Here’s an interesting post from, of all places, CNN, about the possibility that our current understanding of employment such as it is is obsolete and outdated:
Our problem is not that we don’t have enough stuff — it’s that we don’t have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.
The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with “career” be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?
Instead, we are attempting to use the logic of a scarce marketplace to negotiate things that are actually in abundance. What we lack is not employment, but a way of fairly distributing the bounty we have generated through our technologies, and a way of creating meaning in a world that has already produced far too much stuff.
There’s lots of sci-fi that already deals with the concept of a post-scarcity world–most notably Culture by Ian M. Banks–but it’d be interesting to see how reality copes. After all, something something undeserving layabouts, amirite.
