The Looming Problem of Leisure
50 years ago people were talking about a coming age of leisure when there would be 2 day workweeks due to the wonders of automation.
My grandfather was an engineer on steam locomotives and needed a fireman to feed coal to the boiler. Diesel locomotives made the fireman superfluous. They had a strong union and when diesel locomotives replaced steam the fireman was retained even though there was nothing for them to do. That went on 'til all the firemen had retired.
But the lesson was clear. What should a society do when large numbers of people are superfluous?
The idea at the time was that the workweek would get shortened to say 2 days a week that would pay a living wage. It didn't work out that way. Society morphed into something that required the income from two five day a week jobs to support a family.
I was a hippie - a movement where people would drop out of society. I first heard of them in a Time magazine article about them. Dropping out wasn't about avoiding work, it was about not participating in a bad society. I went to live in the woods. And I had a little truck that would get me to work in town. The irony was not lost on me .
Now the issue of automation comes roaring back into social awareness in the form of Artificial Intelligence (AI for short). Now automation isn't just throwing firemen out of work. It's going after the expensive professions like lawyer or accountant that once were immune to automation. Serves them right. They replaced their receptionists and stenographers with machines a while ago.
But we are facing a looming problem. Soon AI will enable a society that has far more people than there are jobs of any sort. What will people do with their time? As the Bible tells us: "Idle hands are the devil's workshop".
I'm more optimistic. My personal experience is that I was more productive in many ways when between jobs than I was when I had a job. I made a lot of art and helped with many worthy projects. People like to gather together to work towards worthy goals. People without jobs can do things like ride across Canada on a bike.
50 years ago we found that rather than make life easier, automation was making life harder. In an environment with fewer jobs people had to have more than one job to support a family. We may face the same problem this time around; cues the gig economy.
Automation and AI aside, humanity faces a huge problem. We are burning through global resources more and more efficiently. Somehow we need to be less productive and consume less.
I'm retired now and I have a problem I didn't have when I had a job. I have to keep myself busy all day. There is no employer giving me tasks to do. I like it. When I had a job weeks and months would pass in a blur with nothing really to show for it all. Not really a problem - it's a state that I like.
If AI becomes as dominant as projected and most people are 'at leisure' then those people will need a means of sustenance lest the blessings of AI become a curse. The Universal Basic Income would be one way of solving that problem. But that's a topic for another day.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.