I wanted to share this quote I came across today.
“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living.
We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments
for inspectors to inspect inspectors.
The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”Buckminster Fuller
I don’t know much about Buckminster Fuller but this spoke to me because I’ve always been puzzled by “automation is taking away people’s work” as an argument against it. For me “automation is taking people’s away people’s work” is an argument for automation.
Who actually wants to work really? If work was fun, work was something people actually wanted to spend time doing, they would need to pay us to do it. We want to work because we want to live. We need to trade the time working for currency so we can trade the currency for homes and food and health.
The self-service tills in Tesco don’t stop people from doing something they love, the stop people from spending their lives engaged in the drudgery of scanning products. The self-service tills take away the amount of work we need to do as a society.
If we can spend more time as a society making art, enjoying the company of our loved ones or other humans, progressing human knowledge or anything we want, why is that a bad thing?