A Society without Work
It was only a couple of days ago that I was thinking about why we haven't seen the reduced work week that a few decades ago was widely anticipated. What will happen when we do get the technology to eliminate most work? Who will own that technology, and how will the average person have their basic needs met?
I don't see an inevitable path from here to an everybody-is-on-permanent-vacation rosy future. More likely, the people who own the companies and the capital now will own the technology to grow food, make shelter and provide services in the future. And they'll still want to charge money for its use.
It's coincidental then, that just yesterday Slashdot ran a story about some essays by Marshall Brain on what might happen when robots replace the millions of minimum wage jobs in the service industry (think MacDonald's and WalMart employees).
In particular, his latest essay, Robotic Freedom discusses some potential solutions to the dilemma. His central suggestion is basically a guarantee annual income for every US citizen. This idea has been suggested before, in different forms.
Marshall goes off on a tangent imagining sources for his guaranteed income. Lots of them are a little odd, like selling advertising on $1 bills. Even if this generated $7.5 billion, that would only be $25 per American. Most of his other ideas also divert current government income, or else propose unlikely new revenue streams (read: taxes).
While he tries to couch his essay in terms that don't sound like "Tax the rich and put everyone on welfare", that is essentially what he proposes. I think he's also correct. Marshall wants to avoid the term welfare because it is distasteful, so fine, call it something else. The bottom line is that when technology allows us to replace most human labor in our society, we will need to force the owners of technology to fund everybody else's income, or else provide basic necessities to everybody at drastically reduced cost. After all, if robots allow WalMart to purchase goods for a fraction of their current wholesale cost, and simultaneously eliminate the huge sales force overhead required to staff the stores, then prices should drop dramatically.
In the Wal-Mart example, above, the drop in the cost of living by itself will not help those displaced by technology in minimum wage jobs (and there could be tens of millions of such unemployed persons eventually), if they have no money at all to buy goods and services. The effect will be to make richer those who are already rich, since their money now buys even more than before.
Now imagine increasing taxes on these hyper-wealthy. Ignoring for now the possibility that the wealthy could influence government legislation to avoid new taxes, it is likely that the wealthy will increasingly leave industrialized countries for tax havens. Faced with the prospect of a massive capital outflow, governments will eventually have to act to prevent serious economic problems.
So it seems to me it will be a very difficult transition from an economy based on the principle of "if you don't work you don't eat" to an economy where technology does most of the work, freeing people to work less and spend the majority of their time creatively. It could take decades of painful economic times, and some of the more pessimistic variations could even involve actual blood-spilling revolutions.
Let me imagine for a second the final form of an economy based on technologically-provided abundance. Robots perform most if not all of the work in gathering primary resources, manufacturing goods, providing services, and repairing the technology involved in all levels. Some humans no doubt would work in government, designing new technology, business, health care and a few other fields, although most of these fields will be dramatically different from today.
If the majority of society is unemployed in the traditional sense, then the technology owners will have to provide living neccessities to the whole world for nothing in return. The technologies owners will also have to pay for the services of the remaining working humans. So those humans that do work will form a middle class, with access to more goods and services. This will be an incentive to work, since anybody who can find something creative to do that others will pay for can become slightly more wealthy.
The incentive for the technology owners to supply the needs of the public at large would be simply greater access to the goods and services they provide, and the ability to barter with other technology owners. This will probably have to be regulated and enforced by government, however, so that the technology owners don't suddenly become selfish and hold the world's food and water hostage.
Some infrastructure technology that everybody needs may need to be publicly-owned. If a water supply company must provide water to everybody for free, what incentive remains for anybody to own and maintain the technology? Even self-repairing robots need power and raw materials, which would have to come from some other supplier. If the water supply company can trade water for power and spare parts, fine, but certainly there will be places where this won't be the case.
Well, I'm going to give up now. This is really long, and it's taxing my non-economically oriented mind (pardon the pun).