We are all one species, homo sapiens, all of us are people. We're not 47% and we're not $5.3 trillion. We're flesh and blood; we live and breathe, work and play, talk and listen, marry and have children, get sick, grow old and die. All of us.
Our governments, it seems, insist on thinking of us as numbers. And our leaders often appear to deny their relationship to the rest of us people.
We can't escape from one another, although some of us try. We ride first class and drive luxury cars and live on the right side of the tracks, in gated and guarded communities, with all the amenities of success. We make reservations in restaurants and hire publicists and trainers and bodyguards.
A genealogist knows the truth - we are all related, with common ancestors revealed by public records and DNA. Perhaps some of us think of others of us as black sheep, but we're still kinfolk.
We can't be codified - we insist on being considered on a case-by-case basis. Rules are meant to be broken, not people.
The root of the word 'democracy' means 'power to the people.' To live up to its promise, democracy must be accountable to the people. Elections merely enable politicians to compete for the favor of the electorate; accountability means the grievances of all individuals must be heard and adjudicated. But we deny equal justice to all, and thereby we deny democracy. "And how much justice can you afford?" is not just the caption of a New Yorker cartoon, it is a shocking revelation of the truth.
We all owe an obligation to humanity; we can't escape it by shielding ourselves behind the trappings of power. We may never have visited a prison or a slum but our fellow humans are there. It's all very well for the powerful to assert the blessings of rugged individualism; but if those blessings end up accruing merely to the few, it's not democracy, it's aristocracy, or brahminism, or outright tyranny.
Government is not about jobs or schools or taxes or deficits or laws or security or farms or filibusters or banks or markets. It's about people.
The next time you read something filled with numbers ask yourself if those numbers merely serve to obscure the faces of unsuccessful humans. Ask yourself how those numbers relate, not just to you (whoever you may be) but to everybody else.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
On Robots and Work
In regard to the books and articles about "the way robots are taking our jobs away from us."
Thinking about the huge number of jobs that used to be performed by humans that can now be performed better and perhaps cheaper by robots, we should have a wide-ranging discussion.
At least one of the threads which should be explored should be, "well, maybe humans should work less." But instead, the typical book or article on the subject goes right into "well, what other kinds of jobs might humans do?"
I've been trying to understand the reasons for this myopia and I've come up with at least two: (1) Calvinism is not dead; and (2) economic models have enthralled us.
For the first, I guess people (even Chomsky seems to go this way) assume people want to "work" although Chomsky thinks they shouldn't do slave labor for wages or salary. But Chomsky doesn't seem to think about people playing instead of working. Not that play can't be serious, but one suspects that Chomsky himself is too much caught up in Calvinist philosophy; he himself has been "working" harder than ever since his wife died.
Leaving aside the need to make money, I guess the Calvinism implies that the kind of "work" people "ought" to do consists of activities that will benefit others, activities that are not selfish, and that "play" is "frivolous" and not of use or value to society. What about art - is it work or play? But of course if there are lots of robots to do things, people might be free to play a great deal of the time.
For the second reason, the mystique of economic models, I guess that most people assume that if we didn't work for money then we wouldn't have any money. But manifestly this is not so. One has only to look at a country like Kuwait which plows a lot of oil money back into various social welfare projects (I'm not advocating moving to Kuwait). Money can be channeled (and is channeled) to people who don't work via government grants (viz., unemployment, welfare) and private charity. The problem here, of course, is that recipients of charity are DEEMED TO BE insufficient citizens because of their failure to work.
To a mathematician, all of this is so much balderdash. If 90% of the work could be done by robots, people could "work" 10% of the time in return for 100% of the salary (so there was enough money flowing to keep the economy flowing). Alternatively, if money was made equivalent to the labor of robots and it was made illegal to hire people to work for money, then human work, as we know it, would cease to exist, and we would rely on volunteer human activities to keep the robots busy.
The real issue is, how highly do we value having rich and poor people?
I think the rich value it a lot, because what they really want is implicit power over the poor, not just nice things for themselves. Status counts for a lot of power. So I think the rich will push for Calvinism and push for the existing economic model and force the poor to earn less and less and at the same time damn the poor for accepting welfare or charity, and struggle to get even richer and to help their children be rich, too.
That last paragraph delineates the problem that must be solved first, before we worry about the effects of smart machines. It is of course, a moral problem, and it is defined in human terms, not in dollars.
Thinking about the huge number of jobs that used to be performed by humans that can now be performed better and perhaps cheaper by robots, we should have a wide-ranging discussion.
At least one of the threads which should be explored should be, "well, maybe humans should work less." But instead, the typical book or article on the subject goes right into "well, what other kinds of jobs might humans do?"
I've been trying to understand the reasons for this myopia and I've come up with at least two: (1) Calvinism is not dead; and (2) economic models have enthralled us.
For the first, I guess people (even Chomsky seems to go this way) assume people want to "work" although Chomsky thinks they shouldn't do slave labor for wages or salary. But Chomsky doesn't seem to think about people playing instead of working. Not that play can't be serious, but one suspects that Chomsky himself is too much caught up in Calvinist philosophy; he himself has been "working" harder than ever since his wife died.
Leaving aside the need to make money, I guess the Calvinism implies that the kind of "work" people "ought" to do consists of activities that will benefit others, activities that are not selfish, and that "play" is "frivolous" and not of use or value to society. What about art - is it work or play? But of course if there are lots of robots to do things, people might be free to play a great deal of the time.
For the second reason, the mystique of economic models, I guess that most people assume that if we didn't work for money then we wouldn't have any money. But manifestly this is not so. One has only to look at a country like Kuwait which plows a lot of oil money back into various social welfare projects (I'm not advocating moving to Kuwait). Money can be channeled (and is channeled) to people who don't work via government grants (viz., unemployment, welfare) and private charity. The problem here, of course, is that recipients of charity are DEEMED TO BE insufficient citizens because of their failure to work.
To a mathematician, all of this is so much balderdash. If 90% of the work could be done by robots, people could "work" 10% of the time in return for 100% of the salary (so there was enough money flowing to keep the economy flowing). Alternatively, if money was made equivalent to the labor of robots and it was made illegal to hire people to work for money, then human work, as we know it, would cease to exist, and we would rely on volunteer human activities to keep the robots busy.
The real issue is, how highly do we value having rich and poor people?
I think the rich value it a lot, because what they really want is implicit power over the poor, not just nice things for themselves. Status counts for a lot of power. So I think the rich will push for Calvinism and push for the existing economic model and force the poor to earn less and less and at the same time damn the poor for accepting welfare or charity, and struggle to get even richer and to help their children be rich, too.
That last paragraph delineates the problem that must be solved first, before we worry about the effects of smart machines. It is of course, a moral problem, and it is defined in human terms, not in dollars.
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