If You Don't Work, You Don't Eat. Where's My Jet Pack?

If You Don't Work, You Don't Eat.

This is archaic, and yet we continue to believe it, or,
at least continue to act as though we do.
If we want to automate something useful,
let's automate the creation of jobs to do, for people who want them,
and create the space necessary for the people who don't,
to best develop their own talents.

The harvesting of the productivity of the people
has always been sold to us as The Future Reward,
heaven, paradise, utopia, the time of plenty and rest.
The time when we would all have slaves,
slaves to do the thinking and physical work for us.

Have you ever seen advertising from the 1950's and 60's, for the future?
If you apply yourself, you are going to get a fantastic future,
a future with flying cars, floating houses,
and nuclear power that would be too cheap to meter.

Then we decided to farm the job out to the bush league, lowest bidder.
Now everything we own is poorly designed, shoddily built,
made to last only as long as it takes for you to make enough money
to buy the next model.

We're so busy “earning” little pieces of paper, and digital bits,
that we have ceased to see the bounty in front of us,
if we can only begin to take advantage of what we already have.
We have been laboring to create machines to do our jobs,
and now we are shocked that we are beginning to succeed.

The free market is good at eliminating waste in production.
It is so good at doing this, it has ceased to recognize people as not,
under any circumstances, to be classed in the category of waste.
We have become “human resources”, when we were supposed to be
the original reason for the need of increase of productivity.

If we are not benefiting enough to not have to worry about
being put out of work, then why are we working so hard,
harder than ever before?
We are working more and more, for less and less.
Squeezed for every last bit of productivity,
while our lives begin to resemble squalor.

Robotics, and automation is threatening to put us out of work,
and we can not afford the things that they make,
the things made more cheaply and more disposable all the time.
This is not in the interest of the people who are inexorably
automating themselves out of existence.

Is allowing people to cease to exist,
because they are not necessary, ethical, moral, or a good idea?
Here is much of the crux of the questions surrounding the
free market vs. guaranteed minimum income debate.

The free market idea has failed to alter it's dynamic
when it became cheaper and more efficient to let the people
who it is needed to serve, starve.
The people it exists to serve, are the whole point of it.
If it is not, then we need to clarify our terms.

This was all sold to us as a glorious future.
Where is the shared benefit of the inheritance of the
intellectual property of humanity?

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