Democratism Blog

Over at NPR’s 13.7 Cosmos & Culture, Marcelo Gleiser asks whether technology will free us from work so that we can enjoy a life of leisure. It won’t, he says, because people are workers by nature, like ants and bees. Technology gives us new ways to spend our time, but “whatever our individual choices are, we seem to make sure we keep busy one way or another.”

It’s an old idea, as Gleiser says, that technology might free us from work, but we’re in a period of high fascination with it. Every week I come across new references to Keynes’s 1930 prediction that within a century or so we will have entered an “age of leisure and of abundance.” Like Gleiser, Keynes felt that “the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented,” but he reckoned that three hours a day would be plenty.

There’s also a more anxious strain, as in Martin Ford’s recent Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future—a title that says it all. Ford advocates a guaranteed basic income as a way to support the vast multitudes of us that the new robot-driven economy will discard.

The key point for our Democratism project is that, however technology develops, the consequences for our work and leisure are up to us to decide. Despite what Gleiser seems to imply, the mere existence of technology that can take work off our hands does not improve our options, as individuals, about how to spend our working lives. Everything depends on how we choose, as a society, to use the technology. History, in fact, shows that we often choose ways that do not widen options for individuals. At one time, for example, we employed new technology in ways that shifted massive numbers of workers from farms to factories. For most of those workers it was economic necessity that had made them farmers, and it was economic necessity that then made them factory workers. Their working lives often worsened as a result, and individual choice had little to do with it. The changes we’ve experienced in recent decades are no different. Some options for individuals close, others open. Technology has been advancing for a long time. If there were a direct line from better technology to better individual work options, Monday would be the happiest day of the week by now.

On the other hand, if Ford is right that our trajectory is toward an economy in which human work has no market value, we aren’t stuck with that, either. While the rise of technology doesn’t automatically increase our opportunities as individuals, it does increase our power as a society to create opportunities for individuals. In a world in which the robots do everything we’re paid to do now, there will still be plenty of good work for people to do—human problems to be solved through human relationships, human joys that we can experience only in connection with humans, new human goals to imagine with other humans.

I hold with Ford that our unattended markets will not support that work, at least adequately. They already don’t! Why would they then? Unlike Ford, though, I’m certain we can do better than just putting everyone on the dole. A guaranteed income might keep us fed, but there’s important work to be done, and humans are happiest when we’re doing it. If our markets don’t support the most socially valuable work, then by definition they don’t work correctly, and it’s our democratic responsibility to fix them so they do.

That’s important human work, too, and it’s already important, and it’s what our project is all about.

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