One of the most propulsive forces of our social and economic life is the rhythm to which emerging technology transforms each sphere of human work. Despite the effect of political lever obtained by the fear of immigrants and foreigners, it is the robots that really take our job. This happens, like the former president of the Seiu, Andy Stern, warns in his book RackNot in about generation, but right now, and exponentially in the next 10 to 15 years.
The autonomous cars and trucks will eliminate millions of jobs, not only for truckers and taxi drivers (and Uber and Lyft), but for all people who provide goods and services to these drivers. The AI will take over for thousands of coders and could even soon write articles like this (warn us of its imminent conquest). What to do? The word with current fashion – or acrosymus of buzz – is UBI, which means “Universal Basic returned”, a regime in which everyone would receive a basic salary of the government to do nothing at all. UBI, according to his supporters, is the most effective way to alleviate the inevitably massive job losses to come.
These supporters include not only Labor leaders like Stern, but entrepreneurs like Peter Barnes And Elon Musk (Listen to him to discuss it below) and political philosophers like Karl Widerquist from Georgetown University. The idea is old; His modern articulation is from Thomas Paine in his tract of 1795 Agrarian justice. But Thomas Paine did not plan the angle of the robot. Alan WattsOn the other hand, knew precisely what awaited us for post-industrial society in the 1960s, just like many of his contemporaries.
The English episcopal priest, the speaker, the writer and the popularizer of the religion and the philosophy of the East in England and the United States gave a conference in which he described “what happens when you introduce technology in production”. Technological innovation allows us to “produce huge amounts of goods … But at the same time, you put unemployed people”.
You can say, but it always creates more jobs, there will always be more jobs. Yes, but many of them will be vain jobs. These will be jobs that will make all kinds of frivant and unnecessary earthworks, and we can also seduce the public at the same time by feeling that they need and want these completely useless things that are not even beautiful.
Watts continues by saying that “the enormous amount of absurd employment and occupied work, bureaucratic and otherwise, must be created in order to make people work, because we believe that the good Protestants that the devil finds work for the inactive hands to do.” People who are not forced to do salaried work for the benefit of others, or who do not seek themselves to become profiteers, will be in trouble for the state, or for the church, or their family, their friends and their neighbors. In such an ethics, the word “leisure” is pejorative.
So far, Watts' ideas are online with Bertrand Russell and Buckminster Fuller, including Criticisms of meaning devoid of meaning that we have covered in a previous article. Russell, writes the philosopher Gary Évisionner, argued “that the immense damage is caused by the belief that work is virtuous”. Navage to our intellectuals, body, creativity, scientific curiosity, environment. Watts also suggests that our fixation on work is a relic of a pre-technological age. The goal of the machinery, after all, he says, is to make the chore useless.
Those who lose their use – or who are forced to take unpaid service work to survive – must now live in considerably reduced circumstances and cannot afford the excess consumer goods produced cheaply broken by automated factories. This neoliberal status quo is in depth, economically untenable. “The public must be provided,” explains Watts, “with the means to buy what machines produce.” In other words, if we insist on perpetuating the savings in scaling. The perpetuation of work, however, becomes a means of social control.
Watts has his own theories on how we would pay an UBI, and each defender has since varied the terms, according to their level of political expertise, theoretical folding or political persuasion. It is important to emphasize, however, that UBI has never been a partisan idea. He was Favored by civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and controversial conservative writers like Charles Murray; by Keynesians and supply sideers. A version of UBI found at some point a supporter of Milton Friedman, as well as Richard Nixon, whose proposal Ubi, notes Stern, “was transmitted twice by the House of Representatives.” (See Stern below discuss UBI and this story.)
During the 1960s, an animated debate on UBI took place among economists who provided the situation that Watts described and also sought to simplify the Byzantine social protection system. The usual quarrels of Congress finally killed a universal basic income in 1972, but most Americans would be surprised to discover how the country came from its implementation, under a republican president. (There are now existing versions of the UBI, or income sharing regimes in limited form, in Alaska, and several countries of the world, including the The greatest experience in history takes place in Kenya.)
To find out more about the long history of basic income ideas, see This chronology with the basic basic terrace network. Watts mentions his own source for several of his ideas on the subject, Robert Theobald, including 1963 Free men and free markets Defined the left and right orthodoxies, and was constantly confused with one or the other. (Theobald introduced the term Guaranteed basic income.) Watts, who is said to be 101 years old today, had other reflections on the economy in his essay “wealth against money”. Some of them now seem, Writes Maria Popova during brain choices“Bittersly naïve” retrospectively. But with regard to the technological “disturbances” of capitalism and the effect on work, Watts has been insightful. Maybe his basic income ideas were too.
Note: a previous version of this article appeared on our site in 2017.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him to @jdmagness
At Learnopoly, Finn has championed a mission to deliver unbiased, in-depth reviews of online courses that empower learners to make well-informed decisions. With over a decade of experience in financial services, he has honed his expertise in strategic partnerships and business development, cultivating both a sharp analytical perspective and a collaborative spirit. A lifelong learner, Finn’s commitment to creating a trusted guide for online education was ignited by a frustrating encounter with biased course reviews.