Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
David Wood’s Reply to the comment “Is this a proposal of a new word order where a group of people work hard to provide lifelong leisure time for another group of people who will never work?
Is this a plan to create a new type of slavery?”
was
“The positive vision is that (1) no one will need to work, unless they want to, (2) people will find tasks to spend time on, that help them to develop and grow in all kinds of ways, (3) this society will be paid for by the fruits of automation and abundance. So no slavery involved!”
Spot on David.
As someone who has run a software company for 30+ years, I see the potential in the very near future to fully automate all systems required to deliver all the goods and services people need to do whatever they responsibly choose. Technically it is a relatively trivial exercise to deliver those goods and services to every person on the planet.
Breaking through the dogma of unexamined assumptions present in economic thought is a much more difficult exercise.
[followed by
in response to: “The idea of not working is excellent but how does the automation bring abundance and free people from work? Can machines come up with creative solutions to our problems?”]
We don’t need machines to come up with creative solutions, we are not at all short of those. We just need them to implement them. There is a vast difference between coming up with a great idea, and doing the hard yards turning it into reality. Not so many people willing to do the last bit – machines doing that is all we really need.
