We will all have more leisure time in the future: Difference between revisions

{{a|shitmaxim|

[[File:Dinocheckers.jpg|450px|thumb|center|Our future. Pity the poor [[robo-slave]] (out of picture): having to watch the idiot [[meatware]] mangle a basic Spassky/Fischer opening must be some kind of ''torture''.]]}}This idea, propagated by [[thought leader]]s like {{author|Ray Kurzweil}},<ref>{{br|The Singularity is Near}}</ref> John Cryan<ref>[[Rumours of our demise are greatly exaggerated - technology article|Rumours of our demise are greatly exaggerated]].</ref> and dashing young heir to the Susskind clairvoyance dynasty {{author|Daniel Susskind}},<ref>{{br|A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond}}. See also {{author|David Goodhart}}’s more thoughtful (but still, on this point, misguided) {{br|Head Hand Heart}}.</ref> posits that [[Chatbot|robots]] and [[artificial intelligence]] will, shortly, supplant the need for human labour ''altogether''. We, the [[meatware]], will shortly be [[Technological unemployment|technologically redundant]]. The ''lot'' of us.

Which poses the question: seeing as we won’t be working [[Jacquard loom]]s, wiping arses, writing [[A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond - Book Review|wishful dystopian techno-political tracts]] or [[Change manager|managing business change programmes]] anymore, ''what to do with all the spare time we’ll suddenly have?''  

On this view there be nothing left to do: we will all just loaf around, playing [[chess]] and drinking grappa the way Mediterranean pensioners always have, only with robo-slaves hovering around to serve the booze and wipe our arses. Sounds great, doesn’t it! Especially if you don’t dwell on the thought that your [[robo-slave]] could wipe the floor with you at [[chess]], too, if it felt like it.

Now if something about this scenario nudges your implausibility hooter, that makes two of us. For one thing, from our [[perspective chauvinism|vantage point]], the last thirty-odd years have been one long [[Cambrian explosion]] of technology (''t’internet! iPhones! SETI@home! Uber! Drones!''), but so far there is no sign of ''any'' extra leisure time. Work — new work, derivative work, previously unimagined work — is piling up. Granted, a lot of it is ''crap'' work: [[internal audit]], software [[change manager|change management]], six-sigma process analysis and [[talent acquisition]] — hardly the effervescent future we envisaged as wild undergraduate dreamers — but it definitely is work, and it definitely ''isn’t'' going away. (You do wonder: had our elders foreseen this new world of work, would they have told us? [[Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?]])

The millenarians ask us to believe that a 5,000-year-old asymptote will suddenly invert. But ''how''? ''When''? ''Why''? ''No-one knows what we will be doing in ineffable, co-evolving future'': ''we'' don’t, and [[chatbot]]s ''definitely'' don’t. It might not be [[Change manager|regulatory change programme management]] (though, ahhh, don’t ''bet'' on it) but, if the past is any guide, it ''will'' be something, it ''will'' be [[tedious]], and it sure as hell ''won’t'' be slugging back ''génépi'' over a backgammon board in the ''Haute-Savoie''.

*[[Systems theory]]