There have been lots of technology x replacing a manual process with the promise that "now instead of doing y, the person is now free to explore more leisurely pursuits." In reality, there's a race in terms of productivity: "now they can do 2x the work they did before!"
As long as companies are driven by profits, and that profit can be increased by higher enployee productivity in the same number of legal working hours, we will continue to do so.
Even on a personal level, say a car lets me do a trip in 30 minutes instead of 2 hours walking. I don't relax for an hour and a half. I go check more things off my todo list.
[DAD] It used to be that if a client wanted something in a week, it was considered a rush job, and he was lucky to get it. Now, with modems, faxes, and car phones, everybody wants everything instantly! Improved technology just increases expectations. These machines don't make life easier -- they make like more harassed. If we wanted more leisure, we'd invent machines that do things less efficiently.
[CALVIN] Six minutes to microwave this?? Who's got that kind of time?!
This is from a courthouse, they have a web application to register and edit formal requests from lawyers. Decent computers, ok network and printers.
From:
- listening to the lawyer,
- (potentially reloging due to session timeouts),
- accessing the right case through a long ID,
- re asking the lawyer about the case ID because half the time they confuse with another ID system,
- retrying to fetch the case,
- selecting a bunch of options (most are direct mapping from ID to value, ID is actually concatenation of these values)
- clicking a few more times,
- reinputing some the already redundant values and waiting for the system to generate the .odt.
- If that does not fail, you get an activex embed view of the document,
- which is 10-15% of the time incorrect in a few places, so manual edit here we go.
- You can now print it x2
You spent 5 full minutes on this.
One day, network failed so no more web app. Girls told me they have a stash of old printed templates to fill manually. So I took the piece of paper, and while talking to the lawyer I could write things on the fly. It took 30 seconds, no wait, no uncertainty, no redundancy, no last minute error correction.
Middle age monks > 2000s technology (when implemented in absurdia)
> If we wanted more leisure, we'd invent machines that do things less efficiently.
This is actually why I still use a French press for my coffee every morning. I don't need to be hyper efficient all the time. That 15-20 minutes of my morning is relaxing, leisurely.
Grinding, boiling, to adding water to the grounds, then it takes 5 minutes. So ~10 minutes to boil the water, 5 for the actual brewing, and then 5+ minutes of just, whatever time.
> now instead of doing y, the person is now free to explore more leisurely pursuits
We are exploring more leisurely pursuits, though instead pursuing hobbies and building relationships, we're consuming media. The average American adult spends over half their day doing so. A lot of it is probably passive background noise, but it's a lot nonetheless.
the sheer fact that we as a society now "binge" whole tv shows and that they're made to binge, should be a sign of this.
the fact people rack up 100s of 1000s of karma points or followers on one social network or another.
We're all living in some weird F451/BraveNewWorld where we're all attached to screens, endlessly. But it's our only escape from an endlessly anxious world where we do and keep up with more and more and more b/c modern conveniences have made us able to do so - without asking if it was ever good for us to cram so much business into our daily lives to begin with
I think that's because people are tired and are constantly thinking about how they have to go back to work / school soon. If people had more time off, I think more interesting things would happen.
I think we do have more time off. This page (https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours) indicates working hours are nearly half of what they were 150 years ago in wealthy countries. Even assuming some faults in the source, I can't believe working hours haven't dropped significantly in that time, and many household chores are also taking less time due to technology.
While I also would enjoy more leisure time, I agree with the parent that most of it would go to consuming media. What specific interesting things do you think would happen if the typical working week dropped to say 30 hours a week instead of ~40?
>What specific interesting things do you think would happen if the typical working week dropped to say 30 hours a week instead of ~40?
I can't speak for others, but I'd be less stressed, and I'd be more easily able to savor the moments when work isn't coming. I'd have more motivation to program rather than play video games, just as I used to do before I got my job. To say "we have more time off" when the comparison is the generation that came before me, never mind the standard from 150 years ago - to me means pretty much nothing. It's very similar to how people sometimes say "what are you complaining about? Compared to the standard of living in medieval times, you're living like a queen!". Who's that really going to convince?
The second point is that there's a tension. Many of the same people who subscribe to some variant of utilitarianism still want to moralize about how people use their time, by dividing things into higher or lower pleasures, without being able to justify it. For example, they say a high pleasure is programming or (maybe) chess. A lower pleasure is, as J.S. Mill described it, something for pigs revelling in their own filth (today, people will say this amounts to video games or 'media consumption').
When people say "things are better than they've ever been", I'm inclined to agree, on most fronts. When people use that as an argument to tell me to shut up and deal with my lot in life, it's profoundly sad.
indeed. humanity evolves, and so progress to improve our lives is inevitable. there is pretty much no point to stagnate.
moreover with the coming automation of many jobs, working on improving our lives is pretty much the only thing that's going to be left to do. (and any kind of exploration of the universe)
it's one thing to not just complain and sulk about how bad our life is right now, as if earlier generations had it any better. but it is quite another to actually work on making life better.
as long as there is a single living being that is not well for whatever reason, we have an opportunity to make the life of that being better.
Pre-industry describes early modernity, the period where press gangs roamed the streets to capture people and force them to crew a ship, and slaves were taken from their homelands and their ancestry decontextualized, rendering a return impossible.
While you could certainly make the case that the hours were fewer(because it was still agrarian) the state of labor relations suggests a huge demand for cheap workers, not efficient workers. Productivity needs inputs: with no canals or railroads, you couldn't get resources to factories in quantity, so you couldn't get the gains of automation. So the idle hours reflect a general impoverishment of possibility: nothing better to do with the idle bodies. Making them cheap, rather than good, reflects the drive to accumulate within the zero-sum dynamic of merchantalism. Or rather, you wanted to define good as "loyal to me and skilled at attending to my needs", which is different from "good at the job". So there was a lot of emphasis on preserving the body but minimizing resistance.
The labor exploitation in early industrialization reflects the combination of productivity dynamic and merchantalistic norms: now, in a competitive marketplace where you have a lot of opportunities to make products and quickly build wealth, there is a reason to overwork bodies and then dispose of them. That's never gone away, we've just engaged in some collective pushback from time to time, as Marx outlined.
But it could be that we're on the verge of another shift in the norms of labor relations. I suspect that's what is going on now. There are a lot of "pieces of the puzzle" that are ready to nibble away at existing norms.
> What specific interesting things do you think would happen if the typical working week dropped to say 30 hours a week instead of ~40?
I won't speak for people in aggregate, nor cohorts. But for myself personally, if my work week dropped to 30 hours with the same compensation package, I'd pick up the pace learning other maker skills so I can build solutions to scratch my own itches, learning a couple other natural languages and cultures faster than I'm learning them currently, and in general do what I currently enjoy when I take time off from my gigs.
The great part of this era is the endless array of autodidactic opportunities easier to access than ever before. It was already endless in previous eras, but the pace was slower, and the scope of what individuals can accomplish themselves was more limited. If I had the money and time for example, I could build my own personal MDx lab that was just impossible in the 1970's; it wouldn't be CLIA certified, but I could test to my heart's content. People talking about the "curse of immortality" speak an alien tongue to me.
The author makes the mistake of projecting their modern attitude towards free time towards those living in preindustrial societies to conclude that people were better off as peasants that overworked factory workers. Every example of industrialization in history proves this wrong, however. Poor farmers that move to cities aren't idiots. They move to terrible factory jobs because it's what benefits them are their families the most. Any moderate illness, accident, or natural disaster spark disaster for a poor farmer's family, so they'd prefer to work a shitty factory job for 80 hours a day for the sake of the small amount of security.
> Poor farmers that move to cities aren't idiots. They move to terrible factory jobs because it's what benefits them are their families the most.
That might be the case today, but at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, it was less so. What drove people who might have been subsistence farmers in the past to work in factories were deliberate policies to privatize the land common people needed to work in order to survive, along with laws that made previously landed people landless and criminalizing their abilities to sustain themselves. Early factories were known to maim and kill, the hours were long, cities were full of deadly disease and the quality of life upgrade you might see today didn't exist as wages were so low. People needed to be incentivized to work in factories, and it wasn't fair compensation that was the incentive. The incentive was being driven from the lands that had sustained workers and their ways of life for generations, and systems of laws that forced them into workhouses.
I wish I remembered the quote from around that time, but from memory it went something like, "It might take a commoner a weekend to make himself shoes that will last him years for free, but for that same person working a factory, it would take a month's wages just to buy a pair of shoes that fall apart in the rain."
>What drove people who might have been subsistence farmers in the past to work in factories were deliberate policies to privatize the land common people needed to work in order to survive, along with laws that made previously landed people landless and criminalizing their abilities to sustain themselves.
Enclosure laws certainly were a massive factor into workers moving to factories. However, I reject the Marxist historian's implication that some aristocrats we're inspired by capitalist ideals to become greedy, which allowed them to take lands from the poor farmers. Rather, they were always this greedy, and market conditions simply let them actualize that greed.
The Black Plague decimated the population of Europe, which allowed the peasants to gain more leverage and gave them common land. However, by the early 1600s (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_England#Histor...), the population had grown back to its height, and the aristocrats had the leverage to claw back these privileges. Indeed, that was when the first formal enclosure acts were introduced (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure).
Moreover, my point about preindustrial/early industrial workers not placing much importance in free time still stands. They could have worked for the enclosure and had more free time but still chose factory work.
I witnessed this on a trip to Vietnam 15 years ago, the rural kids had a life of leisure but much less material wealth. The city kids (or farm kids moved to the city) worked for more but had cell phones and scooters (cars in the west), they could ride their scooter to the KFC.
Covid lockdowns taught me the general public is superb at wasting time and being inefficient. Their mind turned to Netflixing all day, making Tiktok dance numbers, etc.
I am bullish on machines & software improving because people are incentivized through salaries to improve them. I am bearish / pessimistic on the average humans productive use of time outside of amusement or relaxation. Humanity has taught me that Pareto's principle applies to humans.
Why shouldn't they relax if they can? It's bizarre to me that we need to regiment the entire population in order to... make sure people don't have fun?
Whether it is human nature, or learned behavior, the typical human is unable to fill their time with productive use over a longer period of time unless purpose is imposed on them. Hence "work". The concept in a more general term is even mentioned in religious text so there must be a basis....
This is puritanism. There is something to the idea that idle hands make for the devils workshop, but that's mainly when people are dissatisfied. If they're satisfied, let them play pokemon cards or whatever it is they do. You only get one life.
I believe at a higher level, a universe level, rather than a human level - human natural state must be an equilibrium of "energy" & detriment. (energy is a meta concept crossing domains here, stay with me).
Humans consume energy (animals, resources) and create detriment (greenhouse gases, etc) - and must offset all of those to positively benefit the Earth or else that (and each) particular human is a net negative to the Earth. If a human is a net negative, at a higher level why should that person exist?
Humans must each therefore cause a positive net of energy to the Earth through creating useful, productive, additions to the universe to push it forward. Otherwise, as in the matrix, said human is a parasite.
I've skimmed through the report linked, and I'm pretty skeptical of their methodology. For example, on their "Television Methodology" section:
> Television data are derived from Nielsen’s National TV Panel that is based on a sample of over 40,000 homes that are selected based on area probability sampling.
The report does not go into any details on how these 40,000 homes were selected, or any demographic breakdowns beyond saying that the data is "inclusive of multicultural audiences." It's difficult to say how representative these 40,000 homes are of the "average" American.
It's also not entirely clear how they derive their measurements. There's little that discusses how they handle potential over or under-reporting, and there's nothing that says how they differentiate between different people in the same household.
While this report certainly isn't useless, there's enough grey area here that I would be hesitant to draw any conclusions from the data presented. We'd need a much more comprehensive breakdown of their methodology before we can be confident that their data is accurate and representative.
The first link you posted links to https://ratingsacademy.nielsen.com/ for more information, and that site is currently giving me an "Unable to connect" error.
The second link does give some more detail on methodologies used by Nielsen. However, the details are mostly higher-level, and doesn't specify what methods were used on the previously mentioned report. In addition, when 1/3 of the "Measuring Ratings" section is devoted to "Criticism of ratings systems", that doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.
Then again I think it's inarguable (I'm clearly wrong, people will argue with it) that modern life for most of us is incomparably better than the lives most of us had in the past. My kids are 17/18 now, while I was the same age back in the early 80s. There's no comparison. The quality of life available on even a modest salary nowadays is far, far better.
One drag on this is property prices. A huge amount of people's incomes go into property, but that's largely something we do to ourselves and each other. There's a very inflexible housing market here in the UK, so we're all in competition for the best houses, and bid up their value against each other.
>that modern life for most of us is incomparably better than the lives most of us had in the past.
It is, if we measure it against the average (or even worst) of the past (and go quite far back), and also include things like slavery, etc. as if they are non-separable parts of the past, and not something we could have skipped even in the past (and many places did).
>My kids are 17/18 now, while I was the same age back in the early 80s. There's no comparison. The quality of life available on even a modest salary nowadays is far, far better.
Is it? I'd take the 60's or 80's any day - less rat racy, easier employment, more value for your money, more optimism, less wage inequality, better off middle class, less surveillance, less bureucracy, more relaxed life, and so on. Also a better top-10 and nicer looking cars. And I (and perhaps others) would also gladly take fewer modern technology items over a simpler, more sustainable lifestyle.
I don't consider things like some improved smart fridge, or smart bulbs, or a car GPS and mobile phone much of a quality of life improvement. If anything, some of those are net negatives.
And things that have been worse, e.g. seggregation, they were not "1960s didn't have advance technology to avoid that", they're just cultural choices. We often mix these two ups, like we couldn't have, say, 1980 living, technology, etc. AND gay rights.
Unemployment ranged from 5.40% to 10.4% in the 80s and is 4.2% now. Only the last few yeas of the 60s had lower unemployment than 2021. In 1960 people spend 24% of their income on food, vs 8.6% today. And for most Americans the food was FAR worse in 1960s, cold chain and logistics improvements mean that average Americans have access regularly to foods that were luxuries in 1980.
> nicer looking cars
Those cars were death traps. There were twice as many fatalities per 100k Americans in 1960 vs today with fewer people driving fewer miles per capita.
> more sustainable lifestyle
The US of the 60s and 70s was so choked by smog and industrial pollution that Nixon created the EPA. Cars now get 2x the mpg vs 1960. Forrest coverage was lower, and numerous species that have now recovered were going extinct, like the bald eagle.
> better off middle class
The middle class wasn't better off, it was larger. The poverty rate in 2017 was half of what it was in 1960. And since 1960 many families have moved from the middle income quintile to one of the top quintiles. The middle class in the US didn't disappear into poverty, most of it just became more wealthy.
The 1960s sucked, there was political upheaval, the Cold War, the Cuban Missile crisis, global spanning totalitarianism, frequent political assassinations, Jim Crow, and on and on.
If anyone is inclined to disagree off the cuff, I'd suggest checking out Gregg Easterbrook's It's Better Than It Looks[1]. There are some valid criticisms, but he makes a great case for how much better society is now than it was in the recent past. It's a super quick read and is a jumping off point for investigating some more interesting questions.
>Unemployment ranged from 5.40% to 10.4% in the 80s and is 4.2% now.
That's because of an increasing number of magic tricks the neoliberal governments (which includes both Rep and Dem, and any major party in Europe on the last 30+ years) have agreed on to make it appear so. Makes them appear as having done their job (no pun intended).
Things like not counting people giving up on job hunting, and especially avoiding any qualitative comparison, and counting any kind of shitty precarious non-job as a job. Hell, if it isn't the case already, I'm pretty sure "Uber Driver" and "Amazon Mechanical Turk signee" will also sure count towards reduced unemployment.
>The US of the 60s and 70s was so choked by smog and industrial pollution
Yes. And still the US had less CO2 production, less plastic waste, and more sustainable lifestyle.
You're taking a by-product of 1970s car exhausts as if it's a permanent given.
We could go back to 1960 levels CO2 production, less consumption (e.g. no fast fashion, less fast food) and so on. And we could do it without giving up modern exhausts, hybrids, and electric cars.
>Forrest coverage was lower, and numerous species that have now recovered were going extinct, like the bald eagle.
2022 really doesn't want to start an argument about extinguished species with the 1960s.
>The 1960s sucked
Not the experience of most who lived through them and herald them as a great age, or even many who didn't live them, and still consider them so.
>there was political upheaval
Far better, more progressive, and forward looking political upheaval than in the last 10 years...
>the Cold War, the Cuban Missile crisis, global spanning totalitarianism, frequent political assassinations
So, business as usual. Though I'm not sure what bearing exactly the have in this conversation. We can have the positive things I've mentioned about the 60s (which were about levels of employment, consumption, sustainability, etc.) without the "cuban missile crisis" and "frequent political assassination" and so on. Those are historical incidents. The things I pointed at are things we can adopt or not.
>Jim Crow, and on and on.
The 60s was the era that got rid of the last of Jim Crow laws.
> Yes. And still the US had less CO2 production, less plastic waste, and more sustainable lifestyle.
This is frankly, an absurdly ridiculous comparison. Pittsburgh and Lorain, Ohio, where I had relatives working in the steel mills were completely choked out by smog/industrial pollution. The sky routinely glowed orange as in a volcanic eruption or the Great Day of Orange during the wild fires in the Bay Area! Everything and everyone was covered in soot. Buildings turned black. My old landlord's personal entertainment as a kid was watching dump trucks pour slag onto heaps - watching the molten embers cascade. People heated their houses with coal, which was dumped directly into their basements. Houses in Pittsburgh from that era have a lone, unenclosed toilet and often shower in their unfinished basements (Pittsburgh potty), so the workers could hose down without ruining their house. Rivers were treated as interstate highways at best - the Cuyahoga caught on fire for the Nth time in Cleveland (the EPA is created in the 1970s). Loads of kids routinely died from now treatable diseases! It was just a routine part of life. Cities were violent. Police just shot fleeing suspects in the back! 1973 saw multiple bombings daily. Police stations being bombed was so quotidian, it didn't even make the front page!
This stats sheet from the NYPD is wild[1]. They shot and injured least 221 people in 1971, and killed a further 91. That's 1/3 the number of total US police shootings in 2019 by 1 police department when they weren't required to even track that number.
>This is frankly, an absurdly ridiculous comparison. Pittsburgh and Lorain, Ohio, where I had relatives working in the steel mills were completely choked out by smog/industrial pollution
Not really relevant to the claim, is it? 1880 England cities were also filled with coal smoke, but still had less CO2 production...
The claim is absurd even if its factually true. Why would you possibly care about CO2 when visibility is 4 blocks, your lungs are filled with coal dust, life expectancy was 2 decades shorter, and kids are dying of polio and smallpox? Its missing the forest for the trees. Its a paperclip maximizing argument... advanced by a human!
> That's because of an increasing number of magic tricks the neoliberal governments
The BLS has been measuring the unemployment rate the same way since 1940.
> Yes. And still the US had less CO2 production, less plastic waste, and more sustainable lifestyle.
You're taking a by-product of 1970s car exhausts as if it's a permanent given.
The was more of almost every type of type of non C02 industrial pollutant. There was acid rain, and we were punching a hole in the ozone with refrigerants. Pesticides in use then were far more toxic to people and wildlife. Asbestos was everywhere, and lead was in everything.
We could certainly consume fewer disposable things, but the tradeoff is that being poor today affords people a far higher material standard of living than in 1960 by literally any metric.
> Yes. And still the US had less CO2 production
This is almost entirely solvable over the next few decades.
> 2022 really doesn't want to start an argument about extinguished species with the 1960s.
You could and you'd find that numerous large charismatic species on the verge of extinction by the mid 70s have recovered in much of the world. The US has become so rich that we're re-wilding and re-introducing displaced species. The rest of the world could follow.
> Far better, more progressive, and forward looking political upheaval than in the last 10 years...
We started a drug war and the expansion of the carceral state in the late 60s[1]. MLK, JFK, RFK, and Malcom X were all assassinated so I wouldn't call that progressive upheaval. And the progressive upheaval caused by the likes of The Weather Underground or the SLA is hardly impressive.
> Those are historical incidents
Everyone living under the constant threat of nuclear holocaust was kind of a wer blanket.
> The 60s was the era that got rid of the last of Jim Crow laws.
By the end, and replaced it with a drug war.
In the 60s crime was higher, material wealth was less plentiful, more people lived in poverty, life expectancy was shorter, and most people in society had few options. Localized environmental pollution was worse. Cars were far less safe, and mortality by all causes was higher.
> Not the experience of most who lived through them and herald them as a great age
Nostalgia does that to people, but basically all objective measures of life quality were worse.
> The quality of life available on even a modest salary nowadays is far, far better.
I really don't think this is the case. In the US, the cost of many fundamental necessities like healthcare and housing are becoming further out of reach for more and more people. In addition, the suicide rate has been increasing among youth, which shouldn't be happening in a world where modern life is incomparably better. If a "modest salary" is equivalent to the minimum wage in the US, then you're automatically spending above the generally accepted 30% rule for housing spending if you choose to live in a city, which is where the jobs are.
I think certain aspects of life have improved: entertainment has become cheaper, consumer technology is becoming more accessible (although the pandemic has really strained families that don't have access to a good internet connection, which is not a given in this country.)
I really don't think life has demonstrably improved in the US from the 80's to today, it was much easier to have a comfortable life on a lower salary back then than it is today.
Medium-term quality-of-life comparisons tend to involve a lot of apples-to-oranges comparisons.
For example, in the 1990s only the richest people would have a flatscreen TV, or a phone capable of browsing the web, or an internet connection faster than dial-up. Today, even a person working a minimum wage job can have all of those.
But if healthcare, college education and rent have got more expensive over the same period, is that a net improvement in quality of life?
> For example, in the 1990s only the richest people would have a flatscreen TV, or a phone capable of browsing the web, or an internet connection faster than dial-up. Today, even a person working a minimum wage job can have all of those.
Do you really seriously consider any of those a measure for quality of life? When I think of quality of life I want the basics: secure housing, healthy food, free time. Perhaps meaningful employment. And pretty much everything else comes down to the people around me.
> Do you really seriously consider any of those a measure for quality of life?
In 1990, a worker who wanted a TV had to save up two weeks' pay. Today, someone doing the same job could get a better TV for a day's pay. That gives them nine days of free time to spend with their family - or the chance to buy nine more TVs, if they prefer.
Where in 1990 I would have had to go to a library to look something up in an encyclopedia, today I can access a much more detailed encyclopedia, completely free, from a device in my pocket.
In 1990, if you wanted to talk to a loved one on the other side of the world, it was a very expensive phone call. Today it's a video call, in high definition, and it doesn't cost a cent.
In 1990 if you wanted to learn from professors at top universities, you had to get accepted, move house and pay a bunch of money. Today I can get more lectures than I could ever watch, and more than enough education to land a six-figure programming job, all for free.
In 1990, web browsers don't exist.
Obviously no single number can fully represent the incredible richness of human existence. But I think ignoring 30 years of technological process because you can't eat it is a bit short sighted.
There is a hierarchy of needs and if the basics of life are getting worse, then it doesn't matter how much the periphery is improving. This is what everyone who is poor is saying. When your dying, you don't care how good video games look, you want to stop dying.
>In 1990, a worker who wanted a TV had to save up two weeks' pay. Today, someone doing the same job could get a better TV for a day's pay. That gives them nine days of free time to spend with their family - or the chance to buy nine more TVs, if they prefer.
I think this is a perfect microcosm of the discussion. The whole point is that you don't get nine days of free time to spend with your family just because TVs are cheaper, and if you did we wouldn't be having this conversation. And what is the use of 9 TVs?
Also, the trend of measuring quality of life in number and variety of screens available to stare at is a lot weirder than the previous trend of measuring in number of chickens consumed.
Housing doesn't mean what it used to though. 1950s-60s housing stock occupied by 1980s first time home buyer had one shower, no garage or one car garage, window unit a/c and a damp basement.
> My kids are 17/18 now, while I was the same age back in the early 80s. There's no comparison. The quality of life available on even a modest salary nowadays is far, far better.
Most people aren't having children[0], largely because they can't afford them. This is probably selection bias. My kid has a better life than I did, but that's mainly because I have avoided the addictions my parents had.
Number of children inversely correlates to income [1], with the poorest families having the most children and the richest families having the fewest. You're right that birth rates are falling, but I don't think you're right about largely why.
You seem to be implying that rising incomes are causing people to choose to have fewer children. However, it could just as easily be that having children is a drag on people's incomes.
It's probably too much of a broad trend for that to be the case. As entire countries get wealthier, their birth rates drop: it's true in the US, Japan, Germany, Sweden, wherever. If you see a GDP per capita line going up, you will also see a birth rate line going down in nearly all cases. I suspect it's more likely something else: for example, access to and usage of birth control, access to other family planning controls, abortion, etc.
Edit: or even just access to entertainment that isn't "having sex." I remember a conversation with a (very) old woman who'd had many, many children; she said that... well, there wasn't much else to do back then...
Yet that is not what was stated. The risk of pregnancy is not zero. If we really want to get into it, abortions are not 100% effective either. So yeah, extremely unlikely, but still a possibility that one has a child.
You are technically correct, the best kind of correct.
The context of the conversation, however, was that people had children as a non intentional byproduct of having sex, which presumably people had more of due to lack of other entertainment options.
To which I thought it was noteworthy to point out that children are effectively no longer a byproduct of just having sex, especially for the demographics in which birthrates are declining. Hence, regardless of the amount of sex people are having, I would expect the birthrate to still decline.
That does make sense. It's just dangerous to say the chance of getting pregnant is zero, since that could influence someone's decision/understanding and lead to an undesired shock of an outcome.
Maybe the people with the high incomes live in areas where the cost of having children is higher? You often hear about people making 200k at Google on here sharing a two bedroom apartment with a roommate. Personally lack of a additional bedroom in my home prevents me from having another child, and home prices prevent me from moving.
Nobody at Google making $200k has to share a two-bedroom apartment, even in the Bay Area. I was easily able to afford a $2000/month 1-bedroom in Mountain View in 2014 on a salary around $110k, and the same apartment today has only increased in price by 30%, whereas starting salaries have increased much more.
Is it more economical to share a 2-bedroom apartment when you're starting out? Of course, and many new grads share apartments both for money and, just as importantly, social benefits in a place where you might not know anyone else.
Definitely true. But the causation may be backwards. Perhaps people are making the decision not to have kids based on how expensive it would be, the expense in opportunity cost and career advancement is higher with the more income you have.
It seems there's less freedom, and less exploration by kids today. Everything is recorded and documented. It's too expensive or too dangerous for kids to go do stuff. If you make a mistake today, it will follow you forever - little chance to apologize and fix whatever broke (seems more people want to use full force of law to press charges or sue over minor issues even when the person wants to make it right).
I wasn't in the early 80s and didn't have complete free run, but the independence and responsibilities that came with it seem far better than the digital nightmare kids are living in these days. Just my opinion.
Not sure the age group of the kids you have / hang out with, but I get the sense that this is changing with the kids who are preschoolers today.
I see a lot of kids out on balance bikes. My kid was playing with his stomp rocket in the local elementary school playground, and a little girl (about 5) - unattended, on a bike, I assume her mom was a couple hundred yards behind - came up to him and said "I've got a stomp rocket at home too, but my house is being renovated so we're living in a hotel." Playgrounds today are made to be much more about sensory experiences - there's a lot more water play, and places for free play like castle theaters, and plain logs or rocks or other obstacles to climb on. It's more typical for parents to go sit on a bench 50 feet away rather than hovering right over the kid.
Much of this is a very deliberate rejection of post-9/11 parenting standards, and may be generational as well. I think it started to change around 2015-2017; I remember there were articles on HN about a free-range parenting movement in Salt Lake City, or new playgrounds specifically designed to be dangerous in NYC. Also the people having kids now are early/mid-Millenials, while the parents of Zoomers are generally Gen-Xers, who were themselves termed the latchkey/TV-dinner generation. There may also be some survivorship bias where all the kids whose parents never let them do anything themselves failed to launch and have kids of their own, while those who did have kids often had fond memories of independent free play.
I don't see how this can be true. By the time I started high school a decade ago I realized that 90% of human knowledge was freely available to me on the internet. And I explored every crevice of it. The world is at our fingertips in a way it never was before.
Yes, information is accessible. I don't really call that exploration unless they are doing something with it for real. You can watch all the YouTube videos or read Wikipedia articles, but that's lacking if there's no real world experience/implementation. Watch a video with a science experiment? Great, now try it.
It also can't teach how to be independent, interact with friends, or what to do if you get lost (without having your cell phone solve it for you).
My friends and I would ride our bikes around the neighborhood and on trails, go fishing, build lean-tos or whatever in the woods, shoot model rockets, play sports, etc. Sure, some TV and video games too. We even had dial-up later on. But we were out in the world, being active, and thinking for ourselves. Those experiences are much more formative than consuming content created by someone else.
I think this is a lot of nostalgia talking. Learning things through the internet absolutely forced me to be independent. If I wanted to find something all I needed was to look for it. Instant messaging made it easier to interact with friends, not harder.
I can't deny that the experiences youth have today are different than those that were had pre-internet, but I will absolutely push back against the notion that they are worse. Building stuff with your hands is undoubtedly a cherished childhood experience for many, but just because kids are interacting over the internet doesn't mean they're not thinking for themselves. In fact, I would say they're thinking for themselves even more since the options are so much vaster. Is building an elaborate world in minecraft or roblox really that different from building lean-tos or model rockets?
The big issue is you can't let your kids go outside, unsupervised, and go make friends with other kids in the neighborhood until about 12, which by that point they're basically teens and in a completely different stage of life. Before the 80s, you were able to do that. If you do, there is a chance that you get stressful CPS visits, criminal charges or your child taken away from you. And because nobody else is doing it, if you decide to be a rebel the kid will have nobody to play with anyway.
Kids used to be way less of a time investment. There were more around, and they very easily latched on to playing with other neighborhood kids all day which acted like free daycare. You could send them out and tell them to be back before dark, feed them food, have family dinners, fix their boo boos and not much else. Now in today's limited age, kids can only play with their literal line of sight neighbors unsupervised and are mostly stuck inside, dependent on a parent to become a playmate because they eventually get bored of the video games. Or they get obsessed to an unhealthy degree.
The independence you talk about is another kind, but still a dependent kind on the parents. I think a cell phone coordinated childhood with the permissiveness of the 70s is the ideal + all the info of the internet, but it's not something you can do in english countries.
There is also a curse-of-knowledge aspect to today's age. The average teen does not seem to deal well with instagram and cell phones, especially girls. It's unique. I think society will eventually create an immune system to universal cellphones and social media, much like we did with TV, but until then we are dealing with it downside more than we should.
"Is building an elaborate world in minecraft or roblox really that different from building lean-tos or model rockets?"
Is building software that much different from construction? I think so.
"If I wanted to find something all I needed was to look for it."
True, but most of the content is just someone else's. If you wanted to find something out when I was a kid, you formed a hypothesis and tested it - not just taking the word of someone on the internet. The internet can be useful for information, but not as much for knowledge and possibly even less for wisdom.
"Instant messaging made it easier to interact with friends, not harder."
Maybe sort of. I don't think it's quite the same as in-person. I think we are seeing this on a mass scale with pandemic restrictions too - that virtual presence isn't the same as physical presence. How does one learn to handle emotions in person rather than just shut if the computer when an argument arises?
> Is building software that much different from construction? I think so.
Really I think this comes down to what you think makes experiences valuable. Obviously virtual and physical construction aren't the same, but do they provide the same benefits? It seems to me that building things is a valuable experience because it teaches kids about hard work, grit, teamwork, perhaps curiosity, and makes all those things fun. Building things virtually seems to me to provide all those same things. Maybe you think getting your hands dirty had some value, in which case yea kids are missing out, but I generally think they're able to get many of the same things with the added benefit of increased use of imagination since they can literally build anything.
Now obviously the internet is what you make of it. Like anything the the internet can be a crutch or a tool. Kids can sit in front of youtube for 10 hours a day and learn nothing from it, but I'm not sure that wasn't also the case in the past. Keeping children on track probably requires more parental oversight than in the past, but I'm not exactly sure that's a bad thing either. Exploring the internet together with your child can easily be a way to bond with them while also creating a lifelong love of building and curiosity.
Note that the selection bias has existed throughout history. Every kid assumes that having children is the natural order of things, because their sample usually consists of their friends and all their friends' parents (by definition) had kids. However, when I look at my parents' friends (or even siblings), a lot of them were childless or died young. U.S. fertility rates today [1] aren't appreciably different from what they were in the late 70s and early 80s.
My childhood in the 80s was much more comfortable than my children's current life. Some of that is just that I'm paid worse than my father was at the same age, but a lot of it is the rising cost of healthcare and housing. The things that are better today for us are mostly pretty trivial - kids movies on demand via Netflix rather than on a schedule via HBO, for example.
> The quality of life available on even a modest salary nowadays is far, far better.
It really depends on how you define "quality of life" and what one means by "better".
Material comforts and the bare necessities are ONE THING, but if you buy into the idea of "Maslow's hierarchy of needs", we have a huge and growing problem with those higher-level needs (and perhaps even the most base one, psychological) in recent times.
The base one is "physiological", psychological is higher up. However, we are having problems with that due to bad food giving us diabetes, pollution in the water, and too much physical labor destroying bodies in blue collar work (the Sacklers really seized on this to get people addicted to opiates) and not enough physical labor causing health problems in white collar work (diabetes, heart disease, nerve damage from too much sitting).
> My kids are 17/18 now, while I was the same age back in the early 80s. There's no comparison. The quality of life available on even a modest salary nowadays is far, far better.
Where do you live? I don't think my kids' day-to-day lives are any better than mine was at their age in Ireland in the 80s.
edit: ah sorry, you're in the UK, I hadn't noticed. What about your kids' lives is better than your life was?
Median incomes in the UK have doubled in that period, after accounting for inflation. Access to nutritious food has been revolutionised. The produce available in the shops is incomparably better. I didn't know what a mango, guava, persimon, plantain or dozens of other exotic produce looked like until the 90s but now they are commonplace and affordable. TV was a small, hot grainy screened little box. The way I kept in touch with the RPG gaming community was fanzines through the post. Almost nobody went on international holidays, now you can get Ryanair tickets for a few quid. Buying products remotely meant printed paper catalogues.
I was very lucky to have access to a computer running CP/M and MBasic on my dad's computer back home, but even as a computer science student in the late 80s I had no computer. All my programming was done on minicomputer terminals or lab PCs you had to book in advance, so I only had access for a few hours a week.
For women, oppressive gender bias and overt harassment and abuse was endemic in many spheres of life, I saw people get away with it. Being homosexual was still a career ender for many people. Open and accessible communications technology, and rising living standards has I think been crucial to connecting people and fighting these prejudices. I still remember the gleeful way US politicians and religious figures spoke about the impact AIDS was having, 'punishing' gay people. They thought it was funny. It fundamentally changed my attitudes to a lot of things, socially and politically. I'm still a fiscal conservative and believer in liberal capitalist economic freedoms; but I have no trust whatever of conservative social instincts anymore, that died 35 years ago.
If you took an average modern teenager and had them live in the 80s for a while they'd be horrified.
> For women, oppressive gender bias and overt harassment and abuse was endemic in many spheres of life, I saw people get away with it. Being homosexual was still a career ender for many people.
Ah yes indeed - there has been some genuine progress here
> If you took an average modern teenager and had them live in the 80s for a while they'd be horrified
... but this would really be just an aversion to change, right? Does the average modern teenager have any more fun? Have more joy and less sorrow in their lives? I'm not convinced (unless they're gay)
The contention was that there have been no meaningful improvements in our lives from technology. I just don't think that's the case, we are much better off in real terms, and that many of the improvements we do have were at least in part facilitated by that technology and associated quality of life. That's all. People still have problems to deal with, for sure.
That must have been pretty rough - I was a CS student from 84 to 88 (Scotland so 4 years first degrees) and we had pretty much unlimited access to kit (HLH Unix minis, BBC micros, Atari STs) and we all got keys so we had 24 hour access.
If there were any issues with access to stuff, being based in the Grassmarket in Edinburgh, we'd just go to one of the many excellent pubs in the vicinity.
There were labs with BBC Micros that were more accessible, but they only had Basic. If you're learning Pascal, C, Modula 2, etc that's just not good enough. There was a Unix machine but I didn't do any courses that required access to it.
Grew up in the 80s in Easter Europe under stringent economics where food was ratioed and such and yet I think out childhood was better than that of children today. There were plenty of things that sucked, especially for the parents and comparatively to today we had nothing and yet... I think something went horribly wrong despite the ‘prosperity’ we’re enjoying now.
It's hard to tell when nostalgia is real or not, and basically any comparison to the past can be dismissed as nostalgia, or it could be true but one thing strikes me as clear cut is that there was a lot less stress around. Personally I'd swap out abundance over stress at any time.
I don't think that's true. My parents are far happier than I am. They have a far more optimistic view of the world than I do because they've had it far better.
They own their own house. They could easily afford to have children. They could easily find well paid work outside of big cities, set up their own business. They didn't need higher education to get a well paid job. They didn't need to work nights and weekends for 15 years straight on side projects just to get by (like I did). They have more friends and their friendships are stronger too because they don't have to keep moving countries/cities to find jobs that pay enough (and with the right tax regime) to support a basic lifestyle. They didn't have to change jobs all the time to keep up with inflation. Their jobs were meaningful and useful to society (not some financial schemes). They're part of their community. They are less stressed. They feel free to express their views with their friends and colleagues. They felt that they could trust the government for most of their lives. Taxes were lower since inflation has since pushed everyone into higher tax brackets and the taxes actually went to useful projects, not into the pockets of big corporate executives and financiers.
Nowadays, every worker is subsidizing corporations; subsidizing their own slavery within the corporate system - Sometimes unwittingly, sometimes against their will because in many countries, retirement contributions are compulsory and deducted from incomes; this money is 'invested' into corporate stocks and straight into the pockets of big executives who get huge bonuses thanks to the rising stock prices; driven by all the big pension funds propping up stock prices using workers' money which was taken out of their salaries without their explicit consent.
These are subjective and personal. What causes the stress? What caused reduction in harmony, certainty, hope?
Your parents probably lives through a transition from extreme scarcity to abundance. As scarce as things were for them in the 80s, they were probably at lot more scarce in the 50s and 40s. Maybe your parents didn’t experience that directly but their parents did for sure.
From our grandparents generation and before, a much higher proportion of them were directly affected by things like war.
If you’re lacking hope because you’re afraid of something like war, I would consider that a luxury compared to actually being in a war.
If the prospect of impending austerity or violence leads to more suffering than the experience of these things themself then I would not say that being at war or hungry is the worse situation. While maybe subjective and personal by some criteria, still real and measurable.
It's worse for most people. Evidenced by unhappiness, drug/antidepressant use, declining birth rates, institutional distrust and breakdown of social relationships. Before, people ate less on average but the food that they did eat was far higher quality (all organic, local produce). Nowadays you have to go to a Michelin star restaurant to get the same quality produce as the average poor person would get every day in the old days. Real estate was cheaper and it was possible to buy a house near your job with savings alone. There were fewer regulations so you could build your own house yourself without worrying about compliance with thousands of different council laws. The family bond was stronger and based on honesty and shared values (now it's more individualistic).
If you had the skills to produce something useful, the market was less competitive so it was possible for essentially anyone to improve their standard of living through education and hard work. Also, employees had stronger bonds with employers and it wasn't uncommon for the business owner to sell or handover management of the business to their top employees (and the pool of employees was far smaller/less competitive). Nowadays, it's not possible for certain people to climb out of poverty because their competitors are big corporations who have access to easy money from banks and governments. Also within corporations, the level of competition is extreme, often counter-productive and the environment is toxic, suppressed and censored. Also, there is constant gaslighting in the media telling everyone how good things are when it doesn't match observable reality at all.
I disagree that the food was better for them previously. For as 'bad' as the foods are that we eat today, we have access to plenty of vitamins and nutritional issues in childhood are much less prevalent. Read about iodine deficiency for an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_deficiency.
That said, there is certainly plenty of truth to the house building/land use issues. I don't think anywhere has fully handled the new technology of the automobile well as the handling of automobiles has been a major driver of the issues in housing. Unchecked automobile use allows much more land to be used, but conversely encourages dumb land use rules that encourage sprawl and add miserable amounts of noise, pollution, and render most public space (roads) uninhabitable by people. I think the next century will have society figuring out a better balance or some new solutions.
> Nowadays you have to go to a Michelin star restaurant to get the same quality produce as the average poor person would get every day in the old days.
You obviously haven’t eaten British food from the seventies. It was dire.
I guess that must have been the downside of living in a northern country during the winter. International freight was probably not advanced enough for perishable goods back then... They probably had to pick produce when they were unripe and let it ripen on the way (a lot less tasty).
I lived in a country near the equator with year-round good weather so we didn't have this problem. Many people had land and small vegetable gardens. Fruits tasted amazing. I remember bananas used to be my favorite fruit; that was before the Cavendish variety took over. Nowadays, bananas mostly just taste very sweet with a not much other flavor. Nothing like it used to be. I don't even like bananas anymore. Mangoes also tasted amazing. Now it's hard to find good ones (though still possible but hard). Same with most vegetables; Tomatoes often taste bland nowadays; they're optimized for color, not flavor and they're picked when green/unripe to avoid damage. In many countries in the EU, meat is terrible nowadays. A lot of meat products are heavily processed; sometimes a hamburger patty tastes more like a tough sausage and chicken tastes fatty and rubbery.
Buying a house or home is the biggest expense that most people will have in their lives, and people have to pay back that loan over decades. And you mention that as a “drag” and dismiss it as “something we do to ourselves and each other”… what? It’s irrelevant whose “fault” it is. Of course that kind of thing will have a huge impact of what kind of life one can afford “on a modest salary nowadays”…
I think this is one of the biggest drags on the economy of the anglosphere, along with healthcare costs (which on some level could be connected).
The cost to construct brand new housing is considerably under US$100k per person where I live (US smaller coastal city, considering a smallish walk-up building), if you exclude land costs. At current interest rates, that could be financed at around $200/month, around $1/hour of full-time work.
In reality, a unit that costs $200/month in construction financing might cost ten times that to actually rent. Most of that reflects the cost of acquiring the land.
In principle, there is no reason that land needs to be particularly expensive in a lot of the places where it is. My guess is that a lot of the current price reflects land's status as an investment vehicle, which is largely an intentional policy choice (albeit one that might be politically infeasible to substantially change).
Land is expensive because everyone wants to live within the same 5-mile radius around the "good jobs". There's lots of land in the U.S; there are very few corporate headquarters of growing companies.
At the same time, it's hard to fault buyers for this. Commuting sucks (what price do you put on 2 hours out of your day?), and the difference between a "good job" and an "okay job" can be an order of magnitude in income these days.
Forgot to add that it steers a lot of investment into a zero-sum speculation game that could be going into investments that create (rather than transfer) value.
> The quality of life available on even a modest salary nowadays is far, far better.
It highly depends. I'm in my early 40s now, still not owning a property, me and my SO are finally one step away from getting into (quite considerable, for our standards) debt so that we can take that out of the way. 30-40 years ago property was a lot more easier to get hold of, even for the less financially fortunate. Forgot to mention that we do not have kids, partially because of the stress of not owning a property just yet.
Why are you so fixated on owning property? Plenty of families don't own property due to moving for better jobs every few years or military. Do you have a marketable skill or licensure, some savings, and the ability to take care of your health? Great. You will be an awesome parent. Get to work
Because the prices will only go up, judging by what happens further West (I live in Eastern Europe). Five, six years ago I used to believe that wouldn't have hold true going forward, reality contradicted me.
I do not want to "chase better" jobs into my 50s or, God-forbid, into my 60s, I'm content with what I have on that front. No, we do not have (more than emergency) savings, no, we do not have a strong family-support network, no, I don't believe we're the only ones in our age cohort that are in that situation.
I understand now. Definitely property values haven risen proportionately faster than wages in most of the big cities of the USA. This causes wealth distribution by age to be suboptimal. 40 y/o have too little wealth compared to 70 y/o.
> There's a very inflexible housing market here in the UK, so we're all in competition for the best houses, and bid up their value against each other.
Well yes, prices rise to the maximum amount that people can afford because the alternative is not living at all. Quite simply there aren't enough houses in the place where the jobs are. The only way to change that is to build more houses or move jobs.
40 years ago the average 18 year old could look forward to owning a modest 3 bed semi with a nice garden with a couple of kids and an annual holiday, all from a single wage
Today they can look forward to hopefully being able to afford somewhere if they get 2 incomes, both in the top 80%ile range. Kids are unaffordable as both parents have to work to pay the mortgage, and there's no extra for a holiday, let alone childcare costs.
But you can veg out in front of netflix after your 2 hour commute instead of watching Neighbours at half five.
I do understand this very well as someone who builds process automation tools. There are infinite menial jobs to automate, but in the end the benefit is only realised by the capital owners and employers, rarely the employees.
When I was kid it was said that if you went to university and researched/developed your work there that you would be able to make more money. Idea being that the technology would become capital of your own, which you could offer to business under more favourable terms than if you were to create it for the business as an employee. I suppose in reality that there will always be someone willing to take the quick cash instead.
> Even on a personal level, say a car lets me do a trip in 30 minutes instead of 2 hours walking. I don't relax for an hour and a half.
And that's why building highways does not reduce average commute time—people just move further from the downtown where they work. If you build a new highway that cuts commute time in half, on the population level, the sprawl increases until average population is twice as far and their commute remains the same.
They may very well be happier because they (as evidenced by their choices) prefer to live in a detached house and have a yard over having a shorter commute.
Cars and the highway enabled that increase in happiness, even if commute times are unchanged.
>Even on a personal level, say a car lets me do a trip in 30 minutes instead of 2 hours walking. I don't relax for an hour and a half. I go check more things off my todo list.
This is why all the modern conviences that people adore, including myself, just makes our lives more cluttered and anxiety ridden.
Nothing is freeing up our time so that we can focus on self care, relaxation, valuable time with family. It just makes us more able to cram more stuff in. And the "to do list" is never ending. There's always yard work, house work, more constructive things your kids could be doing to get them ahead in life, maybe you could now afford some extra education to further your career, there's always just.. SOMETHING to fill in the new holes we now have.
It's not just businesses and profit motives.
and one day you look back at it all and often you find that 2 hour walk, was probably mentally and physically healthier for you. How many things in life are like this - where we've scarified our mental health, physical/nutritional health, our privacy, ownership rights, and other rights all in the name of a convenient technology that "simplifies" one problem for us while creating 10 more in it's wake? Then we're all convinced that this new, convenient thing is super valuable and can't be done without.
well the problem is people don't put "self care, relaxation, valuable time with family" on the TODO list. ever. If you make it a priority then you'd get it done.
> well the problem is people don't put "self care, relaxation, valuable time with family" on the TODO list. ever. If you make it a priority then you'd get it done.
In general people seem to be fairly bad at getting things that are important but not urgent (hat tip to the Eisenhower Matrix) done unless they establish a habit for it. Holidays are valuable in that they at least reduce the need for coordination between multiple parties somewhat, at least for "valuable time with family", but they don't really help with the "self care and relaxation" bucket. Quite the contrary, for many.
Western styled families are designed for maximum generational conflict.
I'm not against capitalism outright, so don't mistake this as a leftist snipe, but consumerism and the lifestyle of it has really separated us from each other. Not just in the stuff we buy but in the constant cultural and sub-cultural fracturing going on.
We're obsessed with identity (not just politically) as a society and consumerism drives it as much, if not more, than identity politics.
People want to belong. And identity is a way to do so.
But we've lost roots with religion, community and family. And the further we get away from it, the more stressful dealing with community and family become.
I could go on more about religion.. I'm atheist but have grown to see the evolutionsiry advntage of it and the socio/psychological problems it solved and how the trade off of its rejections and what we get out of that rejection... Isn't a good deal.
Until we confront all of this... Anxiety, depression, suicide, all of this will increase.
Call it hippy dippy. But being connected to nature and family and community has value that's hard to quantify and hard for a headline or a brand or a political slogan to sell you.
And we're losing it. Teenagers and 20 somethings don't see it. It's only when life is hard at 30-40+, does it begin to dawn on most.
People tend to think meditation (or longer prayer) is a waste of time bc you aren't "doing anything". And once you have anxiety and depression (for most) and only then, Do you realize thats kinda the point.
As long as people want more stuff. Company profits have a dependent relationship on consumption. It wouldn't matter if the company produced twice as much if people didn't consume the increased output. You hint at that in your last statement, I just wanted to spell it out.
I get what you’re trying to say, but this doesn’t necessarily always apply.
For example, demand for some goods is fairly predictable, e.g. certain commodity foodstuff. A profit driven company selling these kinds of goods is focused on increasing their market share, but no matter what, the demand is there.
Compare this to something else like SUV sales, where demand exists that probably shouldn’t.
Yes, consumer sentiment drives/enables these companies, but the nature of that demand and the behavior it drives is certainly not all equal.
It isn't equal, but pointing that out downplays the fact that they are in equilibrium. Commodities producers reduce costs to increase profits through greater market share, but without the drive to consume more goods than the present, the excess capacity from the cost reduction would sit idle, which doesn't happen in practice.
To make the point more salient, if people were willing to live to the standards of the 1800s, a significant amount of the workforce slaving away could retire right now. People choose increased consumption over leisure time, not corporations, corporations only provide demanded goods.
Well, the important skill is saying no. While you won't get far saying no to the employer, all those other things on the todo list got there somehow. I'm now fighting the good fight of getting my own time back. I suggest trying the same.
> In reality, there's a race in terms of productivity: "now they can do 2x the work they did before!"
I think the reality is more depressing. It’s not companies deciding this, it’s each other. “Now I can do 2x the work I did before.”
As a system there’s a feedback loop involved. You only need very few people to decide to undercut each other, but for each person who does, that’s more pressure for the next person to keep up, causing even more pressure on the next people, etc.
This is why the 40 hour work week had to come from the top. I doubt we’ll see real leisure time improvements until we see overtime pay starting at 32hr/week or something else top down like that.
It also means people can make more complicated stuff. For example, it’s crazy seeing what amateurs can do with post-production on TikTok.
Far from putting Hollywood professionals out of business, it’s enabled humans to take many parts of mass media for granted, while pros move on to creating ever more dazzling content.
Unless we get to some sort of AGI (or partial AGI), I don't really see this playing out like this. We're already seeing employers capitulate quite hard when they're short on labor: a stark rise in compensation, shorter work weeks, better benefits and so on.
As a person with a minimalism view on possessions - I've often wondered if with today's technology such as self vacuuming robots, etc. if we designed new houses around said technology and what it could do today - could many more people be able to have robotic house cleaning.
If you could spec out a house to have only unscratchable concrete floors, rounded corners, all furniture must have adequate clearance, a Roomba would be way more effective.
I'd buy a house with a spartan bathroom if that meant I never had to houseclean.
As a leisurely pursuit, you can now fly anywhere in the world for under $1000 (some planning required), or listen to basically any music ever produced, or play and record whatever music you happen to compose (a couple grand of music gear suffices), or read any book, or publish anything for the entire world basically for free.
But if your idea of leisurely activity is laying in a hammock and watch the clouds go by, it's still as expensive as ever. Time is as expensive as ever; for instance, look at your effective hourly rate.
Wouldn’t your life be worse off in general if you had to walk for those extra 90 minutes and had fewer things done? If you thought otherwise, why couldn’t you walk now, even though cars exist?
> There have been lots of technology x replacing a manual process with the promise that "now instead of doing y, the person is now free to explore more leisurely pursuits."
Yeah, the "free to explore more leisurely pursuits" part is contrived in most cases, but there is a real argument for automating work that's "dirty, dangerous, or dull" -- freeing humans to do the parts of the work that's more interesting, meaningful, safer, cleaner, etc.
My opinion on this is that a better goal (though not an exclusive alternative to) UBI is what I call "basic needs automation". Instead of distributing arbitrary amounts of money to pay for basic needs, it seems like it would be better if we can automate the maintenance of those needs to a point where the costs are negligible.
Easier said than done, of course, but imagine reaching a technological point where instead of having self-driving cars, we have self-sustaining food/clothing/shelter.
This stuff always seems like appealing to magic. If magic could meet our basic needs, it would be great too. But unlike magic, people appeal to this all the time, despite it being equally impossible today.
The reason I bring that up is that it distracts from solutions that we can actually implement.
The problem is that any alternative or additional solution could also be interpreted to be a distraction, so that doesn't convince me much. I don't see it as an exclusive alternative, as in we should do this instead of UBI. My point is about the long term trajectory of innovation.
In the US at least, our roads are a public service. You don't have to pay to be on a road (outside of a few exceptions). I think a good long term vision for scientists is to reduce the cost of our basic needs to the point that all our essential needs could be a public service. I don't see why that's a distraction.
I can see how automation would make poor and middle income people poorer, but I don’t see why automation would depress the wealth of the already wealthy.
Well, "people" here means 99% or 99.9% or maybe a couple extra nines. I really didn't mean the next 0.01%.
Anyway, it can, by a complex process that makes an entire society poorer once people gets thrown out of the economy. That includes the absurdly rich too. It's just that if this is the only point where it bothers you, honestly I don't even care about your opinion.
Automation can put everyone out of a job, for all I care about jobs and the economy. They are potentially mutually beneficial, but usually extremely unfavorable to labor in terms of sharing profits. No jobs means no unemployment.
There's a wide variance in who captures the gains from technology, and most of it seems to come from whether the technology enables new transactions. Transactions are all that matter in a market economy; any work done that doesn't alter the terms of trade is effectively invisible (case: housework). Hence why corporations frequently try to deliver the shittiest products and customer service that will not result in them losing customers, employees try to do the least work possible that will not get them fired, companies aggressively expand into new markets and convert new customers, and employees hunt for promotions and job-hop into better opportunities.
Your ability to capture leisure time for yourself is largely related to how well you can judge the minimum amount of work needed to not get fired and then execute on that while saving the rest for yourself; or, alternatively, how much value you can create when you do work so that you can bank the rest in financial assets and live without any further transactions. Hint: the former amount is usually more generous than you think it is, particularly if the latter is very high and you let your employer capture that value.
Technologies that result in new transaction types result in large amounts of value being captured by their customers, as well as by the company delivering them. Think of YouTube: millions of people have been able to step into the market previously reserved for entertainers, broadcasters, news anchors, and other TV personalities, and in the process they've made billions for Google, millions for themselves, and cannibalized the whole industries of advertising, journalism, and entertainment. The Internet as a whole has created the top 5 most valuable companies on earth, worth a combined $10T+, as well as millions of other small businesses.
Technologies that increase the efficiency of existing transaction types typically only enrich the companies that buy them, at least until they penetrate the market entirely, at which point they only enrich the company that sells them and are just table stakes for the companies that buy them. Think of say the high-availability mainframe market of the early 80s (Stratus and Tandem). When banks started using these to process transactions, bank tellers didn't capture any of this value, because it's not like a bank teller can go open their own bank using these machines. Contrast this to say the Apple II and Visicalc, where people could open up their own business because the technology let them cut expensive secretaries and accountants out of the loop.
There's a deep connection between this idea and that of Disruptive vs. Sustaining innovations in The Innovator's Dilemma. Disruptive innovations are those that create new customers and new transactions, thus opening up new markets. Sustaining innovations are those that improve the efficiency of existing transactions and customer relationships. Sustaining innovations can widen your moat and increase the amount you can charge for your product, but they aren't going to form new businesses or unlock large market that you don't already have a foothold in.
This is also why certain VCs get extremely excited about innovations like PCs, the Internet, cryptocurrency, and wearable/ambient computing. Communication, finance, markets, and proximity are the key building blocks that enable transactions; anything that fundamentally changes these systems is likely to be significantly disruptive. Meanwhile your SaaS that improves the efficiency of a niche industry by 5x is much less exciting, even though it has a higher probability of success, because you know exactly who your customers are and are unlikely to be able to create more of them.
Sure, but I also have a supercomputer in my pocket now, which is pretty neat. We couldn't even have this conversation without incredible amounts of technological innovation that's happened over the last few decades — well, at least not without endless "letters to the editor" happening over the span of weeks (and maybe not getting printed at all).
Automated X replacing manual Y is usually good, IMO, even if the idea that it'll result in more leisure time is pretty much bunk.
Even on a personal level, say a car lets me do a trip in 30 minutes instead of 2 hours walking. I don't relax for an hour and a half. I go check more things off my todo list.
Isn't that good? You certainly could give yourself more leisure time — there's no capitalist overlord forcing you to do your own personal todo list — but since you have more time, you've decided to do more things to help yourself.
Slightly more seriously, and delightfully pedantically, you don't. A supercomputer isn't a supercomputer because it does a lot of computations every second. It's the utility of the machine that makes it a supercomputer. Your phone can model entire weather systems or the intricacies of millisecond-by-millisecond fluid dynamics inside a nuclear explosion, but you choose to play Angry Birds on it, so it isn't a supercomputer. It's just a very, very fast, and immensely wasteful PC. You could do everything you do on your phone with a much less well-specced device. We all could.
But — that in itself has been pretty society-changing (well, maybe not the part about reading HN). Literally every person, just about, has a reasonably good camera in their pocket capable of shooting video, that connects to the internet — and by the way, the quality of those images does actually relate to the thing being a supercomputer (thanks, computational photography). Would the George Floyd related protests have happened without someone's cameraphone taping cops killing him in cold blood? Definitely not: only cable news companies decided what to shoot and — equally critically — what to broadcast.
And on a more mundane note: ubiquitous internet-connected cameras certainly revolutionized how I pick restaurants for dinner.
Capital really doesn't drive innovation at all except in very specific situations where there are sufficient regulations and guardrails to coax companies in the direction of progress (and you certainly won't see innovation happening under completely unregulated capitalism). It's almost always independent and/or individual people -- researchers, open source contributors, scientists, etc -- who come up with society-changing technologies and ideas. In the mid 1900s, the large tech corporations ran enormous corporate laboratories, like the famous Bell Labs that would churn out things like this (Unix, almost the internet, etc). Rampant de-regulation of capital in the 70s and 80s led to an industry shift that removed these guardrails and incentives and made it easier to simply monopolize, price fix, and acquire your way to the top, as the oil and rail tycoons had in the early 1900s, and that is where we find ourselves now. FANG companies are not innovators -- they have become machines that swallow up the innovations of others and either neutralize or begrudgingly copy them in such a way that still manages to crush competition via economies of scale.
Google, the "great innovator" of search hasn't innovated on the topic of search engines in over a decade, and instead relies on multi-billion dollar deals to ensure Google is the default search engine on every mobile device in the world. When a competitor emerges, they acquire and shutter it, or sit pretty knowing economies of scale will ensure new competitors won't get sufficient traction.
For the last decade, Apple has simply watched the tech industry very closely, cultivated their image as a glorified fashion company (everything driven by design and status-symbol imagery), exerted monopolistic control over an entire industry via their app store fees and tight restrictions, and used their unlimited resources to copy or buy their way into the features and ideas actual innovators have proven will play well in the coming years.
Amazon uses its size and its control over a global marketplace (that they completely control) to continuously enter new markets and shutter competition with economies of scale, and is taking the same approach with AWS. Notably they won't be innovating on anything outside the realm of "just run it in our network of data centers", and everything they do with AWS is designed to pull you into the walled garden of AWS products.
Netflix has simply acquired their way into controlling a large portion of the good movie studios, their only "innovation" being on perpetuating a toxic and cutthroat company culture where everyone is constantly under review and DRM and compression technology to limit who can watch what based on expensive regional licensing deals.
All of these companies are threatened by, and afraid of innovation, and they will stop it from happening if they can. They compete and innovate, only if they have to, and would much rather just pay you to not innovate. Capital isn't going to create innovation -- regulation of capital, done correctly, will. Capital has to be dragged into innovating, kicking and screaming.
Would UBI be a good way to do that? I do not know much about it but it seems that it could potentially lead to a whole generations being able to try new things, tinker with technology, make mistakes, see what works what does not work. A lot of human thoughts could be shifted from "how to make sure me and my family are fed, clothed and sheltered" to more creative ones.
1. $500 campaign donation limit, per person, per candidate, per year.
2. Corporations not allowed to donate to politics in any way, shape, or form. Subject to a fine of 20% of the corporation's deductions or taxable revenue for the current tax year, whichever is greater (catches the "break even" monsters like Amazon), per infraction.
3. Large financial and jail-time penalties for materially incentivizing a politician for the purpose of manipulating their stance on an issue, for both the manipulator and the politician (if they are proven complicit). All that needs to be demonstrated is a quid pro quo.
4. Corporate death penalty and/or jail time for a variety of corporate issues that currently result in a mere slap-on-the-wrist fine
5. Abolish the electoral college, so we are not living under a tyranny of the few.
Collectively this would end lobbying and make it impractical to entwine money with politics, resulting with, as you say, a number of policies like UBI, high quality public housing, and a social safety net that are provably more conducive to technological and societal progress.
And I say this as a YC CTO who used to be a DoD research scientist.
More relaxing is not a goal! Very few people can spend spend days in bed if not forced to. If you try your body will betray you by getting up and doing something.
You can do "more work for the man", or you can do a hobby of some sort. Either way though you are up and doing something.
No, you miss the point: what is the difference between a hobby and a job? You are doing something either way. I'm not the only person who likes my job. I'm not the only person with a hobby that sometimes gets frustrated with something in the hobby.
Note if you can’t understand why the distinction matters in general, in practice, and to many people then you might be unhealthily privileged and should try to get some perspective.
The point is being able to decide and structure your own time, rather than being beholden to someone else's demands just in order to have enough money to keep existing on this planet.
In the economic sense, an individual's time is split between work and leisure. Leisure is defined as "time not spent working", so any reduction in working hours will increase your leisure hours. Leisure time can be spent doing anything someone desires (chores, exercise, watching tv, reading, hobbies, etc.), it has nothing to do with sleeping or lying in bed.
"This also explains why so few futurists make any money. They are attracted to exactly those parts of the future that are worth very little. They find visions of changed human behavior stimulating. Technological change serves as a basis for constructing aspirational visions of changed humanity. Unfortunately, technological change actually arrives in ways that leave human behavior minimally altered.
Engineering is about finding excitement by figuring out how human behavior could change. Marketing is about finding money by making sure it doesn’t."
While that's an appealing idea and much as I like Venkatesh Rao, I think the explanation is simple in a different way.
Making money on investments isn't generally about know something will happen sometime in the future. It's about knowing exactly when that something will start to pay off. And that knowledge is much more wrapped in small details. Amazon spent ten years losing money but had investors who believed it would even eventually make it, which it did. Determining whether Amazon would have been a good investment at the start wasn't about knowing ecommerce would work, it was about noticing things like committed Amazon's investors were, etc, etc.
> The work of Ruth Schwartz Cowan demonstrates this dynamic in the arrival of appliances like microwaves, washing machines and refrigerators in the first half of the 20th century... Cowan showed that these technologies did not necessarily result in a net reduction of women’s housework hours. Instead, the new electrical machines were often replacing the paid labor of domestic workers. American families in the early 20th century, even economically “uncomfortable” ones, often maintained day workers or live-in workers as a regular supply of labor.
In the U.S., only a minority of families ever employed domestic workers on a regular basis. Most people did not employ domestic workers. Domestic workers, for example, did not generally employ domestic workers.
Electrical appliances did decrease the amount of labor required to run a house. That's why families today, who work more hours on average, can run a house without employing domestic laborers.
That description really does a disservice to Cowan's work. A more general argument was that:
- Prior to the industrial revolution, men's and women's work was distinct, but reciprocal—they both contributed towards the general maintenance of a home (farming, animal care, cooking, cleaning, chopping wood, repair, etc.)
- With the industrial revolution, men left for work, leaving many women solely responsible for nearly all home-based tasks. Household tasks became associated with women's work.
- Over time, electric appliances reduced the necessary labor to perform their household tasks. However, shifting expectations of motherhood and cleanliness standards resulted in less time saved than you would expect. Before washing machines, clothes were cleaned only seldomly, but with them, it became a weekly or even daily task.
The domestic workers part of the book is real and was common, but I'd hesitate to use it to exemplify the overall argument of the book.
That’s why I’ve been trying to keep a nonjudgmental eye on the solarpunk community. There is a positive outlook we need to foster to think with fewer constraints about the future.
I have to disagree with the author here if only because the majority of applications he talks about are transitionary in the sense that they are dependent on AI/ML that's at the cusp of fruition. Self-driving is probably the best example I can come up with, where currently something like an Uber or DoorDash relies on a gig-worker underclass in order to drive things. But once autonomous vehicles come online, as they already are starting to, that opportunity will also soon disappear.
I think the more meaningful question to ask here is what happens when even the menial labor made available through gig work[0] starts to dry up. The discussion, in my opinion, should really no longer be about the legitimacy of automation which I believe is being argued here, but what we will do as a society in response to the inevitability of automation and its ramifications for the average person as a result.
[0]: I see gig work as the culmination of peak labor efficiency, short of perhaps slavery / indentured servitude, which even then isn't enough to compete after a certain point
2014 called, they want their unbridled optimism about the inevitability of self-driving back
> But once autonomous vehicles come online, as they already are starting to
The current status of autonomous vehicles is pretty miserable on city streets. Tesla's new "full self driving" has a reported error rate of one incident requiring manual intervention per 2 miles. Nobody is going to get into a taxi that tries to drive into a wall or onto train tracks a couple of times every hour.
Uber and Lyft have already given up on them, selling off their AI divisions. They have no near-term automation plans.
You're looking in the wrong places for the cutting edge of self-driving. While I greatly respect Tesla for energy storage/generation, you should really be looking at companies like Waymo or Cruise.
If you live in San Francisco or the Bay Area, I'm sure you've seen many of their vehicles being driven around.
While OK, cutting edge might be better but big questions still are open.
It is not about making road safer...
Question is, if it will be more cost effective to have self driving car or not. Cutting edge is currently not cost effective as developing and operating such car is costing loads of money.
There are still operation costs that are not obvious like insurance. I don't think there is sane company anywhere that wants to put 100's of cars on the same roads as insurance scammers.
And even so cost effectiveness isn't obvious. The hardware results in quite expensive vehicles that additionally won't be owned and maintained by gig workers for free.
to me, a self flying plane is a lot easier problem to solve but i don't hear about anyone getting into a plane without a pilot (and co-pilot) at the controls. I know we have auto-pilots but there's always a human and backup in case something goes wrong. Flying a plane is a lot easier on a computer than navigating the ground and ground traffic (IMO). I would think we'd see self-flying planes before self-driving cars.
I think the main issue is that in case of a problem you can't just gradually slow down and get out of a plane. A lot of things can go wrong and a broken autopilot == crash.
If the self-driving car breaks down completely it could still slow down until stopped with some emergency lights on. This is the worst case scenario and in many cases wouldn't end up with anyone being hurt.
Dangerous acceleration, braking, steering, or some combination of the three are far, far worse.
I've repeatedly had lane-keeping veer off-road while adapative cruise control accelerated at the same time. That's incredibly dangerous and if I hadn't had my hands on the wheel and my foot resting on the brake pedal I may have driven into a tree/sign/parked car. I don't use lane-keeping anymore.
Slowing down until stopped with some emergency lights on is also plenty dangerous if it happens on a high-speed road.
I'm not the OP, but personally I just can't see it, not on all roads and at a level that most people would consider "self driving". And as for fully self driving such that there are no manual controls, absolutely no chance.
I think self-driving cars are realistically only going to work in conjunction with other technologies embedded in roads, signs and other vehicles - and even then, it's still a massively challenging problem, with potentially dire consequences when things go l wrong.
The framing that Uber and Doordash are exploiting the workers' own capital because workers also supply their own cars completely ignores that the cars were unproductive, sunk cost capital until these platforms arrived, and that people desire flexibility and autonomy, and it was dead weight regulation of monopoly (taxi) licensing that kept these people out of the labour market. People aren't "workers," even if the establishment has defined them into classes of workers and employers as a means to further manage them.
Even if gig economy companies were pyramid schemes for investment as you suggest, their redistrbitive function would still be way more efficient than any other scheme.
The crux of this view is the belief in and characterization of literally everything as exploitation. It's the axiom in the logic of that idea. People want jobs that provide some balance of economic security, status, and freedom, but if you discover need, desire, and value that creates jobs for them and risk your own capital to grow it, you're exploiting them? Personally, I'd reject that premise.
Someone owning a car without using it to generate income, leverage, or opportunity is the definition of unproductive capital rotting in a driveway. The uber for x platforms are market makers, which is about as valuable a service as it gets. The only ones it seems to bother are those who would seek to exploit people politically.
The platforms have pernicious pratices, certainly, but the political outrage about the the gig economy has served mainly to discourage competitors from entering the market to make it better.
I'd argue the critics of the gig economy are ensconcing the very platforms they're complaining about by threatening the market - and they have never solved a problem they didn't first invent by characterizing everything as exploitation from the outset.
This is about par for the course for people who don't solve problems with discovery, technology, or consensus, but rather, invent problems to leverage them politically and add them to the portfolio of things they create rules for and manage. These are not reconcilable world views, but when one is committed to the logic of an idea, I sympathize with how they might interpret inconsistency with it as stupid.
> Someone owning a car without using it to generate income
The point is you're just _making up_ the "fact" of people not using their cars to generate income.
Cars depreciate when you drive them, people recognize their value as capital, the IRS recognizes their value as capital.
You're idiotically trying to pretend that they don't count as capital. For no real reason either. Just because you said something stupid before and you can't admit it.
> market makers, which is about as valuable a service as it gets
it's not possible to automate away all components of the concept of "service". there will always be time consuming or tedious tasks that people will pay other people to do. they likely won't look like anything we can imagine now
Exactly. The Wright Brothers weren't thinking about going to Mars, they wanted to make a "bird" that people could ride like a horse. New inventions spur more new inventions and new ideas. Sometimes it is just an old problem solved by combining two new things.
I like these types of essays, even if I largely disagree with them.
Truth is, our imaginations are quiet limited, and always have been. Think of all ancient mythological creatures (half man, half goat, half man, half bird, etc) they're all pretty lame when compared to the wonders you see under a microscope. Reality is infinitely richer than our imagination, and the same applies to the future. It'll surprise us in ways we can't quite predict.
The other thing is, the future almost by definition can never come. The moment it does, it becomes the present and gets taken for granted. We have video calls, cars that drive themselves on highways and fantastic voice recognition (on the latest Pixels for example), but these just become "obvious" and expected and the future moves on.
Finally, why should we expect human nature to change? Some of the biggest social changes over the last few decades - LGBTQ rights and marijuana legalization - are just new spins on the same old thing people have always been up to: getting high and fucking. In the future, they'll figure out even more ways to get high and fuck. Are these new ways of living any different than a self-driving car is a new way of living?
Bertrand Russell, the English philosopher, was not a fan of work.
In his “In Praise of Idleness” (1932) [0], he poised that if society were better managed, one would only need to work four hours a day.
Not to be confused with the "4-hour workweek" by Tim Ferriss.
new technologies also require new systems to exist in, which tend to reduce how long it takes to do something once, but almost always comes with a cost.
ie: light switches versus smart bulbs.
lightswitches: a system that relies on the user to hit the lights in whatever room they want light. This means a physical action. maintenance: low, only if electrical outlet has problems does the user need to do repairs, or change a lightbulb.
smart bulbs: system can be controlled automatically or with voice, or even the switch. System is more flexible but comes with increased maintenance cost. maintenance: bulbs require connection to a hub, which requires internet conn, automations require time to setup, firmware updates can break functionality, and other unknowns.
i point this out because we often forget, we usually have ways of doing the "new" things the way we did before, and they worked well, new ways are great, but sometimes come with hidden externalities
it becomes a master you don't think of as a master, like an institutional system like wages where you think you're in control when the power dynamic is really reversed
This is pretty much why we need philosophy (include religion in there if you like) - as they say, science shows us the world as it is, but philosophy lets us imagine the world as we should like it to be - so that technology can help us get there.
The British philosopher Mark Fisher coined the term "capitalist realism" for the sense that, since the beginning of the neoliberal era with Reagan and Thatcher and the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has become impossible to imagine an end to capitalism. In fact, "it has become easier to imagine the end of the world, than the end of capitalism". Perhaps that's why apocalyptic and dystopian fiction has taken over from optimistic futurism - we are no longer capable of imagining Star Trek futures of abundance and idealism.
I think it's important to say that it goes deeper than not being able to imagine idealistic, utopian, or abundant futures. Fisher's point was that we aren't able to imagine any future at all any more.
And I think that actually involves Star Trek, which with its sort of 'space replicator communism' and adventurism is in itself not really forward looking, it's just optimistic, and entirely a product of its own time, namely 60s and 70s 'golden age' sci-fi.
I have enjoyed what I’ve read of Mark Fisher, though I haven’t read CR except via excerpt and quotation.
If you are open to a compelling, non-Marxist analysis of the present malaise, I would recommend the writings of Augusto Del Noce.
The past seventy years have made something of a prophet of Del Noce. He predicted, as early as the 1950s, and among other things which were — at that time — unthinkable: the fall of communism, the sexual revolution, and the global supremacy of a new stage of capitalism, which he believed would become its own, existentially suffocating form of totalitarianism.
He wasn’t magic, he just had a very logical way of thinking through the consequences of ideas. He didnt have a philosophical system, but drew heavily from Vico and Rosmini, who did. He was also influenced by his own experience with totalitarianism in the early 20th Century, where he briefly became a Catholic Communist in response to the rise of Fascism, before rejecting both. He was also conversant with modern and contemporary philosophy in a way not paralleled by other Catholic thinkers of his time, excepting Ratzinger.
If this sounds interesting, a good introduction is this book review[0], written by him shortly before his death, but after having been vindicated by the collapse of the USSR and it’s aftermath. It touches on a number of Del Nocean ideas: the suicide of the Revolution, the heterogenesis of ends, Occidentalism as ideology, Neo-Capitalism, and traditionalism as an ideological reduction of religious tradition. His books are even better — every bit as clear-eyed and unnerving as what I’ve read of Fisher, but with a glint of hope.
I think there's some truth to the idea that sci-fi relies on and mimics the same type of living to some degree. In order to have a successful book, you need the consumer to feel a connection. That's hard to do if everything is fundamentally different from what they know.
I would also say that some stories do change one or two fundamental aspects at a time. Sometimes just to explore the inverse of current society.
The novel I am currently writing imagines a world where all human values are subordinated to ecological sustainability. All progress is measured by that. Perfection is zero resource consumption. This is not the Jetsons future. It probably won't sell that well because it is not at all like the present and is kind of brutal, though there are some good parts.
It might sell well. That troupe sort of exists today to a lesser extent - lots of talk about sustainability. I think there would be a segment interested in the next step of no consumption, or would wonder what that looks like. So I do see this as a tie that could make the problem relatable to people even if the outcome is more brutal.
There is an obsession in knowledge work for productivity (output per time). The goal should be for efficiency (best output per time).
Having more slack / diffused time to problem solve, think things through, and actively rest brings more consciousness into knowledge work and makes people more efficient.
The problem is...line & middle managers are largely incentivized for results from their people. Results can be achieved in many different ways, but the current approach is brute force which leads to burnout and thus a "reshuffling" to find more sustainable working conditions or be paid more for how many "productive" responsibilities put on your plate.
For the workplace to embrace new technologies, this article is spot on in the fact that we must imagine our ideal ways of living, working, and playing. We can't go from screen to screen. We have to have a right to disconnect.
I forget where I came across it but this brings to mind an aphorism I've heard before. Basically, people in cultures that need to build fires to cook and heat their homes usually reject modern solutions saying "But then I wouldn't be able to build and keep a fire!"
New technologies will give us time so that we can come back to thinking about life and hopefully think of better ways of living. It need not be this way but with the addiction to work it just needs to go through this route.
I think it's trite to pick on The Jetsons, while ignoring the many attempted predictions of the future that did focus on "underlying social relations."
Marxism was, in large part, a techno futurism. JM Keynes predicted a future of 15hr workweeks and leisure societies. Feminism, at various point in time, was had strong techno-futuristic elements.
It's either really hard to predict people, or we aren't objective enough to do social science. Our predictions and attempts at critical analysis tend to reflect our ideals, or anti-ideals moreso than an objective conclusion.
Meanwhile, predicting the butterfly effect of a technology or change is almost impossible. Could a western european living in the 1400s and pondering the importance printing presses have predicted the Protestant Reformation?
I'm not saying it's bad to delve into such questions. I'm saying not to start with a "no one ever talks about X..."
> These recurring technofutures perpetuate a familiar equation in which convenience equals freedom
This statement I agree with. When you view convenience through the lens of dependency, you see something like Ivan Illich's "radical monopoly," where a technological change subordinates everyone to it. The car and roads are the example he uses, and the internet and its platforms are another.
This is so many consider Demolition Man an extremely underrated movie. It actually projected life differently. I also summise, it's why it's not as popular a sci-fi flick. Im eager for it's remake someday.
We really stopped imagining new ways of living and it’s unfortunate. A lot of people seem to think that the various isms that have already existed represent the only conceivable modes of human organization.
Agreed. People nowadays are indoctrinated to think that it's either capitalism or socialism/communism. This prevents them from rocking the boat, because the only alternative to the status quo is arguably even worse.
There is a system out there which is better than anything we have tried so far. However, to discover it we first need to break out of this mentality that we're stuck choosing the lesser of two evils.
That's why I no longer say I want socialism. Instead, I say I don't know what I want, but I know I don't want capitalism.
As long as companies are driven by profits, and that profit can be increased by higher enployee productivity in the same number of legal working hours, we will continue to do so.
Even on a personal level, say a car lets me do a trip in 30 minutes instead of 2 hours walking. I don't relax for an hour and a half. I go check more things off my todo list.