Technological Unemployment
While we can’t predict the future, we can imagine a world without work – one where those who own the tech get rich from it and everyone else ekes out a living, propped up by an increasingly fragile state. Meet Alice, holder of the last recognisable job on Earth, trying to make sense of her role in an automated world.
In “the last job on Earth” animation (embedded below), the worker Alice gets frustrated when the machine refuses to dispense her medicine. As society becomes increasingly automated we may well reach a point where real time epidemiology will use sensors to assess our health and tell our worker: you’re likely to get sick tonight, we put some medicine into the AC system of your home.
Frey and Osborne predicted in 2013 that 47% of US jobs were susceptible to automation by 2050, in a study that set off alarm bells all over the world..
As Paul Mason warns,
The automation revolution is possible, but without a radical change in the social conventions surrounding work it will not happen. The real dystopia is that, fearing the mass unemployment and psychological aimlessness it might bring, we stall the third industrial revolution. Instead we end up creating millions of low skilled jobs that do not need to exist.Mason explains, low-work society is only a dystopia if the social system is geared to distributing rewards via work. In the early 19th century, the Utopian Socialists tried not only to imagine an alternative but to implement it, in slightly crazy closed communities inspired by the writings of philosopher Charles Fourier.
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"The automation revolution is possible, but without a radical change in the social conventions surrounding work it will not happen."
Fourier predicted work could become play – its qualities could absorb the qualities of aimlessness, humour, even eroticism. We would flit from one kind of work to another, oblivious of its productive function.Utopias of the future based on work, such as Marxism, are now challenged by the possibility of its disappearance in the form of technological unemployment.
Now, as Mason writes, "the best you can say about the play versus work debate is: it’s complicated. Many of us work through a single handheld device which, on top of our contacts, emails, screenplays and so on contains much of our externalised self."
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