In his latest piece for Huffington Post, writer and basic income advocate Scott Santens takes the perspective of a Martian observing life on Earth.
Such an extraterrestrial observer, Santens hypothesizes, would be baffled by the fact that the human race has failed to take advantage of technological progress to free itself from needless labor — but, on the contrary, finds itself working longer and longer hours:
“Incredibly, human beings are waking up early in the mornings to drive to offices to perform imaginary business in imaginary markets involving imaginary customers using imaginary money to buy imaginary goods and services instead of simply enjoying their non-imaginary and most definitely real lives with each other.”
Santens’ Martian substantiates its critique of humanity’s peculiar backwardness with multiple timely examples — including Google’s sale of its robotics company Boston Dynamics (the developer of Atlas and BigDog), which was prompted in part by negative publicity surrounding automation, and Johnson & Johnson’s discontinuation of the automated sedation device SEDASYS, which would have eliminated much of the need for anesthesiologists.
Reflecting on humans’ odd insistence that “machines not do their work for them,” the insightful Martian even weighs in on Robert Reich’s recent comment that mankind is not yet ready for a basic income:
“[P]erhaps humans should ask if not having a basic income is actually part of the reason there are any jobs still left for humans. Perhaps it’s the insistence on the existence of jobs that creates jobs, whether they need to exist or not.”
This — one of the main themes of the article — is a crucial point, yet one seldom made in discussion of automation. More typically, commentators suggest that technological unemployment might eventually drive a need for a basic income (including Reich, in the interview cited above). Santens turns this more standard argument on its head: technological unemployment ought to be something that we strive for, and a basic income is necessary to enable us to fully pursue this goal.
Those who still find the idea of decoupling income from work to be what is “alien” are well-advised to read this article and take heed.
Scott Santens, 5 April 2016, “Humanity Needs Universal Basic Income to Stop Impeding Progress,” Huffington Post.
Image: Boston Dynamic’s Atlas
Source: DARPA, Public Domain
