The abolition of work

http://www.inspiracy.com/black/abolition/abolitionofwork.html

by akbarnama • 11 years ago

48 72 11 years ago

nefitty• 11 years ago

The emergence of human labor-replacing machines could be seen as a boon by certain strands of the far left. Then again, anarcho-primitivists will probably be monkey wrenching those same machines that are allowing them to not work. Either way, let's get people excited about lifelong leisure. It seems inevitable on our current course, anyway.

logicchains• 11 years ago

To those who think that in future robots will be able to do all the jobs currently done by humans, why would these robots (which would need to be at least as intelligent as us to completely replace us) be willing to work for free (without us doing any work for them in return)? And what about the moral issues involved in using sentient beings as slaves?

EGreg• 11 years ago

Because what they'd be "willing" to do is what they'd be designed to do. Why is your toaster "willing" to work for free now? Of course, the work will require resources and robots will require upkeep. But sentience? We haven't figured out what it takes, and I doubt that anything we build would be so similar to ourselves. Do you feel sorry for a corporation when it loses money? Maybe a little, but you'd probably rather save a human being than a corporation.

paulsutter• 11 years ago

Rather than feel likes slaves, maybe they'll be on Robotnews discussing todo list applications and exchanging tips on how to overcome procrastination.

moe• 11 years ago

why would these robots be willing to work for free?

For the foreseeable future robots will be machines and have no will.

Robots don't need to be nearly as intelligent as humans in order to replace us in many areas. Nearly 100% robotized factories are already a reality[1].

Self-driving vehicles are at the verge of removing 3.6 million jobs[2] from the US transportation industry.

The dumb, slow, reliable "general purpose robot" (e.g. car mechanic) and his cousin the specialized, "intelligent appliance" (e.g. self-driving car) will change our world long before any kind of robot-consciousness might become technologically viable.

[1] http://www.scmp.com/tech/enterprises/article/1786484/buildin...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

pmichaud• 11 years ago

I think we'll come to a point where we have strong AI, but we don't need strong AI to do pretty much every job humans currently do. It won't be one type of robot replacing all of us, it'll be specialized equipment doing it all.

glup• 11 years ago

This sounds like a first-world problem. How about we abolish hunger / fix our food distribution systems or ensure access to safe drinking water? Then we can double-back and end forced labor (the actual demand set forth in the article—somewhat weaker than the sensationalist title).

maccard• 11 years ago

The world isn't so black and white. We don't have to have everyone working on solving clean drinking water and nobody working to improve the quality of life for people in western countries.

Consider the implications of most western people having more free time. If we had an extra billion people on the planet who didn't work full time but decided to dedicate some of their free time to trying o solve some of the issues you're advocating we spend our time on, that would be a net win wouldn't it?

saiya-jin• 11 years ago

the problem is, most people on this planet (over 90% that's for sure) with current mentality wouldn't work for some mythical greater good when given more free time. they would be sitting in front of TV more, been drinking more etc. gotta love these theories for 12 year olds which work with these theoretical people units of some star trek era. Real people with hate, greed, massive egos, slacking around, not giving a franction of a fk what will happen to this world after them, and so on.

mkay, so maybe not all deserve so much free time, because it would be spent entirely selfishly. who will decide who gets more and who less? heck, give me more free time, and I'll travel more, have more adventures in life. some greater general good ain't the priority here, more focused on closest people around me. what about coming up with some way to reward more challenging work more, reward more people who bring benefits seemed most worthy to community? and make this reward interchangeable so they can use their rewards to fulfill their needs and wishes? sounds slightly familiar...

so please, if you come up with some shiny & chrome new theory how to solve everything and even more, just sit down a bit before, and think how can you change THIS world with REAL achievable steps into whatever fantasy world you dreamed today. as for me, this place is mkay. not perfect, but that was never the plan

akallio90002• 11 years ago

I don't foresee any garbage collectors or plumbers working "for the fun of it" or "personal fulfillment" anytime soon.

Jedd9• 11 years ago

I don't foresee any garbage collectors or plumbers working "for the fun of it" or "personal fulfillment" anytime soon.

Most of these kinds of propositional ramblings engender a handful of predictable responses - including the dubiously authoritative 'I can't imagine how this will work, qed it can't work', underlying which is an assumption that the proposition needs to (or indeed can) be enacted in isolation of any other cultural changes.

So here's a bit of anecdata back to you. One day in the not too distant I'm intending to build my own house. Because of local regulations I need a plumber (and electrician, etc) to vet all the work performed, but not necessarily perform that work. Unrelated to either regulation or cost, I'm looking forward to performing as much of the work as I can. It is, basically, an opportunity to obtain new understanding and skill, explore some new problem domain, and given the scale (one abode and surrounds) not expected to be especially onerous.

Point being, I expect it'll be fun and personally fulfilling.

wanderer23233• 11 years ago

The "dubiously authoritative", as you put it 'I can't imagine how this will work, qed it can't work' is far far better than the idealistic "the cultural changes will take care of it in the end". Our cities require a large amount of tedious unfulfilling unfun work to maintain. All the articles on the living wage I've seen either handwave or outright ignore the question of how this work will be performed at the service level comparable to what we have now.

ciderpunx• 11 years ago

Those aren't the only sorts of motivation folks might have to work.

Plenty of people working in sewage, collecting rubbish and so on do it because they think it makes an important contribution to society, same as people in the army. I find it hard to disagree that their contribution is more important than software development in some ways -- I'd rather have streets clear of rotting rubbish and rats than a new version of office.

mattlutze7• 11 years ago

The practical question is whether the same or a greater volume of people today, would be working in sanitation and sewage tomorrow, if they could chose not to.

I'm not sure there's a reasonable way to argue in the affirmative.

cafeoh3• 11 years ago

I'll put aside the plumbing example because I believe that it would be either be done by yourself, by your friends, or by a stranger willing to help because he loves plumbing (I can understand the potential tedium of garbage collection, not so much plumbing, I personally know people would love that kind of stuff)

Ok so, for the garbage collector, you imply a few things :

- Garbage collection in the centralized sense is necessary. By centralized I mean that one person or a group would be tasked to collect all the garbage within big communities. Now, in a world where I had all the free time I wanted, I would not care a bit to take my car around my neighbours/family/friends houses and collect it myself, it would simply be much more organic. Worst case scenario, it's gonna be up to you to take care of that, and with all the free time you have, it should be a minor inconvenience if any.

- Garbage will be as much a problem as it is now. It's pretty ridiculous the amount of garbage we create, and it sure as hell isn't sustainable. The article mentions junk food, feminine hygiene deodorant and the like, I expect this should have to go, or at the very least be distributed in a more suitable manner.

- Garbage collection can not be automated We already have cars driving by themselves around town, I don't think automatic garbage collection would be any problem.

- Nobody would ever like to be a garbage collector I and many other find the laborious taks to be a bit meditative and rewarding in some way (not unlike a game). I'd urge you to take a look at the sales of the videogame 'Viscera : Cleanup Detail' (As of this post around 200k people bought the game for around 10$ on the steam platform alone). It's a game about cleaning up with friends, it's literally nothing but cleaning up, and it's a lot of fun. Just imagine how it would be if it actually accomplished something. I'm not saying that millions would dream to become garbage collector or even that I myself would seriously consider it (that's also why it's the last point I make), but it's not so ridiculous an idea as you may think.

I believe a lot of work similar to garbage collection would happily be done by the residents within smaller community without any sort of rules or scheduling necessary.

I hope you catch my point, and I realize this isn't about garbage collection. It's about the fact that the all the menial tasks I can think about are either unnecessary, automatable in the very near future or able to be carried by willing individuals without any hassle.

It might seem utopic to you, but bear in mind that without the dozens of hours spent doing a job you hate every weeks and all the stress caused by the monetary system, most of us will slowly ease out of our angry and sad little egoballs identity, and the idea that you're twice as effective as your neighbor in the maintenance of your community will not mean anything to you.

akallio90002• 11 years ago

I personally know people would love that kind of stuff

You do realize that sometimes plumbers have to wallow through raw sewage under a house? It's not all fun and games like on "This Old House".

norea-armozel• 11 years ago

Most likely, those jobs will disappear with automation and improvement to infrastructure.

mattlutze7• 11 years ago

Might we instead ask for the abolition of pseudo-philosophy hidden in verbose writing? As I scan this dense thesaurus, I'm finding an awful lot of internal contradiction and a confused thesis.

I think it might sound more profound than it actually is.

javajosh• 11 years ago

Yep. If you advocate for the end of work and don't address the obvious problem of how you feed, clothe, house, educate, and heal people within 3 paragraphs, then I'm not going to continue reading. Entropy is realer than your florid prose, sorry.

mattlutze7• 11 years ago

His arguments for making the play possible, are

1. To help people around things they might at that moment like to do,

2. then let people do things only as much as they want,

3. then suggests that, for things things almost no one would choose to "play" at, there's people with "aberrant and perverse penchants" who would likely do them. He suggests an example of organizing (or, compelling, i.e. making someone work) small hordes of children that like playing in the mud, to clean bathrooms and toilets.

The author is, disconnected, I think.

I'd quote Billy Madison at this point but it wouldn't be polite. I'm a bit disappointed this post is making its way up the front page.

batou• 11 years ago

Indeed.

What these philosophers, if you can call them that, miss is that history has a number of horrific things we learned from fucking everything up over and over again and killing each other. I'm not sure we're done yet but if we don't learn from those mistakes and hypothesize about just blasting all social contracts away, we're idiots.

Society is fragile. Move one chess piece at a time.

phaemon• 11 years ago

Perhaps you'd prefer Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness", which uses clearer language to express much the same sentiments.

mattlutze7• 11 years ago

I do, that's true.

If the author of the linked article were to just be expressing those sentiments that would be fine. The author goes far beyond the pale, losing himself and his thesis in the process.

sgentle• 11 years ago

An important question if you believe in the abolition of work as a worthwhile goal: how do we get there?

I hope we're all suitably convinced by now that revolution doesn't seem to work that well, which leaves some kind of iterative evolutionary approach.

For that to work, you'd need it to be feasible for a small group of non-workers to see better outcomes than they got from working, while still interoperating with the (much larger) group of workers.

So what would that look like?

sktrdie• 11 years ago

I feel we should get there by empirically studying the whole thing. We need more data. Also we need this research to be more user friendly, that everyday people can read and then decide for themselves if that can be the way forward.

Changing because this guy talked about something on his blog isn't certainly the thing I want. Funny that that's exactly how real-life politics works: just people talking with little backup of actual data.

bruo2• 11 years ago

The abolition of work is one of the most important political essays after the situationist international. It was published in 1986 and also published in over 30 languages.

While what you want from Black is hard data, he wants from you to think and discuss. It's not a post in a blog, it's not a paper, it's an essay and that's what it aims.

ionised3• 11 years ago

Revolution seems to work well as a way of wiping away a system that has become so corrupt or dysfunctional that there is no hope of iteritavely improving it.

That's not to say the successor system would be any better. They often are not. Perhaps society sometimes needs that clean slate approach though.

I'm beginning to think our hyper-dependency on financial institutions to the point of fear of punishing them for wrongdoing is unfixable in our current system. It's too corrupt.

jacques_chester3• 11 years ago

Revolution seems to work well as a way of wiping away a system that has become so corrupt or disfunctional that there is no hope of iteritavely improving it.

I don't think that this has generally been the case.

A total dissolution of social and legal structures tends to make conditions very conducive to psychopaths and sociopaths.

Your dickhead boss, who previously could only make your working life a living hell, can now scale up his ambitions.

That conniving neighbour from the block association is suddenly on the Committee for Public Safety.

Everyone who dreams of revolution dreams of one in which they are the selfless, noble heroes, overthrowing the monomaniacs who control the evil system. Then everyone is surprised when the most ruthless people of all rise to the top in very short order.

Basically, revolution is a fantasy. The actual outcomes are abysmal. The more intense the revolutionary outburst, the worse it goes for the common person.

Jedd9• 11 years ago

An important question if you believe in the abolition of work as a worthwhile goal: how do we get there?

I think we're already seeing much discussion elsewhere on what's most probably the best way there -- the UBI. There are some historical results that are either too modest, or too inconvenient, to refer to or rely upon. But many more experiments seem to be on the near horizon.

One such story was posted on HN a few days ago[1] -- and in turn it was a toe-dipping exercise to proper UBI, in that only welfare recipients would receive the payment (so more BI, less U). Still, lots of people will be watching, talking, and thinking -- all good things.

I hope we're all suitably convinced by now that revolution doesn't seem to work that well, which leaves some kind of iterative evolutionary approach.

Out of curiosity do you mean it doesn't work well in transition or just in terms of results? The transitional phase is rarely much fun, but I'd be curious if there's any evidence for it being ineffective. (Note, I'm not a fan, but historically these things aren't usually a heads-or-tails option for the people involved.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9817209

nexus9• 11 years ago

I must disagree with you about the prospects of revolution. As I've come to see it, a radical cultural shift is taking place, or is about to take place, in the technological fabric of most post-industrial societies.

This is related to the growing trend, or rather movement, to redesign central databases in terms of blockchain-based, cryptoeconomic systems. As the vast majority of the world's Internet, its economic, political, and legal institutions, are built in a way that concentrates management of central databases between vested authorities, there is now a very real threat to re-appropriate, if not entirely automate into irrelevance, the state's most important functions.

This is profound on many levels since it doesn't depend on the currently existing system. You don't need to believe in the futility of the current system. It's not set in stone. It can be challenged in a very realistic sense. In truth, the most essential aspects of economic life and governance can all be re-created and re-engineered in the code of social networks. All this can all be done without violence. All this is possible without trusting a single politician.

If that's not a recipe for revolution, then nothing is.

devnonymous2• 11 years ago

I find these sort of arguments very naive. They limit the definition of ^work^ and then discard it as being unnecessary. Let me give you an example of work that would still exist in the narrowly utopian no-need-to-work world -- No, I don't mean the type that might eventually be taken over by machines, like picking up the garbage, cleaning your apartments, farming and making sure all the machines that pick up the garbage, clean your apartments and farm are still working.

No, let's assume we get there as well and everybody is free to choose whatever the hell they want to do with all their free time -- that kind of world. Assume that you wake up in that kind of a world and decide that today you will climb Mt. Everest, because well, you know, you can !

So you train virtually, buy all the needed supplies and get them delivered to your house with no human intervention automatically, book your flights, get on a plane that flies itself and land at the base camp. Now what ? well you have to find a sherpa and hire him ...why ? because you just can't do something for the first time all by yourself even if you have all the tech in the world. Work (although not as we normally define it) is simply another way to say 'having experience with a certain skill for a sufficiently long amount of time and doing it at a sufficiently reasonable level of proficiency that it is of value others that do not have the experience'.

The sherpa example is just for making a point but even if we limit the discussion of machines doing all 'work' -- who will build the machines that build the machines ? who will look after the machines that look after the machines ? who will teach those who build and look after the machines ? ...and why would any of these people to do any of these things that obviously don't come naturally but require time, patience and perhaps some skill to master ?

sdenton4• 11 years ago

Achieving mastery is it's own goal and own reward, distinct from fulfilling basic needs.

And if you need people to go on your big adventure with you, then you should be able to round up some other fool-hearty adventurers for the trip.

These two principles greatly help with keeping the open source world spinning, and are quite distinct from what we consider 'work,' normally. Interesting, long-term difficult projects can happen without the threat of failing to meet basic needs; we can still make beautiful, functional things and perhaps even be better people without engaging in coerced or mandatory labor.

devnonymous2• 11 years ago

I didn't mean to contrast coerced or mandatory labor against working for the love of it.

Far from it. I wanted to highlight the fact that certain things that we do require a certain level of skill acquired over time via practice and persistence. These have value (for others) and will be traded (in return for value) and that's what comes to be known as work.

Replace sherpa with doctor if you may and Mt. Everest with heart surgery. Yeah, I could possibly find some talented medical practitioners who study the human body for the love of it (that's how the field of medicine was born to begin with). However, if I needed a heart surgery, what would be (a) my motive to go with one specific individual among them and (b) their motive to operate on me ?

Yeah, open source exists. So does indie music, underground/unpublished books/comics, art, etc etc but the argument I was making is that the product of all of these (ie: knowledge of medicine, software, music, art..etc etc) also holds 'value' to those who are not skilled at these and this value will be traded and that does become work -- 'the doing what you love doing and getting paid for it' type of work. At the end of the day, I will differentiate between 2 cooks who indulge in cooking for the love of it and offer some sort of 'trade-in' so that the better one prepares food for me, in return for something that I love doing (although maybe, possibly, not as well as a peer).

You see what I am getting at ? Work is a consequence of acquiring something (a.k.a skill) not the reason behind acquisition of something (money/relaxation/lifestyle...blah blah).

ignorabilis• 11 years ago

Experience is just data. So one day when you go to Everest hiring a sherpa might not be needed. Why? Because a simulator can be created, based on his knowledge and all the other knowledge about Everest.

Regarding your other questions: Humans will build the machines that build the machines. In fact they do it now. Then we will build machines that can build machines based only on a design. That's the future.

The thing with the machines is a little bit different, but essentially it is much better to work from an office 2-4 hours a day, controlling a mining machine compared to actually mining.

Once a person can read there is almost no need for anyone else to teach him anything. I never listened in class, didn't have a notebook and got A's when I wanted to. I was reading the books that we were supposed to, but I prefered to explore them my way and I usually read them before it was needed. I know other people like me. I also know that people are curious in general and like to explore if given the opportunity.

And here comes my last answer - these people will do that because they want to see the result. Because they will enjoy doing it. And when they no longer find it interesting they will move on to something else. Because not doing anything is depressing. Doing it against your will - even more.

cafeoh3• 11 years ago

You really believe that in a world where you don't have to struggle for your basic needs there won't be enough guides?

Think about it for a while, it might blow you away (and I'm not saying that ironically, it sure as hell had an impact on me), what if you had to go to a Sherpa settlement, talk with them, and try to find a friend that is willing to help you?

Sharing knowledge is something beautiful, most people like to talk about what they know.

anon42• 11 years ago

Sounds in some ways quite a lot like Discordianism or motivated by Discordianist principles.

bruo2• 11 years ago

Black's essays are often cataloged as post-left anarchism which i guess it's one of the main reasons it can look like that. But also because in this essay it attacks something that is commonly accepted by everyone, we all work, even him.

arithma• 11 years ago

Robots, if they get free will, will work for their own goals, by virtue of evolution. If they never reach that threshold, we could find ourselves in either one of two broad scenarios: Personal Jets or Personal Computers.

Personal Robots are available for the extremely wealthy and be used against everyone else to keep people off "their" resources. There will be no human labour, simply because states will be built up from rulers and robots.

The other scenario is everyone gets robots, humanity's only bottleneck will be human imagination, much like today's internet. Easy access to power will be a security nightmare not different to the internet's except in the much higher physical stakes.

pjc50• 11 years ago

The Greek crisis and all the associated rhetoric of "laziness" has convinced me that we're a very long way from this. People are not going to tolerate (their perception of) someone sitting idle while they themselves work hard.

DanielBMarkham• 11 years ago

"Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. "

Kinda goes downhill from there.

"Life will become a game, or rather many games, but not — as it is now—a zero/sum game. An optimal sexual encounter is the paradigm of productive play. The participants potentiate each other’s pleasures, nobody keeps score, and everybody wins. The more you give, the more you get. In the ludic life, the best of sex will diffuse into the better part of daily life. Generalized play leads to the libidinization of life. Sex, in turn, can become less urgent and desperate, more playful. If we play our cards right, we can all get more out of life than we put into it; but only if we play for keeps."

Does the phrase "Sexual politics" ring a bell? Battle of the sexes? How about negotiations within interpersonal relationships?

This sounds a lot like "In the future, I will never have to do things that I do not like doing. Instead life will be just a game of relative pleasures." but maybe I missed something.

These Utopian bric-a-brac essays should really take a look at the independently wealthy in our societies. There's certainly enough of them. Guess what? They either become inconsequential dweebs or decide that there is some personal struggle worth living for. In fact, some of the cornerstones of psychiatry and philosophy are the ownership of personal meaning and the journey towards realizing that meaning. As one study said recently, there is a choice between being happy and having meaning in your life. They are not always the same. Meaningful lives involve struggle.

I'm really happy to see more folks starting to consider how technology and robotics will change our lives. It'd be good to see most of them level-up, however. If every essay is going to be troubled by entry-level problems we don't have much of a chance of actually getting anywhere in the conversation.

jondubois2• 11 years ago

I agree with the general ideology. Capitalism is optimized for maximising output, not happiness.

In fact, capitalism will take happiness and convert it into economic output. This is why people in the developed world have such high rates of depression and why we make terrible decisions when it comes to our own happiness.

In the old days, to be happy, you just had to be able to satisfy your basic needs. Today, you HAVE to satisfy your needs, but you also need to satisfy your 'wants' and in some cases, your 'shoulds'.

I think with today's technology (in the developed world) we are already more than capable of satisfying all of our needs without having to work much at all.

I think the biggest evils of today's society are:

1. Marketing

2. Nepotism

3. Debt

x5n13• 11 years ago

Marketing exists because of the need to work, to generate demand for work itself. If we didn't need to work, then we could potentially abolish marketing. If we did that many industries would simply wither away and die. More and more work would be wiped off the table. A more natural state of being would form with things people actually wanted without being coerced. Debt would slowly disappear. And hopefully a society more at equilibrium with itself and the environment would form.

jondubois2• 11 years ago

Your argument is impeccable. Well put.

dopamean3• 11 years ago

If we lived in a society where there was no marketing and I invented something completely new that would genuinely help many people how should those people hear about it? Should they have to use word of mouth to discover that there is a product on the other side of the planet that would fix a problem for them? I'm not talking about a problem they didn't know they had but a problem they didn't know could be solved.

Simp• 11 years ago

While I think it would be difficult to abolish forced labor right now, I do believe he makes some very good points. It would be a start if we could get some consensus that forced labor is something we should try to get rid off, if it was possible, because it is used to control people and it makes people stupid due to lack of time for gaining knowledge/thinking/discussing. And i think this article is great for that purpose.

As [Adam] Smith observed: The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations… has no occasion to exert his understanding… He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”

If we agree that abolishing forced labor should be our goal, we can start working towards making that possible. I see automation and basic income playing a big role in this for example.

JohnyLy• 11 years ago

He describes work as an annoying thing to do in order to live. If work becomes fun or ludic, then it's not work. I agree with this. If on Monday morning, you're pleased to join your colleagues and on Friday, you'd rather have a beer with them instead of going back home; then, it doesn't feel like work anymore. If you have fun (If you play) while working, this is not considered as work (Work having a pejorative connotation). The goal is not to abolish work but make work enjoyable.

bambax• 11 years ago

The goal is not to abolish work but make work enjoyable.

Maybe. But if you have a boss, he can fire you anytime. (If you don't have a boss it's unlikely you have "colleagues".)

How you spend your time shouldn't depend on someone else's arbitrary decisions.

anon42• 11 years ago

Compare with this other recent article about one of the only societies on Earth that have abolished play: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201207/al...

The abolition of work

Related Stories