03-14-2017, 01:29 PM
Despotism can meet basic human needs only by chance. At that one has the unlikely phenomenon of the Benevolent Dictator or Wise King. Most dictators and kings prove crassly selfish.
We need democracy to make the biggest decisions, including how to introduce the post-post-modern era of robotic production that can outdo any mass manufacturing. Maybe we let the robots do the factory work and the farm labor and tax such heavily, People will get to do their own handicrafts and creative activity... but are we up to it?
People may see the End of Work as the end of their way of living and find Donald Trump, who promises a return to the 1920s (when America really was great -- if one was part of the economic elite) in which people really worked 70-hour weeks. What opportunity!
It was also ruinous to people who did such work. Electrification of factories created more potential for production while wages lagged. The consequence was an economic imbalance that brought about the Great Depression. So we solved that problem by cutting the workweek to 40 hours.
We will have to do much the same in an era of extreme automation. But what do we do with the much-vaunted Work Ethic that kept people believing that work was enough to life?
I have a suggestion: why don't we dedicate that Work Ethic to the fullest possible enjoyment of life?
We need democracy to make the biggest decisions, including how to introduce the post-post-modern era of robotic production that can outdo any mass manufacturing. Maybe we let the robots do the factory work and the farm labor and tax such heavily, People will get to do their own handicrafts and creative activity... but are we up to it?
People may see the End of Work as the end of their way of living and find Donald Trump, who promises a return to the 1920s (when America really was great -- if one was part of the economic elite) in which people really worked 70-hour weeks. What opportunity!
It was also ruinous to people who did such work. Electrification of factories created more potential for production while wages lagged. The consequence was an economic imbalance that brought about the Great Depression. So we solved that problem by cutting the workweek to 40 hours.
We will have to do much the same in an era of extreme automation. But what do we do with the much-vaunted Work Ethic that kept people believing that work was enough to life?
I have a suggestion: why don't we dedicate that Work Ethic to the fullest possible enjoyment of life?
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.