I feel people have a general misunderstanding of the future and of progress. Taking a very broad view, humans are much better off each year, living in less poverty, living longer, better educated, more women in the workforce, etc. Yet we see so much unfounded negativity and fear.
We need to look to the lessons of history to understand what is coming. Technologies came in the past. Many technologies have horrible effects which we now suffer from immensely. For example, we die in cars, cars make deadly air and annoying noise pollution, cars take up massive physical space, information technology is addictive, and so on. But throughout history new technologies are most often replacing something which was even worse. We had cities full of horses, slow transportation where commuting as we know it was almost impossible, communicated by snail mail, and had no alternative to whatever propaganda might be in our local printed newspapers or TV and radio broadcasts.
Most progress in the last few decades has happened in developing economies and poor countries, and comparatively we who are from rich countries may feel left behind. But it’s been progress, globalisation, which has lifted so many out of poverty around the world. This progress has also given the rich world’s workers the competition for our own formerly much more valuable labour.
Technology has also reduced the value of labour. But this is nothing new! New technologies have been appearing for generations, and there have always been fears of displacing jobs. But somehow we’ve always stayed at near full employment. There is little reason to believe employment in the near- to mid- future would suffer and more than it did in the past.
And actually jobs go, then great! Work is horrible. If jobs ever do go. We’re still far away from this, but it’s getting time to start discussing it and running experiments.
I hope that with less jobs we’ll need to and be able to talk about a new system of value that is beyond money. We could create a new system of value based on human values yet using technology to measure what is valuable. Suddenly maybe, household work and volunteer work, unpaid work, could be given value and compensated, this in a world where most formerly paid labor is done by machines. Who knows maybe I’m too much of an idealist. But to me it’s logical.