
could be hell
Robots will eventually do all our jobs, but we need to
start planning to avert social collapse
By Ryan Avent Monday 19 September 2016 01.00 EDT
Most of us have wondered what we might do if we didn’t
need to work – if we woke up one morning to discover we had won the lottery,
say. We entertain ourselves with visions of multiple homes, trips around the
world or the players we would sign after buying Arsenal. For many of us, the
most tantalising aspect of such visions is the freedom it would bring: to do
what one wants, when one wants and how one wants.
But imagine how that vision might change if such freedom
were extended to everyone. Some day, probably not in our lifetimes but perhaps
not long after, machines will be able to do most of the tasks that people can.
At that point, a truly workless world should be possible. If everyone, not just
the rich, had robots at their beck and call, then such powerful technology
would free them from the need to submit to the realities of the market to put
food on the table.
Of course, we then have to figure out what to do not only
with ourselves but with one another. Just as a lottery cheque does not free the
winner from the shackles of the human condition, all-purpose machine
intelligence will not magically allow us all to get along. And what is
especially tricky about a world without work is that we must begin building the
social institutions to survive it long before the technological obsolescence of
human workers actually arrives.
Despite impressive progress in robotics and machine
intelligence, those of us alive today can expect to keep on labouring until
retirement. But while Star Trek-style replicators and robot nannies remain
generations away, the digital revolution is nonetheless beginning to wreak
havoc. Economists and politicians have puzzled over the struggles workers have
experienced in recent decades: the pitiful rate of growth in wages, rising
inequality, and the growing flow of national income to profits and rents rather
than pay cheques. The primary culprit is technology. The digital revolution has
helped supercharge globalisation, automated routine jobs, and allowed small
teams of highly skilled workers to manage tasks that once required scores of
people. The result has been a glut of labour that economies have struggled to
digest.
Labour markets have coped the only way they are able:
workers needing jobs have little option but to accept dismally low wages.
Bosses shrug and use people to do jobs that could, if necessary, be done by
machines. Big retailers and delivery firms feel less pressure to turn their
warehouses over to robots when there are long queues of people willing to move
boxes around for low pay. Law offices put off plans to invest in sophisticated
document scanning and analysis technology because legal assistants are a dime a
dozen. People continue to staff checkout counters when machines would often, if
not always, be just as good. Ironically, the first symptoms of a dawning era of
technological abundance are to be found in the growth of low-wage,
low-productivity employment. And this mess starts to reveal just how tricky the
construction of a workless world will be. The most difficult challenge posed by
an economic revolution is not how to come up with the magical new technologies
in the first place; it is how to reshape society so that the technologies can
be put to good use while also keeping the great mass of workers satisfied with
their lot in life. So far, we are failing.
Preparing for a world without work means grappling with
the roles work plays in society, and finding potential substitutes. First and
foremost, we rely on work to distribute purchasing power: to give us the dough
to buy our bread. Eventually, in our distant Star Trek future, we might get rid
of money and prices altogether, as soaring productivity allows society to
provide people with all they need at near-zero cost.
For a good while longer, wages will continue to be the
main way people come by money, and prices will be needed to ration access to
scarce goods and services. But in the absence of any broader social change,
pushing people out of work will simply redirect the flow of income from workers
to firm-owners: the rich will get richer. Freeing people from work without
social collapse will therefore require society to find ways other than pay for
labour to channel money to those not on the job. People might come to receive
more of their income in the form of state-led redistribution: through the
payment of a basic income, for instance, or direct public provision of services
such as education, healthcare and housing. Or, perhaps, everyone could be given
a capital allotment at birth.
These sorts of arrangements don’t magically materialise
as machines become more powerful. They must be brought into existence through
political action. And that’s where things start to get complicated. One problem
is that large-scale social overhaul takes a long time to emerge and have an
effect. Another is that money for nothing is not necessarily what the displaced
masses are interested in.
Ongoing political debates illustrate the problem. There
are lots of ways a government could boost workers’ pay. It could raise the
minimum wage, increase wage subsidies, enact a basic income, or use more
heavy-handed regulation to protect industries and force firms to share more of
their profits with labourers. Tellingly, workers and trade unions seem least
interested in the policies, such as a basic income, that break the link between
compensation and work. This makes the building of our eventual utopia tricky; a
hefty rise in the minimum wage would benefit lots of workers, but it would also
discourage some firms from using the cheap labour they have been soaking up,
forcing the jobless to get along in a world in which they cannot find work yet
also lack the monetary means to stay out of poverty.
Workers’ preferences are easy to understand. Work is not
just a means for distributing purchasing power. It is also among the most
important sources of identity and purpose in individuals’ lives. If the role of
work in society is to shrink, other sources of purpose and identity will need
to grow. Some people will manage to find these things for themselves: pursuing
passions too uneconomic to live on or engaging in voluntarism, just as many
retirees find satisfying ways to fill their days. But others will find
themselves at a loss.
Workers are sure to feel uncomfortable with reforms
designed to clear a path to their own economic irrelevance. They are not the
only ones likely to object. Redistribution implies taking as well as giving.
And while some tech entrepreneurs seem to be warming to the idea of something
like a universal basic income, perhaps seeing it as a moral licence to disrupt,
the reservoir of resentment at those perceived to be getting too good a deal
from the government never runs dry. Rich Americans are already annoyed enough
at the “takers” among their countrymen, those Mitt Romney labelled an
incorrigible 47% in his 2012 campaign for the presidency, who pay no federal
income tax – even though most work, pay other taxes, and are simply too poor to
owe any income tax to the federal government. The haves who will inevitably
provide a disproportionate share of the funding for future welfare states will
need convincing to part with their cash.
So societies might decide that people must be made to
contribute in some way to the community to qualify for state support. Those not
in work, for example, might have to participate in community service or other
activity. Another approach might be more seductive. Those still in work might
be less grumpy about funding a more generous welfare state if beneficiaries are
deemed to be enough like them: fellow tribesmen, people of similar background
and therefore felt to be deserving of charity.
Around the rich world, it is interesting to note that it
is not so much the generosity of state redistribution that is provoking
societal unrest, but the fact that out groups – from Latinos to Poles to
refugees –are grabbing a share.
Building a workless utopia in which wealth is broadly
shared, people are mostly satisfied with their lot in life, and the peace isn’t
kept by excluding any inconvenient foreigners, is no easy task. The grappling
has already begun, and the initial rounds of negotiation are more than a little
discouraging. Two centuries from now, I am confident, we will have worked
everything out splendidly. Assuming, that is, that those of us alive now can
manage the first painful steps without wrecking the world in the process.
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