Getting paid is orthogonal to the effort. Even if performed voluntarily there is still work that needs to be accomplished.
Even having fun is a hell of a lot of work in all proportion. It's no mystery, work is the implication of existence.
I think it refers to that which society is structured around and makes most of us have to be somewhere at a certain time, doing a certain thing, regularly and for a long time, in exchange of regular payment, within an operation with a more-of-less clearly defined purpose.
There will luckily be always problems to be solved.
Dont get caught in pedantic details.
A world where only e.g. 10% of the population needs to work on anything, and any other work is all automation, still qualifies as a "work-free world" compared to 100% of human history.
>Getting paid is orthogonal to the effort. Even if performed voluntarily there is still work that needs to be accomplished.
It's not, because getting paid implies work you do for the wage, and not necessarily because you like it (as is the cases for billions of people. Nobody, statistically, really considers their calling doing 9-5++ accounting, park valet, taxi driving, serving at McDonalds, waiting tables, garbage disposal, transporting goods, digging for coal, and thousands of other jobs). And even if you do like it, you do it under the terms of one or more bosses, company imposed deadlines, etc, just because you also need the money.
So it could turn out that the only people who would "work" in such a society are those who aspire to rule over others. And since they would be dependent on no one else in society, what recourse would the rest of society have if the "priests" turned evil? Or what if the "priests" got tired of maintaining mundane machines that take care of "useless" people and decided to have their machines eliminate the rest of the population? Then they could have wide open spaces and peace and quiet, and they could all go live on a beach of their choosing while their machines grow food and deliver it to them.
I imagine these ideas have already been done in scifi novels...
If we were to automate all work so the only people who had to work were the ones running the machines, those people would effectively be the state. Everyone else would depend on those people. They would be untouchable, if for no other reason than that, if they were eliminated, the machines would fall into disrepair, and everyone who depended on them would die.
It would be like a future version of MAD: kill the machine keepers, and everyone dies--except not MAD, because the machine keepers would have no need for everyone else. So it would be more like a future where only one nation had nuclear weapons, and they were second-strike capable: they can freely eliminate their enemies without repercussion, because anyone who attacks them is guaranteed to be destroyed by nuclear weapons.
The only ways, then, to keep those people maintaining the machines would be altruism or threat of violence. Altruism isn't reliable, and what good is threat of violence if they can program the machines to protect them and eliminate their enemies?
So it seems to me that the only hope is for the machinekeeping to be as widely distributed as possible. Maybe 3D printers will lead to self-replicating machines and a world where everyone is a machinekeeper. But I have serious doubts, because I don't see how even a self-replicating 3D printer could cover the whole chain of gathering and processing raw materials. I could imagine a distant future where all the natural mines are exhausted, and fortresses are built around old landfills, the only remaining source of raw materials for the machines.
Not in our lifetimes, though! :D
It's after all how we "pick" who goes digging for coal or throws the garbage. Force those people through lack of other options.
Besides technological solutions create new, unanticipated problems that need to be solved. And this endless cycle is inherent in human existence. We regard present technology as far advanced vs. what there was 2000 years ago, yet we have at least as many problems to preoccupy us as there ever were.
Everything changes, technologies in particular, except for one thing, and that's human nature. We can't escape the essence of our being.
It really doesn't. Machines have been putting people out of work for ages. We could survive it for a while by growing the economy pretty fast, but any time it slows down, things get bad. Look at truck driving alone - it's the most common job in most states, and when that gets even partially automated, it's not going to create that many new problems to be "solved".
But with our current system, someone owns the machines, and the sources of minerals to make then, and make a profit. In the end, this will lead to the ultimate in income inequality.
We have to start thinking about the post-work world, at least for non-knowledge workers, and what we want that world to actually look like. Basic income might be a reasonable component of that.
Like most here, I have great enthusiasm for new technologies, but we aren't served by uncritical belief while ignoring potential or actual limits and unanticipated effects. IOW we shouldn't be consumed by our biases.
Health care is an example of work hugely impacted by technological innovation. Look at imaging, automation of clinical testing, robotics, and pharmaceutical development to name a few. Believe me, these tools are quite astonishing achievements and enormously useful.
Yet with all these marvelous advances, the number and proportion of people needing care hasn't decreased, if anything, there are more. One factor is the improvements granted by technologies enable finding more cases, and finer gradations of illness. More patients and findings means there's more work to be done. It follows that greater number and type of treatment options also requires more work to parse and apply treatments.
Also worth considering is that technologies might actually produce illness, one familiar example is RSI, "carpal tunnel" problems are common in programmers. Consider the evidence that developed nations have much higher incidence of autoimmune and other conditions vs. developing nations, technological differences being one factor. Currently research is looking at adverse effects of circadian out-of-phase exposure to blue light via LED illumination of devices as a source of metabolic disturbance, etc.
Again, the issue isn't whether we'll continue to develop technologies, certainly we will and should. It's equally important to consider unanticipated effects which are inescapable. Sorry to say, but history shows solving one problem more often than not exposes others, and the cycle goes on. That's in no way a criticism of technology or its developers, merely a fact of life.
But the point of automation is that it doesn't really.
One computer software can eliminate 10,000,000 clerical jobs, and that just needs 100 people to write it, deploy it, etc. You don't suddenly need new and expected jobs to create/deploy that software, and those you do are an order of magnitude less than what where needed before.
1) Fall victim to the problems of our own creation- e.g. climate change
2) Never attain the further advancements around the corner
Suppose, for example, we decided we had come "far enough" and halted technological advancement just before obtaining the vaccine, or the antibiotic, and never developed that technology.
We might be able to automate construction, agriculture, manufacturing- but we are still a fair ways from automating science, research, and development.
Technology is not just a tool it's very soon a competitor.
"According to Everett, while some might consider hunting and gathering work, hunter-gatherers don’t. “They think of it as fun,” he says. “They don’t have a concept of work the way we do.”"
Under that definition, the "work-free world" the Author is discussing is one where all of our problems are being solved by people who want to solve them and thus we don't need to force anyone to solve any problems they don't want to.
The article isn't making argument about whether such a world COULD exist, but whether such a world is one we should strive towards.