The lights in the tunnel

I have read Martin Ford's book with considerable interest. His main thesis is that technological unemployment will pervade and that we should plan for it.

Where I must part company with him is in his view that consumption and capitalism are sine qua non. He rejects Marx's idea of a planned economy (and I'm not here to defend it) yet at the same time posits an economy where the government arranges for the consumer to have the money he needs to keep consumption going by taxing consumption(!) and levying business taxes. This is also a planned economy.

He accepts that the planet has finite resources, but predicts that nano-technology will radically increase what we can do with available materials. I have no reason (or knowledge) to doubt or question his prediction about nano-technology, but he cannot brush away the finiteness of resources by saying we can exploit them more effectively/efficiently

He is silent on the subject of advertising, which is a key driving force in a consumption based economy. He wants to incentivise people to improve themselves and society by offering what amounts to wages for doing these things. I don't disagree with financial incentives being used to create social / environmental benefits, but presumably Ford's system will have to incentivise people to consume goods and services - that is basically advertising/marketing. As he foresees a world in which most work is done by machines, I assume that advertising will be similarly cybernated.

But in missing out advertising as a subject area, Ford has overlooked a huge gap in his thought process. We can find it by consiering what modern advertising does. It seelks to persuade you that such and such a product will make you a better, more attractive, essentially happier, healthier person. Paradoxically, advertising knows what Ford has omitted. Our true motivation is to be happy and healthy. Advertising couples that motivation to consumption to keep the economy going, because our economic system is basically one of consumption. Ford sees this, but does not challenge it - in fact it is his start point, even though he accepts that the free market is an intellectual construct. It has no physical referent.

It is the supreme and truly immutable fact that we have finite resources to work with. That, combined with the urge of humans, like any species, to survive and thrive, produces the essential train of thought of a Resource Based Economy, in which we apply the scientific method and technology to bear on the issue of how we as a species can survive and thrive on 'spaceship earth'.

It is a pity, because Ford goes so far towards deriving an RBE by his own sound reasoning, yet stops short because of assumptions about money and the "invisible hand" idea of Adam Smith which leaves the latter's ideas exposed to the criticism of being more systematic theology than a plan for how humanity can survive and thrive.

Ford has great expectations of what technology can/will achieve, and I'm not disagreeing, but another omission, and a key building block of an RBE, is applying the technology to knowing what useful stuff we have on the planet, how much of it we have, and where it is. Ford scoffs at the idea of knowledge being on the web and not in people's heads:This rather goes against his high view of artificial intelligence, but surely he must accept by his own logic that an inventory of the earth's resources would be the ultimate application for technology, and the starting point of a properly planned - I assume he does not object to all planning - approach to our survival on this planet.

Protests against cuts ... and job losses?

Working in the public sector I share the anxiety that services are not (or not just) being made more efficient, but are being reduced. I don't share all the protesters' values though.

I want services to be more efficient. I don't want to create jobs, I want less work for humans. This was the big promise of technology, and we could do it.

What needs doing? How can we do it most efficiently now, and more efficiently in the future (answer: technology in the majority of cases)? There may be work left over for humans to do, but as little as possible, preferably.

Those in futile, pointless, socially destructive jobs, and jobs that can be done by technology are basically being paid for doing something that doesn't need doing by a human, or shouldn't be done at all, so they can get money to access the means to survive. Why not just arrange for everyone to have the means to survive directly, instead of creating pointless work (or worse still destructive work). Then people are freed from shackles and excel at what they are good at, benefitting humanity and themselves. Nothing else will do.

Motivation in an RBE - again

Once we have stopped doing work for its own sake, even if we have automated much of the remaining and truly necessary work, there will be the need for human input. Even Jacque Fresco and Peter Joseph accept that there will always be a residual need for human input even in the ultra-automated - 'cybernated' world they imagine when arguing for an RBE.

We seem to have the assumption that people are only motivated by money, but this flies in the face of many facts or apparent facts:

• There are many people working philanthropically who are plainly motivated by doing good rather than by money. Some do good in their professional capacity, some in their own time. If the latter could be freed up from doing whatever they have to do to get paid, to doing what they want to do, there would be step change in doing good.
• People drop out of the rat race - including from highly paid jobs - and not all go off to 'find themseleves' - many take up careers that they believe are more worthwhile.
• Money in itself cannot be an incentive, because it is useless until you buy something with it. Being motivated by making money (over and above what is necessary) is in effect being motivated by having more, or a prior, call on goods and services than other people. Is this really the motivation we want for our society?
• The studies explained by Daniel Pink in his TED talk (which can be seen on internet video sites), and other work.

If we were to have a money-free world, and some problem with motivation were perceived, would we bring back money as an incentive, or would we try to find other motivational means?

Autonomous Auto

http://searchengineland.com/google-working-on-auto-driving-cars-52646

Google, whose mission is "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful" have created a car that is autonomous, using satnav, cameras, sensors etc to operate the car in a real world driving situation. The aim of this project is to reduce collisions.

The idea that machines can do things more reliably and safely than humans is a hard one to accept, as witnessed by Ben McLeish's story about the woman who was terrified in a Docklands Light Railway train in London (trains which have been computer driven since 1987) and was only consoled when a human "driver" was put in place (he just pretended).

In an RBE, we would extend our capabilities as much as possible using technology. If this saved us doing work, we would welcome it. Why do we want to do something a machine can do. And if tech can produce cars that don't crash, can't crash, then safety laws become irrelevant.

Making life difficult for ourselves on purpose is good - ?

In Rail magazine, issue 646 (16-29 June 2010) 'Industry Insider' (pseudonym) writes that because of the recession/cuts "there will be some gains [in rail use] from people who have to travel longer distances to find work". Not sure if he really means to find work - perhaps he means to get to their job, with there being fewer jobs, but what a perversity of the current system!

It seems pretty basic that all the things that need doing should be in a database, along with all the people that can do them, so that the two can be matched. The idea of "finding" vacancies is quite ridiculous in a technological age. Why are we hiding them? Do we not want to find the best person for the job? Why do job seekers - even the name suggests the wrong-headedness of the system - have to trawl through umpteen separate sources of vacancies, some advertising the same posts. It's just a waste of resources.

But the idea that it is somehow good to waste time and resources travelling further because it benefits the railway is just absurd. I am not criticising 'Industry Insider' particularly, but a system in which we apparently make it deliberately harder to do the things that need doing to be done and wasting resources is OK if it makes money or creates jobs. I am assuming for the sake of argument that these people are doing or seeking to do things that need to be done - ie things that have a social return. If not, it's worse still. Further true progress would be to get machines / computers ("cybernation") doing as many of the things that need to be done ("have a social return") as possible. Whyever not?

ZM/TVP from first principles

Why does The Zeitgeist Movement (TZM) appeal to me and so many others:

(1) It recognises that the creatures on this planet have to live within the finite resources of this planet. This is a plain, unalterable fact, though you wouldn't think so from the waste we produce and the lie that is continual growth and continually increasing consumption. This is the starting point of the idea of a resource based economy.

(2) It embraces technology. We were all told that technology would give us more free time. Hmm. Some are unemployed because of technology - and therefore poor. Those working in the information economy are working just as hard, if not harder, but just producing more. The idea of technology freeing us up to do what we're good at and want to do is - frankly - wildly exciting. Jacque Fresco and thus TZM refers to cybernation - a slightly quirky word meaning computerisation, automation, mechanisation combined (probably).

(3) It clearly denounces the perversity of money. People have to have it. If you go into a shop to buy something, it is unlikely that the shopkeeper will tell you that you can get a better and/or cheaper equivalent in another shop. If you work in a tobacconist's you want more people to take up smoking. If you work in the arms industry, you want more war. [I say "you want" in each case - more precisely I should say "it is in your interest for there to be"]. I'm not sure that this perversity can be cured by monetary reform, even if the problem of money supply and money as debt could be. All the while we have to compete for the necessities of life through the proxy of money we have a problem.

How to help people into employment in rural areas

http://www.idea.gov.uk/idk/core/page.do?pageId=19225665

I only saw the header for this article and it prompted me to write to Idea about Resource Based Economy and the ideas of The Zeitgeist Movement (TZM). I'm writing my response here in the public domain, rather than just on the closed discussion boards of Idea.

My first point is practically verbatim from The Venus Project (TVP): It is not jobs/money that people need, it is access to the necessities of life. Peter Joseph, founder of TZM says that if a job does not have a 'social return' it should not be done. A 'social return' is something that benefits humanity / the planet - that is it helps us in - or at least does not hinder us from -living sustainably on this planet within the resources available to us as we quite plainly must do - hence Resource Based Economy (RBE).

In an RBE, it's only jobs with a social return that get done - and they get done the most efficient way possible, which means automation / mechanisation as much as possible - 'Cybernation' in TVP language. Remember, it's not jobs/money that people need but access to the necessities of life - so we must access 'the necessities of life' as efficiently and sustainably as possible. Such jobs as can't ever be cybernated- which would be few - would be done by humans.

In the current system, people have to get a job to get money to access 'the necessities of life'. This may take them away from doing something with a social return - bringing up children, say, to doing something with no social return, say giving out leaflets at the station. In our value system the second is worthwhile as it's a job earning money but the first is undesirable as it's not (unless it's a paid child carer, paradoxically). It's plainly nuts.

To step it up several levels, does anyone really accept that it's OK for millions of people to be starving - even die of starvation - because they haven't got enough money to buy food, because they haven't got a job? This is an utter disgrace. Some people argue that the planet is overpopulated - but who says it's the people with the money who get to say who lives and who dies?

Or take it from a political stance. Working in the armaments industry is a job, but to use arms, we need wars. Therefore there's an incentive to start or escalate wars to generate jobs in the arms industry. How sure are we that the fighting our forces are carrying out is entirely to rid the world of 'evil dictators' or 'terrorist organisations' and not at least in part to generate work in the arms industry?

The need for people to work to get money to access the necessities of life is completely opposite to the need to be efficient as only 'cybernation' can bring efficiency - look at automation in the car industry and agriculture for obvious examples. Also the need to keep people in work means that companies need to compete with each other to sell things. Those things must not be as reliable and durable as possible because that won't keep people in work repairing or replacing them. This means they land up as waste - maybe even in landfill - but no matter, the waste industry creates more work.

If you work in a company that produces anti-cancer drugs, you need people to get cancer so that you can sell your product and stay in work.

On a more human level, people doing jobs with no 'social return' are wasting their lives "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers" as Wordsworth put it. People doing jobs with a negative social return are wasting other people's lives.

To add to all this, the money system is totally broken. Practically every country owes money and not enough money exists to pay back all the debts. Therefore one or more countries have to go bust.