Why do we work? In our current economy, we work for many reasons. We work to earn money, pursue a passion, express creativity, fill a societal or economic need, entertain ourselves, maintain dignity, and generally feel worthwhile. In the early days of human existence, people worked to satisfy basic survival needs. I imagine these needs were food and shelter. As early human culture moved from a nomadic one to permanent settlements, members probably shared community space, but might have divided some territory into private living spaces. As this evolved, the division of labor focused less on hunting and gathering (although these efforts were still important) and more on maintaining and improving shelter and agriculture. Still, the work that people did was primarily essential to survival.
In this early scenario, I don’t imagine that individuals accumulated private wealth. As some people came up with ideas for better crop production or better ways to live more comfortably, these innovations were shared. But somewhere along the way this changed. We can image how the concept of private property came about. My uninformed imagination sees a family whose living shelter and the land around it lay in the path to the river or the hunting grounds, or some other essential territory, and that families came up with the idea of requiring some kind of material exchange before granting other villagers access to these essential spaces. These families began to accumulate wealth at the expense of the other villagers. And somewhere along the line instead of sharing crops, livestock, and other essentials, some began to hoard them. I wonder if these arrangements were widely accepted or met with resentment and resistance?
Today there are estimated to be over 900 billionaires in the Unites States. Did the accumulation of their wealth begin in prehistoric times as cultures transformed away from nomadic ones? Greater minds than mine can weigh in on this, but I think the parallels are real. Billionaires in the United States and others among the super wealthy whose incomes fall just below the $1 billion threshold control many of the resources of the world, and exercise control over the other 342 million American citizens by controlling the job market and the availability of the products and services that enable survival and/or contribute to a higher standard of living. We serve the interests of billionaires by paying them, directly or indirectly, for the products and services they control, and by working for them to create these products and/or provide these services.
Many observers of our culture and our economy see that those whose wealth enables them to control our culture and our economy are replacing the work that Americans do with artificial intelligence (AI). As this happens, people whose work added value to our society are finding themselves unemployed, and finding it difficult to obtaining new employment. I am not making an argument here against this phenomenon. It is probably inevitable. But I think it’s important to consider how we will adjust.
A high unemployment rate might mean a mismatch between the skills of the unemployed, but it might also mean that we need fewer people to do the work that supports our high standard of living. We have temporary programs to provide assistance to the recently unemployed, but what if the need for human work continues to shrink? What if technology and machines, including AI, make our work unnecessary?
The decision to replace human workers with AI (I use the term worker to include professionals as well any anyone earning wages or a salary) is made by executives who may or may not be billionaires, but are among the most wealthy members of our society and are in a position to increase their wealth by driving less affluent people out of the work force. Should the economy punish those who are left permanently unemployed due to the shrinking need for their talents, skills, and experience?
If each of the billionaires in the United States (cited as 902 recently) were assumed to hold exactly 1$ billion in wealth (an obviously low estimate) this would amount to $902 billion. Our current unemployment rate is around 4.4%. The estimated adult population of the United States in 262 million. Clearly not all of these adults are employed or are seeking employment, but for purposes of simplification I will assume that they are. This oversimplification suggests that there might be as many as 11,528,000 adults without employment. Multiplying this by the median American household income of $84,000 (many households have more than one wage earner, but I’ll use this figure to keep it easy), there are potentially $968 billion in lost income for the unemployed. Again, assuming that the total wealth of American billionaires is $902 billion, dividing this by the estimate of 11,528,000 unemployed adults, there would be $78,244.27 available for every unemployed American. If every billionaire donated 50% of their wealth (leaving them with $500 million) to the unemployed, there would be just under $40,000 for each one.
These figures are wildly inaccurate. The population estimates are based on Google queries, and the figure of $1 billion in wealth for each billionaire is extremely low, and wrongly assumes that billionaires would have a large proportion of their wealth to sacrifice annually. It also does not consider the super rich whose wealth may fall just below the $1 billion threshold. And who knows how many adult Americans are actually without employment? I have included these figures just to make a point. As AI and other technologies increase the number of jobs lost while allowing corporations to increase profits, and as the changing needs of society might mean that the need for human work decreases, how will we respond? Could we ever reach the point where we accept that the concept of full employment is a fantasy, and that the country has enough wealth to provide a livable income for life to those whose skills, talents, and experiences are no longer needed? Or, on the other hand, should we expect government to identify needs and provide jobs that fill a need that the private sector cannot meet profitably? This last idea is objectionable in the eyes of the wealthy.
Could we ever accept a society consisting of a huge leisure class – a leisure class where AI make many types of work obsolete? If sustaining our standard of living only requires, say, 50% of the adult population to be employed, could we support this luxury? Or, instead of a permanent leisure class, we reduced the work week to 20 hours, and allowed people to share jobs. I worry that we might end up thinking that people have to have full-time jobs for the sake of working alone, not to contribute products or services that support or enhance our standard of living. Instead of assuming that the unemployed, and especially the recently jobless, should be pounding the pavement to find new work, could we accept that the economy no longer needs them? If we support more leisure time for our population, might we find more creative and imaginative ways to fill our time, perhaps ways that enhance our standard of living in ways we can’t currently conceive? Or would our increased leisure time result in people behaving in ways that are harmful to our culture and society? Or would it create a greater role for government to identify new societal needs to employ displaced humans to fill these needs? I don’t have answers, but I think it’s important to raise and consider these questions.