Why the future is workless - Softcover

Dunlop, Tim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1742234828 ISBN 13: 9781742234823

Verlag: NewSouth, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Even as the robots gather on the near horizon this book argues we have choices about the manner in which we greet them. A world without work as we know it could be a good thing. The landscape of work is changing right in front of us, from Uber, Airbnb and the new share economy to automated vehicles, 3D printing and advanced AI. The question isn't whether robots will take our jobs, but what we will do when they do. 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. So what does our future in the brave new world of non-work look like? In this timely and provocative book, Tim Dunlop argues that by embracing the changes ahead we might even find ourselves better off. Workless goes beyond the gadgetry and hype to examine the social and political ramifications of work throughout history and into the future. It argues we need to think big now, not wait until we're in a dystopian world of mass unemployment and wealth held in the hands of a minority.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Tim Dunlop is a writer, academic, author and entrepreneur. He has a PhD in political philosphy, and has written extensively on politics, the media and the future of work. He has observed at close hand the casualization of workforces in journalism and universities and has been involved in a number of innovative businesses, including most recently, qa bew-media start-up. He was the author of two of Australia's most successful political blogs, The Road to Surfdom and Blogocracy and is the author of The New Front Page(Scribe,2013).

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Why the future is Workless

By Tim Dunlop

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

Copyright © 2016 Tim Dunlop
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-74223-482-3

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, 

CHAPTER 1

The past of work

If any man or woman, able to work, should refuse to labour and live idly for three days, he or she should be branded with a red hot iron on the breast with the letter V and should be judged the slave for two years of any person who should inform against such idler.

ENGLISH POOR ACT 1552

There's a joke Woody Allen used to tell back in the days when he worked as a stand-up comedian. The routine is a surreal dissertation on his fraught relationship with mechanical objects, involving him calling a meeting with all the appliances in his apartment and asking them to behave themselves better. It is a nice little allegory of our relationship with technology, and it is easy to imagine that if Allen were writing the piece today there would be references to iPhones and Fitbits instead of toasters and clock radios.

Allen's routine ends this way: 'The upshot of the story is, the day my father was fired I called my parents. They replaced him with a tiny gadget, this big, that does everything my father does, only it does it much better. The depressing thing is, my mother ran out and bought one.'

One of the things I've noticed in talking about this topic with friends and family and colleagues is that people get angry about the changing nature of work. Start a discussion about the mind-blowing advances in the technology and most people are fascinated. They get excited about the possibility of driverless cars, or self-replicating 3D printers, or solar rechargeable batteries that can run a house. But start talking about the way robots and artificial intelligence are likely to be able to do many of the jobs that humans currently do and those looks darken. Yes, they are worried about what such changes will mean for their ability – and, more importantly, the ability of their children – to earn an income and to live in the world in a decent way, but their concern goes much deeper than that. When someone says, hey, there's this new 3D printer in China that can print out ten houses on a block of land in 24 hours (and yes, such a printer exists) we are both amazed and appalled. The part of us that wants to fly to the moon or win the lottery is thinking, cool, I am really excited. But another part, the part that pays a mortgage and is proud of the job that we do, is freaking out because we see the writing on the wall – not just our technological obsolescence but also the diminishment of our social significance. We worry, à la Woody Allen, that we will lose our job and be replaced in a more fundamental way by a gadget 'this big'.

There is a paradox in how we perceive the relationship between technology and work. On the one hand we worry about being replaced by robots or similar technological developments. On the other we risk being overwhelmed by the extra work they seem to create. We hate the way a technology like email – or more pointedly, the smartphone – integrates work with the rest of our lives. Many workers now have much more flexible hours than a previous generation, and this is often cited as one of the advantages of these technological developments. But anyone who has experienced these 'advantages' knows that they have a dark side too – we are 'always on' because of the phone in our pocket. We might be able to work from home a few days a week, but that can easily mean answering emails late at night, often from bed. Melissa Gregg, who is a principal engineer at Intel Corporation researching the future of work, has written eloquently on this subject. In her book Work's Intimacy, she talks about the way technology facilitates an infatuation with work:

Across any number of cultural artifacts today, computers and networked devices remain the resilient index of a variety of social changes, from family relations to commerce, even dating practices. But nothing has been more evident – and more absent from political discussion – than the way that online connectivity consummates the middle-class infatuation with work.

Infatuation is the right word here, as it captures the obsessive nature of our relationship with work and with the technology that brings it into our homes.

This combination of a fear of obsolescence and unemployment with the almost equal and opposite concern that the technology is allowing work to follow us home, causing us to work harder and longer, goes a long way to explaining why work has become such a ubiquitous and unsettling topic for discussion. Academic and author Mark Davis noted in an article in the Guardian, 'A few years back everyone wanted to talk about sport or real estate prices. These days there's only one topic: work.' This centrality of work to modern existence and to our everyday understanding of what it even means to be human is so complete that we rarely examine it, but we really need to. Until we make explicit the extent work is woven into nearly everything else we do, we are never going to be able to respond to the huge changes that are likely to occur as robotics, artificial intelligence, apps and information technology change fundamentally what we mean by work or what it means to have a job.

Sociologist Kathi Weeks captures the issue nicely when she says paid 'work remains today the centerpiece of late capitalist economic systems ... the way most people acquire access to the necessities of food, clothing, and shelter ... it is also the basic means by which status is allocated, and by which most people gain access to healthcare and retirement.' Just as importantly she notes, 'the wage relation generates not just income and capital, but disciplined individuals, governable subjects, worthy citizens, and responsible family members.' This aspect of work, the way in which it turns us into manageable citizens, is perhaps the most taken-for-granted aspect of paid labour because it is the least discussed. It is the more-or-less hidden motivation that drives governments – and corporations – to continue to insist that work is central to our lives, and the aspect of a postwork future that most terrifies such elites. A world without work is a world in which it is harder to create governable subjects.

All these functions fulfilled by work in our lives have a history. To understand it, it is useful to distinguish between what I will call 'work' and 'labour'. This distinction is used by the philosopher Hannah Arendt and it is a driving concept in her book The Human Condition. The basic difference between the terms, as Arendt uses them, is this: 'labour' is what we do as a human in the normal process of living in order to survive. Such activities are driven by necessity and must be repeated over and over in order to sustain life. Labour is thus akin to slavery, something that impinges on our human freedom. Arendt discusses at length the way the citizens of ancient Greece freed themselves from labour by the use of slaves. As she says:

The opinion that labor and work were despised in antiquity because only slaves were engaged in them is a prejudice of modern historians. The ancients reasoned the other way around and felt it necessary to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: NewSouth
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1742234828
• ISBN 13: 9781742234823
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 258
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland