Reacting to the book: "The Future of Work, Technology, and Basic Income" in general

 So, I already reacted to all 10 chapters, now to give my overall thoughts. There isn't much to say that hasn't been said elsewhere. But all in all, I think that this book is good, but I really wish the authors wouldn't have leaned so hard into the arguments about work is good and work is a duty and blah blah blah. Maybe I've read and internalized a bit too much of Van Parijs' and Karl Widerquist's work, but honestly, I'm not convinced by these arguments. I feel like we as a society need to shed these kinds of mindsets. 

I don't think there's much inherent good to work, and believe much of that good comes from the social rewards and punishments structure associated with it. As far as a duty to work, I believe that this idea is antiquated at best, and always propagandistic and evil at worst (and it's Widerquist's work on the prehistory of private property that makes me suspect the latter). Such a duty is associated, at best with a functionalist need for work to be done. But assuming we can accomplish that without forcing people to work, I don't see any value in forcing people to work. These ethical sentiments are misguided and harmful in my opinion. I also think that it is an inherent good, in the long term, to move away from having to force people to work and being able to have a society where we work less. I mean, if I were to imagine "the good life" in abstract, wouldn't the goal of everything we do be that that which is good and pleasant we do more of, and everything that is bad or unpleasant we do less of? I mean, my moral compass literally is as simplistic, at the end of the day, as "I like good things and dislike bad things." All ethics is just an expression of that. All valid ethics anyway. We shouldnt need to be lectures about how work is great and we wanna do it. That is brainwashing. Rather, we should have a society that is value neutral toward that stuff and allows people to live as they want. And UBI is my preferred policy choice to get us to that. 

As such, I have mixed agreement with many authors in this book. I agree sometimes, I dont agree other times. I think the book is good from a sense of presenting a diverse set of worldviews on the topic, but as someone who is very biased and passionate about my own viewpoint on the subject, I kinda have to be critical at times to the essays I tend to disagree with. Would I recommend reading this though? I mean, yeah. It's a good book. Not the best book on UBI and the future of work I've read, but it's a good one.