emmitt wrote:Yes, I don't think technological progress will help us in any substantial way right now or in the near future.
They substantially helped us in the past and are going to make half of jobs unneeded in a near future and yet they will not
substantially help?
Child-rearing is an activity that's often not remunerated nor appreciated. Once child-rearing is done communally, this activity will have to be shared. Elderly care will have to be communalized as well. Everybody's going to do this kind of stuff. It won't be primarily women who are actually doing most of this (either privately or professionally) right now.
I understand the logic but face it: we currently have 20% of real unemployment (taking into account people who're stuck with part-time jobs while they would want a full one, those who are early retired or deemed as socially handicapped, those who are unaccounted because they're out of the system or in jail, etc). Soon enough we will have 40%. And now you want to equally share the workload of elderly care between they and me who work 80h a week?! While at the same time I will still have to provide them with 50% of my income in order to finance universal income and public services?!
Is it really fair?
The only solution for this to work is to alleviate my workload. But since you cannot share it, it means less automation and productivity. Which in turn will increase the need of unskilled and ingrate work.
The category of administering, directing and planning will have to be more inclusive as well.
I do agree on this however. We need to extend democracy, both intensively (better democracies) and extensively (to include the professional sphere). Those are the professional activities that can be shared, although they will not weigh much on the total work time (there are few managers per employee). Note however that many employees hate doing this kind of executive stuff and many employees are not willing to go out of their comfort zone even against a financial compensation ; I have a direct experience of this with technical teams who were asked to take over a part of the decision and executive process. The latter requires more social interactions and many techies dislike it for example. You can distinguish spheres of preferences: manual work, abstract reasoning, social interactions, organization, outdoors, indoors, etc.
The same is true of creative activities. These things are all monopolized at the moment. A more participatory approach will have to be utilized.
They're not monopolized. However:
a) There is a lot more offer than demand.
b) People wants the graphist/composer who made this specific piece. Or this guy who has this very good portfolio. Not random graphist #154684861 or random composer #484464231. Everyone today is exposed on the web, those are the professional and individual consumers who willingly select the same guys. Are you going to remove the freedom to choose to who you entrust a work? More generally, are you going to administratively distribute employees to enterprises rather than let them select who they want to work with? Will you also empty museums of their masterpieces to put random pieces taken from deviantart instead?
c) Anyway only a small fraction of the population has creative skills. This is a skilled activity. But better softwares and AI will help on this point.