Abstract
Rapidly increasing computerization, automatization, robotization, telecommunication, and advances in AI—both Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Intelligence—may reduce an economic need for human labor and work, an economic phenomenon, which is often referred as “technological unemployment.” Although this can be a very painful process, leading to many possible disastrous scenarios, it may also create economic conditions for the emergence of the Age of Leisure in a “post-work” society, a possibility that is not guaranteed in itself but based on people’s political will. In this Age, genuine leisure will become the dominant way of being for people in a “post-work” society.
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Notes
- 1.
I use this term loosely that combines labor, work, and modern waged work.
- 2.
Of course, this number includes increasing part-time employment, but this fact does not affect my argument about diminishing need for labor/work for the economy as the whole.
- 3.
However, this 200-year development of reduction of work/labor/chores/school obscures the historical fact that in Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and even in the Medieval Europe, people, including slaves, serfs, and peasants, spent almost half of their life in festivities—both religious and secular (de Grazia, 1962, pp. 89–90).
- 4.
“The old Adam” is a reference to the Biblical Adam in the Leisure Paradise of the Garden of Eden, from which Adam and Eve were expelled into the world of necessity, work, and labor, “in the sweat of your brow shalt though eat bread.”
- 5.
Research estimates that each new robot eliminates about 3 human jobs total in the economy (Acemoglu & Restrepo, 2017, March). This assessment includes new jobs that robots create in other spheres of the economy. With increase of robotization—current ration is 1 robot over 1000 human workers,—the technological unemployment will become much more visible (Danaher, 2019).
- 6.
- 7.
In his 1988 audiotaped testimony and reflection titled “About the accident on the Chernobyl atomic plant,” Valery Legasov, a Soviet scientist who led the Soviet government committee to contain the Chernobyl disaster, provided a devastating critique of the Soviet socialist system and its effect on the Soviet chemical and atomic industries in which Legasov was deeply involved as a scientist. Legasov showed that the Soviet socialist strong vertical of power suppressed any technological or strategic expert dissent on a systematic basis, thus, often reserving to the only one possible feedback on Party decisions: emergencies, accidents, and disasters, which in its own turn created the atmosphere of constant pressure of urgencies and promoted tunnel visions in decision makers. http://www.pseudology.org/razbory/Legasov/00.htm (as it is now, available only in Russian).
- 8.
Later, a similar story was told by the famous economist Milton Friedman about some Asian country.
- 9.
Graeber seems to refer to the Civil Rights movement and unrests here.
- 10.
- 11.
Of course, not only on jobs but on environment, health, social justice, safety, and so on (e.g., O’Neil, 2017).
- 12.
- 13.
David Graeber insists that, “all social systems, even economic systems like capitalism, have always been built on top of a bedrock of actually-existing communism.” To provide evidence for that he often gives the example of natural catastrophes, when people work together without any exchange in mind (Graeber, 2014, p. 95). I respectfully disagree with him exactly because of these extreme examples – extreme situations cannot be a bedrock for a regular economic life cycle.
- 14.
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Matusov, E. (2020). Changes in the Economy: Technological Unemployment and Creative Authorial Labor. In: Envisioning Education in a Post-Work Leisure-Based Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46373-1_4
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