Video games as substitute for disappearing work

[ManaMan]

Here's a pretty good one
http://reason.com/archives/2017/06/13/y ... g-video-ga

[Julius Seeker]

Being a fan of Asimov, I am a fan of the expansion of the leisure class with productivity offloaded onto automation. So I can't really complain about people spending their time gaming. There's the idea of a basic income that is going around Canada right now, and I think this is the beginning of it; don't get me wrong, I don't think this is something that will fully take hold immediately, it's for our grandchildren.

The more freedom we have as a people, the greater the labour force we have available to act on their dreams, and perhaps accelerate our advancement as a civilization. In my opinion, a person spending hours a day playing video games is more likely to do something inventive than that same person using those same hours working some monotonous job. A basic income shouldn't hurt productivity, people with enough money to live the rest of their lives without working a day, still work; but the jobs they do get into are generally more ambitious than those who work for survival. BUT, the economic question is how do we get these hypothetical big and profitable automated corporations to support the leisure class?

Actually, I'm on an off topic rant now, I'll post something about this later in a new topic.

[ManaMan]

...and yet the US unemployment rate is near an all-time low (thanks Obama!). The age of machines replacing all work hasn't materialized yet. If & when it does then I think guaranteed income or some sort of beefed-up job sharing with wage subsidies will be necessary (like on the Jetsons where George only worked 3 hours a week).

From what I've read, the rate of men pulling out of the workforce seems unrelated to job prospects. I believe it may be more cultural. I think Jordan Peterson made good points about this on the Joe Rogan Experience. Since our culture has moved away from the male-as-breadwinner framework (& our economy has moved away from high-paying blue collar masculine work) men no longer have this heroic narrative to inspire them to do the usual get-a-job-get-married-start-a-family thing. Women are inspired by the built-in "be a mother" heroic narrative but men need something to inspire them. Society seems to be ignoring men & focusing solely on the progress of women in this respect. I think if men don't have some sort of heroic narrative to follow we tend to "go feral" to an extent. This is why men tend to commit more crimes, join gangs, sit on the couch and play games all day, etc.

[Julius Seeker]

Haha, so in other words: arguably women are the only people required in society =)


I'm going to split this in two:

1. Heroic narrative - I think that it's just a matter of progressing with the times. The early 20th century heroic-narratives don't necessarily work with the progression of society. The whole male-bread-winner and female housewife model is relatively new, historically speaking. It is a symptom of the nuclear family and the expansion of the middle class. It also went out of style very quickly because the rise in skilled labour drove the monetary demand down, and so, relatively speaking, wages have dropped substantially, and so multiple family members were required. Realistically speaking, with the nuclearization of society, women couldn't just live with their parents if they were unmarried; there was going to be a burst, somewhere. It wasn't very long ago that men, women, and children almost all worked working class jobs: factory work in urbanized areas, and farm work in the rural areas - and prior to that specialization in work was not the norm, people did what they needed to do; but everyone contributed to putting bread on the table (aside from first/second estate classes, which were less than 3% of the population).

I do agree that a lot of people who don't really know what to do with themselves can fall into a "feral" state, but I think this goes both ways, male/female. I also think this is significantly less than in past times. I am not really sure that people have to do anything; we currently have a motive as a society to make everyone we can productive, but if we didn't require it, then we wouldn't really need to do this: if we have the capacity to painlessly support people who aren't needed to work and don't want to work, then who cares? If an automatic pricing and charging system exists in grocery stores, then why do we need 80 people on the payroll to come in and do the job that 2-3 support-type people can do instead? Scientists and visionaries are going to do it, regardless of the role - it is our current frontier, and that is a heroic narrative as well.


2. Society focused on the progress of women - This is something I wouldn't necessarily agree with. Society has largely been focused on the expansion of the middle class, and getting women into that was a major step - but not the only step, large debates have occurred about workers rights, medical, what should be privatized, and what is a government service. In recent times, in Canada at least, the largest gender related right gained was paternal leave; it quickly became normalized - it was unheard of just a decade ago.

3. Other Stuff
Progress, IMO, is the expansion of the population working to advance society. It's been expanding significantly in recent times, largely because we have substantially increased the size of the middle class - working class nations aren't contributing nearly as much to science and technology. The leisure class doesn't necessarily mean "unemployed" as many of them are self-employed, and are attempting to work on a new project: arts, sciences, and technology account for a lot of it. As the leisure class expands, so too does the number of people available for thinking and innovating ways to advance society. In the past this was largely limited to nobility and other upper class families: a very small stratum of the population - the upper class; in France, prior to the revolution, this amounted to just 3% (and France was the wealthiest nation in the world at the time, but it was almost completely controlled by the first and second estates), the other 97% were working class slobs; and among them, MANY underutilized minds fighting for survival.

If 90% of current jobs are replaced by machines over the next decade, that's progress; because then we have that 90% available for other tasks: new jobs in new fields, or thinking. The dilemma is how to support those people as we encourage technological advancement. We've been seeing this to some extent in some countries, European countries, and even beginning here in North America; some of the proposed solutions:
* Lowering the length of the work day.
* Basic income.
* Bring back old jobs.

I'm more of a fan of basic income, it is going to lead to the greatest additional freedom for the population; while option 1 is kind of a half-assed way of saying "We've got nothing, so let's expand the job market by allowing everyone their turn" and option 3 is regressive - as it means bringing back jobs that are obsolete.

Expanding the middle class was a good thing for progress, as it allowed people more leisure time; and therefore freedom. People have the freedom to leave occupations they don't like, and attempt to do something else; and that freedom is in the form of money for basic needs. Unfortunately, our current society only offers this luxury to people who have already been successful and University students who have been funded by the government or their parents (and this is dropping off in North America); we can do better. It is probably an inevitability at this point as technology moves moves more into automation.

This is a fairly interesting view: 90% of all the scientists in history are currently alive, that is how successful recent society has been: https://futureoflife.org/2015/11/05/90- ... ive-today/

Expanding the leisure class to the majority of people in human society isn't a new idea, by far. Asimov had many books written on the subject (it accounted for 100% of the Solarians in the book The Naked Sun), Gene Roddenberry also looked in that direction. It's popular in science fiction.


PS. this wasn't complete off topic, just my take on why I think people living as videogamers isn't an issue

[ManaMan]

I don't think any of that was off topic. You made some good points but I think you are dismissing the man as breadwinner too quickly. Yes obviously the nuclear family with a salaried father is a relatively new development but men have always been the primary income earners either as farmers, craftsmen, retailers, etc. Women and children earned income but it was supplementary. This was the culturally agreed on arrangement. Women & children were explicitly kept out of the highest paying jobs for this reason. Sure there were exceptions.

The "heroic narrative" explanation has its limits. I found this article interesting about a similar situation in Japan: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/ar ... te/534291/. This presents a cultural & economic narrative as an alternative.

Basically, Japanese people are not getting married and having children at a high enough rate. Birth rates are down and this is causing problems. Authors identify young men not being able to find stable full time employment as the cause. Without such a work arrangement they're considered unmarriageable in the Japanese culture. Previously full time careers were reserved for men and women had little chance to support themselves. They had little choice but to marry whoever was available, now they can be pickier. The culture has adapted to accept women working but hasn't made the next leap to say it's OK if the guy doesn't has a full time career going, & that he's still an acceptable partner.

I think you see similar arrangements in all cultures that are very male dominated: when women can support themselves they hold out for marriage looking for a man who can support them. I think this is why marriage rates have cratered among African Americans & rural whites in the US.

This is not to say that I'm in favor of a return to the past. I think it's essential that women be able to work & have careers. However I believe that this is not enough, men still require some sort of heroic narrative and women need to accept men who are their equals and not hold out for a sugar daddy.

[Julius Seeker]

It's not that I am dismissing the idea of the breadwinner model as a thing, so much as disagreeing with it as being some kind of natural order, or something that should still be a factor in our current and future society.

As far as a breadwinner heroic narrative being a natural trait, this would go all the way back to way out of date pre-Freudian psychology where people examined their current culture and determined that this is the way things aught to naturally be; defining the gender role based on ones own culture. We know today that any kind of cultural norm or thread is developed in the consciousness later on in life by learning. Essentially, due to our intelligence, we can be moulded into many different sorts of cultures.

On the point about supplemental income - this was often not the case for the lower working class, as much of the time the income brought in by women and children was essential, and men were often incapacitated from working due to injury/illness, and so would make less money than their wives and children. The only ones who could really said to be living the true "breadwinner heroic narrative" would be men of the middle class; and this (as shown in the writings of Ruskin, Godwin, and Dickens) was often defined by generics - so certain men of what could be described as perceived lower genetics were not allowed access to that world.

It just happened that when equality was on the rise, men of other genetics gained equal status before women; and the timing was about politics rather than any kind of a natural truth.

Anyway, to get back on point: humans in general have the capacity to evolve culturally with our technology. This is going to be important going forward, as jobs are going to decrease in number as technology improves. We're seeing it today, it is clear that it's currently an employers market, currently.


The Japanese situation you bring up is very fascinating in this regard, but also because of the cultural shift that has occurred in recent times. Japan got away from the traditional arranged relationships at a later date than western culture. In Japan, parties and get togethers are much less frequent than they are here - and at the same time, the arranged relationship culture has completely disappeared, so this leaves Japan with much less opportunity for men and women to meet. From what I have heard from my friends who have taught in Japan, most relationships these days are established between co-workers and classmates; or associates of such - so it's kind of in line with what you're saying, but with a bit of a different reasoning; as people who do not have a job are just not able to meet women, regardless of whether or not it is socially acceptable to date someone who has a job or not.
I don't know if online dating has taken off yet in Japan, but it sounds like it would benefit a lot, as that would get past the employment barrier.

In North American society, at least, relationships are most often based around compatibility and love; it's having children that's usually based around whether or not a couple feels they have the means to raise them easily. A lot of people like the idea of children, but not all the baggage that comes along with having them - and these tend to be the more intelligent people in the world (unfortunately); and this is not a new notion either, British people have been complaining about this for almost as long as there has been an Anglican Church.


Disappearing work. That's something we both agree with. There's still many jobs, but we are moving away from a job based economy. The two big obstacles:
1. The conflict of needing to extract wealth from heavily automated corporations while also encouraging them to be automated.
2. Altering the economy in a way to support all people in the society while at the same time eliminating point 1 as a problem.

We've known for a while that our civilization is heading toward a time where automated industry will no longer require much human interactivity; even medical procedures are becoming more automated now. We're getting closer and closer to the time when we should stop asking the question of "How do we provide jobs for everyone?" We want to maintain a capitalistic society, but at the same time we want to be able to have it function without the purchasers getting their wealth from employment - since there won't be enough jobs. Asimov explored an option here in "The Naked Sun" by essentially making every human on the planet Solaria as CEO class; each running estates which had thousands to tens of thousands of robots working for them, providing all their needs - that would work, but would be terribly inefficient - we have democratic social ideas, which I don't think necessarily needs to be at odds with providing stylish luxuries and a large variety of goods and services.

Basic income - establishes enough wealth to live a comfortable life. But to exceed that, be a writer, a scientist, a technologist, and an environmentalist - some jobs would get a person additional wealth from the capital economy, while others - which are developments in science and environmental technologies which may benefit society but not necessarily appeal to a general consumer - would get some kind of research/reward grant. Of course, our means to produce would have to exceed our means to consume. I think we're a ways off from that currently, but I think that time is close, perhaps even within our lifetimes.

Technology is booming right now, and most of the scientists that have ever lived are alive today - and that is a product of progressive trends in western society offering us far greater rates of leisure, giving opportunities to pursue such such ambitions, than ever before.