I’ve been thinking a lot this year about inequality and technology and how we got here and where we might be going. Why is school free but not food? Why do some forms of automation help people while others hurt them? Is it even possible for us to reach a post-scarcity world?

“Good” Automation

I don’t hear a lot of people complain about the existence of their dishwasher, washing machine, barbecue, or vacuum cleaner. They may complain when they don’t work well, but when they do work it seems like these automations are well-liked. Not many yearn to spend more hours in their day doing laundry or starting fires.

These automations mostly have something in common: they are used to automate a task the person believes would otherwise be done by themselves, and which they’d rather not do. They are often also owned by the person, but laundromats and other forms of rented automation still improve the person’s life.

Yet these automations all exist at the expense of jobs which used to exist. These tasks were not always done by a person for themselves, and many fewer people are paid to do these tasks now that machines can do them. I do think, however, that most people imagine that they are not in the class that would ever have employed someone to do this work (even if they are) and so it is viewed almost entirely as personal labour-saving and not labour-destroying.

Jobs

“At the expense of jobs” is quite an idea. Implicit in this is the idea that “having a job” is good or even necessary. When someone who up until this point has been employed scrubbing clothes is displaced by a washer, is it the hours spent scrubbing that they miss? I rather expect that what they miss is income. Fundamentally, perhaps not even income but the things that an income can provide: food, shelter, etc.

People often talk about automations which are viewed as labour-destroying rather than labour-saving in terms like “more jobs will be created” etc. I think this whole discussion misses the point. Jobs are not what we want. Money is barely what we want. What we want is food.

“Bad” Automation

In fact, this hyper-focus on employment is, I believe, a key factor in what makes many automations ultimately “bad” for us. The cycle is something like this: a new automation comes out which allows a person to accomplish the same work in less time. Or, viewed another way, to accomplish more in the same time. Or, viewed another way, for a smaller group to accomplish what a larger group used to accomplish.

If our driving force is that everyone must be fully-employed, then accomplishing the same amount in less time is no good, since that leaves unemployed time. Accomplishing more in the same time is fine, but who gets the benefit of this “more” that is accomplished? Rarely in our existing system is the answer the person themselves. And what if their job has nothing “more” for them to do? Well then we shrink the group, which shrinks expenses for the employer. Who benefits from that? Neither the one who left nor those who remain.

The Replicator Problem

Imagine that tomorrow is announced the first viable replicator. Post-scarcity is here! All else being equal, what will happen? Every production job is gone, most transport jobs, and many others besides. Some corporation buys the patent to the replicator, and they are the only ones operating them. Maybe they sell them, and you have to buy the “design files” for items to be produced from them.

I do not believe that post-scarcity is being prevented by a lack of technological advancement. Not when every advancement is owned and the bulk of humanity is driven to continue seeking jobs forever. Even with limitless energy and replicator technology, people would now be looking for what job they can do to afford to operate the replicator.

Indeed we are already closer to post-scarcity than we often like to admit. Energy is plentiful and cheap (and, increasingly, clean), automation is widespread, a handful of people compared to the historical norm now produce all of the food we all eat (and throw out) every day.

Post-Jobs

Therefore, I believe in order to reach post-scarcity we must first target post-jobs. This may seem backwards: isn’t post-scarcity supposed to be what makes it possible for us to go post-jobs? By post-jobs I don’t mean that no one every works again doing anything productive (indeed, even post-scarcity would never mean that. humans love doing things) but rather decoupling that labour from the things people want and need: especially fundamentals like food, housing, etc.

Of course this is nothing new. Many different ideas have been proposed for this decoupling. Under capitalism, the idea of “basic income” has become very popular as a way to keeping the system intact while starting this decoupling.

So what can I do? What can you do? How do we make real progress and not just technological progress? I don’t know. If history has taught me anything it may be that we cannot. Certainly nothing any one of us does will accomplish much. Like every important problem stemming from this, it is ultimately a collective action problem, and we are if anything getting worse at acting collectively, not better. So do we give up? Of course not. But we need to be thinking about the whole picture if we want to get to a future where people work less and have more, rather than the opposite.