Why the Future is Workless

140 Pages·2016·0.74 MB·English

by  Tim Dunlop

Why the future is
WORKLESS
TIM DUNLOP is a writer, academic and author. His book The New Front Page:
New media and the rise of the audience is a seminal text on the early days of the
digital media revolution. He has a PhD in political philosophy, and has written
and broadcast extensively on US and Australian politics, the media and the
future of work. He lives in Melbourne, Australia, with his wife, Tanya and his
son, Noah.
Why the future is
WORKLESS
TIM DUNLOP
A NewSouth book Published by
NewSouth Publishing
University of New South Wales Press Ltd University of New South Wales Sydney NSW 2052
AUSTRALIA
newsouthpublishing.com
© Tim Dunlop 2016
First published 2016
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or
review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process
without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Creator: Dunlop, Tim, author.
Title: Why the future is workless / Tim Dunlop.
ISBN 9781742234823 (paperback)
9781742242569 (ebook)
9781742247991 (epdf)
Subjects: Economics.
Economic forecasting.
Employment forecasting.
Technological unemployment Occupations – Effect of technological innovations on.
Wealth – Forecasting
Dewey Number: 331.12
Design Stan Lamond Cover design Design by Committee Printer Griffin All reasonable efforts were taken
to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could
not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.
This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.
Contents
Introduction
The past of work
The present of work
Will a robot take my job?
Will an app take my job?
Basic income
Three paths to the future
Workless and work less
Acknowledgements
Selected reading
Index
For Noah
Introduction
Gradually, however, it was found possible to induce many of
them to accept an ethic according to which it was their duty to
work hard, although part of their work went to support others in
idleness.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
If you can get up early enough and miss the peak-hour traffic, it takes about ten
hours to drive from the northern suburbs of Sydney where my parents live to
where I live in Melbourne with my wife and son. I’ve covered that 900
kilometres often over the years, and it’s a pretty nice drive too, if a bit long. I
must admit I like the thought of sitting back and doing the trip inside a car that
can drive itself, a prospect that is becoming increasingly likely. But let’s not get
ahead of ourselves.
As it happens, I was staying with Mum and Dad back in 2013 when I wrote
the first outline of this book, having got interested in the topic about a year
before that. I finished the 6000-word draft one Saturday afternoon and got up at
5.30 the next morning to drive home. By the time I stopped in Albury five or six
hours later to get some lunch and petrol for the car, something occurred to me. I
had set an alarm on my phone to wake up for the early start. I had sneaked down
the hall to the bathroom, guiding myself by the flashlight app on my phone. I
had used the map app on my phone to set the route for my journey back to
Melbourne. In the car, I synced my phone with a bluetooth speaker and listened
to music and podcasts I had downloaded. Oh, and when I got to Albury I
actually used my phone as a phone to ring my wife to let her know when I’d be
arriving.
I’d had a mobile for years by then, but this was the first time it had really
struck me how central to my life that little box of magic had become. And it
wasn’t as if my early morning routine had exhausted the range of things that it
could do. As we all know, we can also use them to access immense databases of
useful information, play games, watch movies, take and share photographs in an
instant, read a book – write a book – or find out what movie is on near us, what
restaurants are available, where our friends are and what they are doing, or
where the nearest public toilet is (yes, there’s an app for that). We can order a
car to drive us somewhere, have a three-course meal from a fancy restaurant
delivered to our door, or line up a date for the night. We can even organise a job
for ourselves.
The technology shines on us like a sun, no doubt. But it also casts a shadow,
and sometimes the wonderful and the terrible are almost indistinguishable from
each other.
Those devices we carry around in our pockets also allow others to track us, to
know where we are and where we have been, what we have watched, what we
have spent our money on, who we have spoken to and for how long, what books,
music, food and perversions we have sought out. Our most intimate personal
information is increasingly known to governments, security agencies and private
corporations. Their ability to track us is sold to us in the name of protecting us
from terrorism, or, in the case of the corporations, in the name of offering us ‘a
better user experience’. In many ways it makes us uneasy, but the truth is, we
have welcomed Big Brother in willingly. We allow ourselves to be surveilled
because having a phone with geolocation and cloud memory and payment
facilities and search facilities and a way to talk to people and to remember things
and share stuff with friends and family is convenient, useful and exciting. Big
Brother is also Big Santa.
This book is an attempt to understand the relationship between the
technologies that are reshaping our connections with each other and the natural
world, and our ability to control them. It is particularly addressed to the area of
work and what it means to live in a world where technology is increasingly
automating many common jobs. Work remains central to our conception of how
it is we are meant to live, but paid employment seems to be increasingly scarce,
unstable, insecure and – worst of all – failing to pay us a wage that can sustain a
decent standard of living across a human lifetime. Under such circumstances,
work looks, to my eyes, like an idea that has outlived its usefulness. I would go
so far as to say the era of full-time work is coming to an end and we have to stop
holding out the false promise that at some magical moment the jobs are going to
reappear.
Smartphones are at the heart of a lot of what is happening, but they represent
only a tiny fraction of the tech that is likely to transform our lives. Endless
articles and books examining what robots can and can’t do list a stunning array
of technologies from 3D printers that can create human bones suitable for
transplant, to driverless vehicles that have the potential to render every truck
driver in the world unemployed, to humanoid artificial intelligence programs
that can diagnose and treat post-traumatic stress. Developments like these leave
us more than a little gobsmacked and uncertain about the future. In some tellings
of the story we are heading for the benign and entirely recognisable middle-class
future of The Jetsons; in others, we are plunging headlong into the malign robot
world of The Terminator. Indeed, the likes of scientist Stephen Hawking and
entrepreneur Elon Musk have been quoted at length and ad nauseum, arguing
about whether artificial intelligence will eventually achieve consciousness, be
smarter than us and take over. But here’s the thing: asking whether robots will
take our jobs is the wrong question. And by asking it that way, we get the wrong
answer.
If all you want to know is whether a robot will be able to, at some point in the
future, do the job that you do, then I can save you a lot of bother. The answer is
yes. Robots – or technologies of some sort will. It is already happening. Short of
world war, alien invasion, the collapse of the biosphere or some similar event
that blasts us back to the Stone Age, technological developments will
fundamentally change what we understand by work and what it means to have a
job. There might be a substantial argument about the timeframe for such
changes, and there is an argument to be had about whether new jobs will be
created to replace the old jobs, but none of that really alters the fact that, at some
point, technology is going to fundamentally change the work we do and how we
do it.
Once we accept that we are on that trajectory we are left with a much better –
and much bigger – question: is the fact that a robot will take my job a good thing
or a bad thing? Given that for pretty much everyone outside the Paris Hilton
class of inherited wealth a job is the means by which we support ourselves, keep
our families alive, and are able to have the possibility of some of the good things
in life, losing your job to a robot is a bad thing. Nonetheless, I am going to use
these pages to begin an argument that says the opposite. The idea at the heart of
this book is that a future without work is potentially a good thing.
Even if I don’t convince you of that, I hope this discussion will at least
encourage you to see work in a different light. Nothing changes, I don’t think,
until we get it through our heads that paid employment is not a natural state of
the universe but the outcome of centuries of particular political decisions, and
that we could, if we wanted to, do things differently. In order to make that
argument, I begin with the contention that speculation about the future of work
requires some understanding about the past and the present of work, and that is
what the first two chapters do. A key point of these chapters is to show how our
ideas about work are not eternal truths but socially constructed. The
understanding we have today that makes paid employment central to our lives is
a relatively recent invention, and knowing this should make it easier to think
differently about the future of work.
The next two chapters address key questions about technology and work. In
‘Will a robot take my job?’ I examine in detail the arguments about
technological unemployment and look at the most reputable research that tries to
answer this fundamental question. What this research shows is that serious
people of goodwill are able to reach vastly different conclusions. Some suggest
we are on the verge of massive job losses because of the rise of the machines;
others reject this conclusion as ‘technological anxiety’ and argue instead that we
will create as many jobs as we destroy. That is to say, some people see the future
of work as a technological problem, one created and solved by the technology
itself. Others see the future of work as a political problem in which the questions
are not just about technology but also about who gets to make decisions about
how we use the technology. I’m on the political side of the argument, because
the technology itself will fundamentally change the social conditions in which
work takes place. In the same way that a tractor changed the farmer’s
relationship to the land, a driverless car will change our relationship to the city.
It isn’t simply that work is done in a different way because of new technologies,
but that society is organised in different ways once those technologies are in
place.
The next chapter is called ‘Will an app take my job?’ and it documents how
enterprises like Uber and Airbnb are affecting the ways in which work is
organised. The so-called sharing economy – a term that I criticise – is not just
about the creation of new jobs but also about reorganising the way in which
work and wealth creation is understood. The question that arises is less to do
with direct job losses than with the sort of jobs that are being created. This has
huge ramifications for how secure work in the future will be. Already, middle-
class jobs are disappearing and national wealth is increasingly going into profits
rather than wages. Technology that replaces workers with machines or replaces
full-time jobs with short-term contracts is only going to exacerbate that trend.
This means we can’t just think in terms of grafting the working conditions of the
past onto the technological developments of the future. We have to rethink the
basic ways in which we organise our societies. To tease this argument out, I
begin with a discussion, in the next chapter, of ‘Basic income’.
Under a system of basic income, people are paid a monthly allowance that is
neither means-tested nor taken from them if they get a job. Come what may, you