Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out

A while back, I discussed the possibilities of a basic guaranteed income. Now venture capitalist Sam Altman, on the Freakonomics podcast, has addressed the idea, coming down in favour of it. The interesting (and headline-grabbing) aspect of his defence came when he poopooed the concern that guaranteed income would take away the incentive to work. He said that society would continue to function even if 90% of people just get high and play video games.

The strange thing is, I find that believable. It's part of a question that many people have asked one way or another: how much of the work done in our society is actually necessary? I know, that sounds painfully cynical, but come on, have you worked in an office? On top of that, consider the amount of work that goes into cancelling out someone else's work, such as advertisers promoting competing products. Generally, we think of that as the lesser of two evils, the greater evil being a completely planned economy, where even more waste will go into bureaucracy and self-serving decision making. But even still, it's depressing when you think of how many careers go into it. Those lives could be just as well spent high in Hyrule, as far as overall productivity goes.

However, I do still have some concern with this reasoning: they're essentially saying that there are enough people with passion who would work without material incentive that we could keep society going. In many aspects of life, that's true. Most artists work despite the structure of capitalism, rather than because of it. And open-source software shows that programmers are willing to do work without pay, though usability experts apparently don't.

But what about farmers? Lots of people would probably farm anyway, they get enjoyment and satisfaction from growing things. After all, we have the term "hobby farm" for a reason. But would there be enough people, working hard enough, to feed us all? We urbanites don't really appreciate how much farming has industrialized over the past century. Yes, automation is a possible answer. Indeed, it's a possible answer to all concerns about post-work societies, but I'm not sure it will become that advanced fast enough. After all, we're talking about hobby farmers growing food to feed seven billion (or eight or nine by the time these changes come about.)

How about janitors? Garbage collectors? You could argue that without work requirements, the way we approach the distribution of work might change. Using garbage collectors as an example: if 90% of us are smoking pot and playing video games, and the other 10% are working, but not at a breakneck, nine-to-five pace, we might not mind taking our trash out to the dump ourselves. We also might not mind cleaning up our own workspaces, instead of expecting people to specialize in cleaning buildings on an industrial scale. Or maybe our standards of cleanliness in the office might drop down to the standards of cleanliness most of us have in our homes.

That's an interesting thought experiment: modern society has generally gained efficiency by having people specialize in jobs. But perhaps a future post-industrial society might undo that change. The only way empowered people might get unpleasant work done would be to spread it out among all of us.