So, Jon Stewart decided to cover the topic of AI this week. And....given my niche perspective on automation and work, he seemed to miss the point entirely. I get it, normies will probably think this is funny as hell, but he kinda just...didn't seem to 'get it" from my perspective.
Jon Stewart starts off the topic by saying something along the lines of:
"Now we have, as a society, we have been through technological advances before, and they've all promised a utopian life without drudgery, and the reality is, they come for our jobs."
Before proceeding to expose how AI is actually coming for our jobs. But I do want to focus on the above quote, as this seems to encapsulate the entire problem with our society's approach to automation.
Technological advances CAN promise a utopian life without drudgery. AI CAN promise such a life without drudgery. And the fact that that stuff comes for our jobs is proof of that. For every job destroyed by technology, instead of creating another somewhere else, we could choose to work a little less. Whenever automation comes for our jobs, we need to ask ourselves, should we produce the same output with less work, or produce more output with the same amount of work? Our economy is designed around the latter. For every time a job is destroyed, we could simply decide to work a little less and a little less in society, until we decided not to work at all. If we viewed work as an evil, something to be minimized, this is easily accomplishable.
But instead, we live in a society that fetishizes work. Any time we automate a job, we wonder, oh gee, how will this worker get by? We need to create more jobs, to justify them getting a paycheck, in this system that we created, where everyone has to work in order to meet their needs. Not only is us all needing to work completely and utterly unnecessary in the 21st century, it's actually kind of cruel that we keep insisting on forcing everyone to work under the threat of poverty. Because at this point, poverty, and economic precarity are policy choices, and not some existential reality that we have to face in the first world. Maybe in parts of the third world or "global south" does actual material poverty still exist, but even then, a lot of it was forced on them by this system that we created.
We treat poverty as a natural right, and link it to labor. We treat this as an axiomatic truth that we cannot question, and then we keep trying to keep people working within this system we created. But these systems are not natural, they are human made, and humans can change them any time we feel like it. We SHOULD work toward moving away from a system in which we are all dependent on work to survive, and in doing so, we need to consider policy choices like the basic income. We should considered the relationship between growth and working hours and perhaps choose something differently than more growth, and more jobs. We should consider other ideas like universal healthcare, free college, some sort of housing program. We should think our deeper relationship with work as a concept. Maybe, if we changed the system to be less dependent on human labor, then we could start to care less about human labor.
Instead we'll scream about robots taking our jobs, and acting like luddites smashing the machines to preserve the old way of life. It's a horrible regressive mindset that comes from a lack of imagination. It's like the fixation with factory work. 200 years ago people were revolting about being forced into the factories, now we're acting like factory work was great and that we need to "make america great again" by bringing it back. It's such a disgusting mindset to me. I want off of this sick merry go round of an economy. I don't want to be forced to work, or to spend all of my time working. I see work as an actual evil, something to be minimized, whereas our society treats it as something to be maximized, we talk about the need to create more work and more jobs, and the "jobs of the future" while simultaneously castigating people as lazy if they don't want to work. It's sickening, and we need a whole new approach to the economy built on a completely new set of principles. This doesn't mean throwing out what came before, but just changing it, taking what works and adapting new aspects to it.
This is why this Daily Show segment didn't land with me. He spent so much time talking about how AI was gonna kill jobs that he didn't even stop to ask if this would be a bad thing, or that maybe the reason we haven't been able to have a life of automated luxury is because rather than seeking to eliminate work, or society tries to maximize it, with us replacing work with other work, keeping people working as long as they always did, while most of the gains of such a deal goes straight to the top 20% or so. Then we just tell people to get more jobs and their poverty is their fault rather than recognizing it as the society wide problem that it actually is. I just had to write about this.
No comments:
Post a Comment