Peer2Politics

Ministerio TIC Colombia (CC BY 2.0)
James Pethokoukis Via The Week:
The robopocalypse for workers may be inevitable. In this vision of the future, super-smart machines will best humans in pretty much every task.

In this video, David Graeber, Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, is interviewed about the rising idea that people have “pointless jobs” where they do not actually do much work.  Graeber discusses the reasons behind these pointless jobs and claims that while they fail to make sense in a truly capitalistic setting, they do make sense within businesses where people may be more powerful if they have more people working under them.  Graeber then goes on to explain why he believes a basic income could solve the problem by freeing people from these pointless jobs in order to pursue their passions.

In the ‘gig’ or ‘sharing’ economy, technology will release you from the nine to five.

The writing is on the wall: the robots will take our jobs. Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots, explains the implications for the capitalist system.

mostlysignssomeportents: David Graeber, who wrote last year’s incredible Debt: The First 5,000 Years, has an extraordinary essay up called “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” which explores the phenomenon of people in productive industries...

The necessity of production is so easily proved that any hack philosopher of industrialism can fill ten books with it. Unfortunately for these neo-economist thinkers, these proofs belong to the nineteenth century, a time when the misery of the working classes made the right to work the counterpart of the right to be a slave, claimed at the dawn of time by prisoners about to be massacred. Above all it was a question of surviving, of not disappearing physically. The imperatives of production are the imperatives of survival; from now on, people want to live, not just to survive.