From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Fri Nov 15 2002 - 11:40:28 MST
Charles Hixson wrote:
> Samantha Atkins wrote:
>
>> ...
>> But what the heck is "work" when increasingly large groups of people
>> have no skills that are not subsumed by or made irrelevant by
>> accelerating technology? There is no need in advanced countries
>> for everyone to be in full-time work of any conventional kind. I
>> don't see where make-work to satisfy outdated prejudices improves
>> anything or is particularly extropic. Personally, I believe a great
>> deal of good could come from a society with such real material
>> abundance that no one "works" except on that which they are truly
>> interested in. Go into most major corporations and it already
>> looks as if there is a lot of pointless make-work going on.
>
>
> There are two principle kinds of work. Kind one is work to satisfy
> personal needs, and kind two is work as an act of submission to the
> king, or his representatives (e.g., the lords of the land). Technical
> profiency can result in kind one becoming irrelevant. It can't even
> address kind two.
> N.B.: When full automtion becomes practical, then work of kind one
> will be irrelevant. This doesn't mean that the population can
> expand. Until direct synthesis is achieved, that is problematic, and
> even then the population is already excessive for the livable space.
> Of course, part of the dense packing of people is to allow access to
> jobs, but even without that there are just too many people.
There is another kind of work, work done in the service of that which
one cares about (e.g. creative work). In a way it is a subset of kind 1
but it is not in the least threatened by accelerating technology. .
Population expansion is a separate topic. If there are "too many
people" is there any proposal to do anything about that?
On kind two, who the heck needs "kings" and lords of the land? What for?
>> ...I would have a serious problem with those who would let people die
>> of hunger in the middle of abundance just because they did not
>> satisfy some group of people's scarcity based prejudices.
>>
>
> That's a silly way to do things alright. If for no other reason, then
> because it increases the levels of violence and crime in societies
> that adopt it. (OTOH, if you are a supporter of private armies, it's
> a dandy way to justify their existence.) But that's not the basic
> problem.
Not to mention it is utterly inhumane.
>
> The basic problem is that it's again a method invoking centralized
> controls. If you consider that people who loose their jobs may
> rightly be treated inhumanely, then what happens when YOUR profession
> is automated away? Don't think it won't be. Every single job
> category on the planet is under pressure. Once a couple of decades
> ago I wrote a thesis titled "be a garbageman". My forecast was that
> garbageman would be the last job category automated out of existence.
> Now I suspect that the last job will really be landlord, because the
> lords of the land derive their powers from delegation of the king's
> authority. This job class has become highly specialized into many
> diverse sub-classes, but all property titles are based on adverse
> possession, and all "tennancy" is based on the government supporting
> someone's claim to land that he can't actually hold on his own. But
> how else could cities exist? Or suburbs? Even isolated places in the
> country are only possible because the government breaks up other large
> maruding bands of armed people.
A landlord is not a "lord of the land" in today's society. S/He is
usually some middleclass person attempting to pay off a mortgage on a
property by renting it at a bit better than break-even cost hoping the
value will go up. Or so it seems to me watching would-be landlord
friends. I don't see what the rest of the above has to do with the point.
>
> So in today's headlines, the president is planning to privatize
> federal jobs. This basically means that he wants to get rid of the
> civil service. Hasn't your post office improved tremendously since it
> was privatized? These days I expect to get three or four
> mis-delivered letters a week. But the pay rates of the workers have
> been cut, so YOUR prices must have dropped, right?
> If I thought that he meant to decentralize the controls, then I'd be
> in favor of the action regardless. I don't. The bids will be so
> structured that only his friends have a chance. This is merely a
> manuver to place certain job functions permanently in the hands of a
> wealthy clique. It is a transfer of power to an even less accountable
> group. We may soon be talking favorable of the days before Chester A.
> Arthur, when the "spoils system" reigned. (Well, we won't, because
> people don't study history. But there are very good reasons for the
> civil service.)
>
The post office is not really privatized. It still has certain
monopolistic supports. I would be in favor, tentatively, of
privatizing many federal jobs simply to remove the non-elected default
government of this country to some small degree. Then again, that
inertia may be all that is saving us from the likes of Brother Bush.
- samantha
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