[ExI] keynes vs hayek again, was: RE: 3d printers for sale

[Anders Sandberg]

On 27/08/2012 23:49, Stefano Vaj wrote:
> On 27 August 2012 22:36, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se 
> <mailto:anders at aleph.se>> wrote:
>
>     I am often thinking about this, since I live an ultra-privileged
>     life as an Oxford scholar. Sure, I do grant hunting and need to
>     publish or perish, but let's face it: it is a creative job with no
>     heavy lifting, light demands and very flexible hours in a lovely
>     place.
>
>
> Mmhhh.  I suspect that "creative" work, either as a philosopher or a 
> music composer or an entrepreneur or even a politician, can actually 
> be much more demanding, competitive, challenging and actually painful 
> and/or risky than a 9-to-5 clerk-level employment.

Richard Florida made the point that the creative class in many ways is 
more stressed than the service class. It might be a better kind of 
stress than the stress of fearing for your position when you pull 
all-nighters to make your startup work or because you cannot drop a 
mathematical problem. Knowing that you better come up with fresh and 
unique ideas to do your job is deeply unsettling. 9-to-5 work has a 
natural cut-off, but creative work doesn't, and if not managed right 
will eat your life. However, I think the feeling of being in control 
over one's life (no matter how real or imaginary) outweighs the direct 
stress.

There is plenty of workism around saying that it is good to work 
(usually based on some kind of protestant assumption of 
self-mortification or a variant of my Aristotelian virtue theory). But 
this is unlikely to motivate many to dig ditches or be clerks if they 
don't have to. The tricky part about creative work is that it often 
seduces us: we do it because it is rewarding, and before we know it we 
cannot drop it. In a post-scarcity world the creatives are likely nearly 
as stressed as now.

Over the long span we have a transition from a society were all levels 
of human skill are economically competitive, over a situation where 
automation makes skills under some certain level cheaper to do by 
technology, to a situation where nearly all human skill is redundant. 
This transition makes society in general much richer, since the cost of 
producing wealth goes down. The current headache is how to re-school 
people whose jobs have been substituted by technology (either to 
something completely different or to jobs enabled by this substitution) 
or find some other way to ensuring their livelihood. This is likely 
driving lots of current stress in society. But just as scary as lack of 
food and shelter is loss of social status. Many people get their social 
positions from their jobs (or think they do), and that is threatened by 
this trend even if there is an endless supply of material security. In 
fact, if material security doesn't matter then social status becomes 
nearly the only thing. So this suggests that high-status people are 
going to react even less well to automation of their jobs than 
low-status people. So it might be the creatives who have the worst 
situation in the long run: they self-identify with their skills, and 
automation threatens their self concepts.

Maybe the proles are going to be the long-term winners.  Although I do 
not think we should underestimate human creativity in creating status 
markers.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Faculty of Philosophy
Oxford University

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