The post-drudgery future
We’re creating a world where there is going to be more and more technology and fewer and fewer jobs […] The thing to keep in mind is that this is absolutely great news.
An economist called Andrew McAfee discusses the technology-assisted, Citizen’s Income-enabled post-drudgery future.
His talk has the same exact thrust as a piece I’m writing for New Escapologist Issue Nine (which is a tad annoying in a way, but I’m extremely glad that someone better qualified and better equipped is making some noise about this).
We’re talking about the wide-scale solution to the long-held problem of toil. It’s no trifle.
Watch the video, utopia-likers.
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About Robert Wringham
Robert Wringham is the editor of New Escapologist. He also writes books and articles. Read more at wringham.co.uk
I saw Mcaffee’s Ted presentation, and it brought me back to my 1976 high school sociology class where one day the teacher flashed an illustration on an overhead projector depicting what labor would look like in the future. The illustration showed a comfortably well-off couple living in a pod-like structure that had an enormous picture window looking out onto a large field of corn or something, with an unmanned robot harvesting the field. To me, it looked like one if the oddest and loneliest future imaginable. I remember feeling slightly uncomfortable, and even a bit repulsed, as I raised my hand and asked the teacher: “But where are all the people?” Mcaffee’s lecture leaves me similarly perplexed, and somewhat skeptical of this future “utopia”, where there is more time to “create”,, rather than to work, so that we can sit in our hermetically sealed, pod-like homes with our smiling spouses and field robots. But of course, that is pure fantasy, and a unequal one at that. What we are more likely to see outside of the sterilized pod house, and the rich, content couple, are hoards of unemployed people, fighting for basic necessities, while a technician class competes for the rare chance to labor in such a scenario. For the most part, this “utopia”/dystopia is already well underway.
Thanks DWK. Your point deserved a bit more attention than a comment-thread reply. Instead I discussed it here.