It's a Friday night at 12:20. In Manhattan. Of course I'm married so I'm at home living conservador. But that doesn't mean I can't get drunk on Rioja and hit the blogosphere with a crazy futurist fantasy.
I think we've all heard a bit of political noise from the Tea Party over the past two years. These people are furious about spending right? Just not military spending. Or spending in the form of unnecessary tax cuts for the super rich. Or subsidies for churches. Additionally, the Tea Party can't even vaguely conceptualize the macroeconomic processes via which cuts in spending could contribute to the deficit.
The deficit, after all, isn't what bothers them. These people are people who weren't happy with Welfare, and that was before folks started collecting unemployment for years at a time. I can even vaguely emphasize with them. There is a species of anger that the assiduously productive instinctively feel toward the leisurely of our race. It was probably breed into us sometime shortly after the arrival of the city-state.
The interesting question is what will the world be like when the furious working poor and lower middle class leave the job market too? These people aren't indignant over deficits, they're indignant because they slave away at jobs they loathe while other people freeride for their salary at a purely negligible discount.
But all that is about to change. Within 10-20 years these people will not being working either because A) they're living upper middle-class lives in 2010 dollars not working and B) they will have essentially nothing to contribute to our society.
There's this thing in humans where we're never satisfied. If you told someone from the 16th century they could live in the Projects, get occasional medicare and receive foodstamps without working they'd probably think they had passed on into the celestial heavens. But, since human progress is a continuous process and not a discrete one, the human greed function transforms every "quantity of consumption" input into a "not enough" output even though the selfsame human clamoring for more would probably have dropped out of the labor force if promised the same goods and services for not working if you had offered him the entire package 10-15 years previously.
Ultimately though, the week is linear and human beings tend to sleep. There will come a time when welfare, and I don't mean checks and government cheese, I mean additionally quantities of social good other humans are no longer ambitious enough to try to grasp, will float around in something resembling a uniform distribution. Personalized services, crowdsourcing, robotics, natural language processing, gigantic amounts of free and opensource media, 3-dimensional printing: I love and believe in the human species but I seriously doubt 75-95% of people would work if they could eat gourmet food and experience a panoply of rich virtual environments for a price who's limit is approaching zero.
And what jobs would they do if they indeed had the urge to work? They express fury at all the cash register clerks and manufacturing workers lining up at the socialhandoutline now but do they really think that low-level office workers and carpenters are not automatable?
In a future filled with robots and houses where your appliances talk to you, in a world where a small mounted headset will fulfill any wish you ask of it, where cars drive themselves and not a human on earth works in manufacturing, manual labor or agriculture there will be a strange group of individuals, something like the personal computer hobbyists of the 70s, the Capitalists.
Capitalist 1: The Super-Greedy. Gordon Gekko. The 4th-generation superrich kid who must become an investment banker. The guy who planned to retire at 30, achieved the sufficient means to do it comfortably...and worked fevorishly until the day he died. For some people, nothing will ever be enough. Although the unemployed welfare recipient of her age can tour the entire solar system for free, she will insist on vacationing at Alpha Centauri and Vega. Maybe Gordon had a point, Greed, for lack of a better word is -
Capitalist 2: L'artiste: Vincent Van Gogh didn't achieve much in his lifetime. Much less Kafka. Kerouac wrote over 90% of his work before the publication of his third novel. Although certainly not all, there is some significant fraction of the population of world artists who would continue working without even the slightest chance of income.
Capitalist 3: The Creative Technologist: The most consistent flaw in my belief in the American Dream is apparent when I see how genuinely happy Richard Stallman looks and how cramped and uncomfortable Steve Jobs and Bill Gates look. Linux. Firefox. The Natural Language Toolkit. I don't think I have to convince you that people will write software for free....
Capitalist 4: The Gamer. Measures achieving some level of societal good will be programmed into enjoyable game-like formats. Play with your hand-controller, play with Kinect, play in immersive virtual reality environments, but no matter how you play, the derivative of your playtime will be some type of identified task that needed done for furthering of human society. This will all be done quite smoothly such that you don't have the slightest sentiment that you're working....
