our obsession with jobs might trap us – everything could look like healthcare, still using fax machines when email and text exists.
“sorry I know this is possible via AI but we have our manual spreadsheet guy, following regulation 1284”
Leaving aside the word “AI”, because it’s not clear how expansive the use case for current AI really is, there’s a point here and it’s an important one.
He’s exactly right about our obsession with jobs, but I’d state it a different way:
It’s our obsession with distributing resources through money gained by jobs. A pre-requisite of speedy technological adaptation is people knowing they won’t be hurt by it.
Recently we had the longshoreman’s strike. The issue that caused the strike is machines replacing workers. Longshoreman jobs are some of the few blue collar labor jobs that pay well. If the longshoremen lose them, most will never get a job again that pays as well.
But the issue isn’t the job. It’s the money. And the money is just a proxy for resources: housing, food, heat, cold, transport, medical, entertainment and so on. No money and your life is shit, and probably short. Not much money means misery in most cases.
Labor; which is to say the proletariat, people who have to sell their labor to survive, embrace technological change when it benefits them, when it doesn’t hurt them, or when they have no choice.
During the industrial revolution people were forced off the land thru enclosure. They worked in factories 12 hours a day, for 6 1/2 days a week because they had no choice.
After WWII in America, people flooded off the farms into the cities and suburbs because jobs that provided a better standard of living for less work were abundant.
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This lesson goes far beyond workers. No one wants change that hurts them. One of the main factors stalling industrialization in most countries was that most land couldn’t be bought: it was controlled by nobles or the Crown and they didn’t sell land if they could help it. The land was the basis of their wealth and power. Until they either perceived otherwise or they lacked the power to keep their land, they wouldn’t sell. (The game Victoria III, while not a very good game, is great for modeling this. Play Japan or Dai Viet and you will FEEL this: sheer hate of reactionary landowners holding you back.)
There was also the issue of money: for most of the Dark Ages and Middle Ages you couldn’t borrow large amounts of money, in part because the Church was against lending at interest and the Church was powerful. (There were other reasons, Economists include them in their hand waving of “primitive accumulation of capital” which is why sociologists, anthropologists and historians have written most of the important literature in the area.)
If you want change, whether technological or social, you either have to get people to be OK with it (for it, or not mind) or you need to remove their power to resist.
It is that simple.
Machiavelli famously noted that men do not change. Whatever they are like, whatever their normal personality and way of doing things, they stick to it. Fabius Maximus, faced with Hannibal, retreated to fortified fastnesses and refused to engage. This was the right thing to do, but when he once again had enough men, he still refused to engage. This is how Scipio Africanus wound up being the general to defeat Hannibal.