Can Robots Liberate Us From a System Dependent On Failure?

in #robots7 years ago

CAN ROBOTS LIBERATE US FROM A SYSTEM DEPENDENT ON FAILURE?

INTRODUCTION

There is a famous quote, one that has been attributed to several people including Genghis Kahn and Gore Vidal, which states 'It is not enough that I should succeed; others must fail".

It sounds like a selfish and sadistic outlook on life, one that seeks not only to maximise one's own advantage but to actively favour misfortune coming to others. But is it something else? Is it, in fact, a true description of how things must be in modern life?

I would argue that in a world centred around people earning a living through paid employment, it is both inevitable and necessary that a few can succeed but the majority can, nay must, fail.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY 'SUCCESSFUL'?

(Image from wikimedia commons)
The first thing that needs to be done is to define what 'success' means in this particular context. The definition I am going to rely on for purposes of discussion is this: You are successful in employment if you are able to find paid work which enables you to develop skills you are passionate about. I believe every person is gifted in some way or another and one of the surest ways to achieve satisfaction in life is to spend one's time in a career that utilises those skills and provides one with the opportunity to reach the highest possible levels of professionalism.

There can be no doubt that people can and do find work doing what they are passionate about. People who are passionate about caring for others who become doctors and nurses; people who love to cook who become chefs, and so on. But I also think it is the case that, while a few can succeed in securing a job that indulges their passion, the vast majority never get that opportunity.

WHY MOST PEOPLE CANNOT BE SUCCESSFUL

Here's why. For every career path that leads to work that coincides with your passion, whatever it may be, there are so many more jobs that have nothing to do with anything you really enjoy (and if you really enjoy doing something, it's a fair bet that you are gifted at it).

The National Lottery once ran the slogan 'It Could Be You'. This slogan was not lying; provided you had bought a ticket your numbers had as much chance of coming up as any other possible combination of numbers. But, given how many possible combinations there are it is also much more likely that it would not be you who had the winning ticket. Lotteries can and do pay out jackpots to fortunate players but there are always so many more people with tickets that are not worth anything. The majority of players whose tickets are not worth anything are actually a vital part of the lottery, for it is the money they pay into the game that generates the prize money one or a few ends up with. The lottery is a case of 'it is not enough that I should succeed; others must fail'.

When it comes to careers I think we have a situation much like the lottery. It could be that you find paid employment doing something you love, but it is vastly more probable that you will end up having to submit to employment that does not enable you to engage in work that coincides with anything you are passionate about, for pretty much the same reason that you are very likely not to win the lottery. Of all possible jobs, the vast majority have little or nothing to do with anything you care about. It is far more probable, frankly, that somebody else will be given your dream job.

That is not to say that you cannot find meaning and be happy in jobs that don’t make use of your particular talents and passions. Following Sartre, we might say the individual is always free to choose to be happy and to find meaning. But I do think it fair to say in most cases, happiness and meaning is to be found in spite of, not because of, your employment.

We can represent jobs, with those coinciding with one's passions and those that don't have much at all to do with anything one really cares about, like so:

The green part of the triangle represents jobs that utilise and grow your gifts, with the rest of the triangle representing the jobs that don’t.

THE SYSTEM DEMANDS FAILURE

In his essay Bob Black said of employment:

"People don't just work, they have "jobs." One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs don't) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A "job" that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty hours a week with no say in how it should be done...

The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of assorted indignities which can be denominated as "discipline." Foucault has complexified this phenomenon but it is simple enough. Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian controls at the workplace -- surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching -in and -out, etc. Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions they just didn't have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do".

Such a system did not come about by malice but simply because it proved to be the most efficient way to achieve productivity.

As Jeremy Rifkin argued in 'Zero Marginal Cost Society':

“Capitalism is a unique and peculiar form of enterprise in which the workforce is stripped of its ownership of the tools it uses to create the products, and the investors who own the enterprises are stripped of their power to control and manage their businesses.

Managing large, vertically integrated enterprises, in turn, was most efficiently carried out by centralised, top-down command and control mechanisms.

Running these mammoth enterprises required the successful rationalisation of every aspect of the company’s business operations. Max Weber, the great nineteenth-century sociologist, provided a good description of what is entailed in the rationalisation of business. To begin with, the modern business corporation is arranged pyramidically, with all decision making automatically flowing from the top down. Formal rules and procedures dictating the flow of activity, the definition of tasks, how work is to be carried out, and how performance is to be judged at every stage of operations and every level of engagement are meticulously planned, leaving little room for improvisation".

I think it is fair to say that most jobs have very little to do with anything anybody really cares about. Nevertheless they still have to be done if we are to have the goods and services that the forces of supply and demand say are required. Each and every one of us depend upon people wasting the time of their lives on tasks that provide minimal reward, for it is thanks to the sacrifice of these people that markets manage to produce such the abundance of goods and services now available to us. A few of us can succeed in finding employment that utilises skills we care deeply about, but the majority must fail to succeed, for they are required in all the dull, dirty and dangerous jobs which modern society depends upon (or, perhaps, that advertising as convinced us are essential to achieving fulfilment).

THE LIBERATORS

But what if that need not be the case? What if there were some alternative to requiring people to give up their dreams and submit to a job they don't really want to do? As the 21st century develops, there could very well be an alternative. With sufficient development in their ability to emulate the capabilities of people, robots and artificial intelligence could provide a way of getting work done without having to turn to people. Often the prospect of a substantial rise in automation is portrayed as something to be feared. 'Robots are coming to steal your job!' headlines cry, as if people ordinarily give a damn about their job above and beyond its wages. But with appropriate adjustments to society, I think robots could instead be seen as liberators, come to free us from all the work we would rather not do, given a choice, and enabling all of us, not just the oh-so-lucky few, to succeed in developing our passions to their highest possible expression.

REFERENCES

The Abolition Of Work by Bob Black

Zero Marginal Cost Society by Jeremy Rifkin

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