We imagined a utopian future where robots did our menial work so we were free to be creative. Instead we got a dystopian future where we do more and more menial work so our robots can poorly emulate creativity. It's not too late to turn it around, but that requires recognizing the humanity of 99.9% of people, and the 0.1% who own everything would rather create their own synthetic (subservient) humans than recognize the basic rights of the ones that already exist (and can make fun of them on Twitter).
They said the same thing about automation when the Industrial Revolution began a century or so ago. That the common worker would be liberated from the drudgery of labor and be free for creative and intellectual pursuits. The people who protested were ridiculed as Luddites who simply feared technology and progress.
Of course, because automation serves the interests of capital (being created by, and invested in, by the capitalist class,) the end result was just that workers worked more, and more often, and got paid less, and the capitalist class captured the extra value. The Luddites were right about everything.
I don't know why people expect the automation of intellect and creativity to be any different. Working at a keyboard instead of on a factory floor doesn't exempt you from the incentives of capitalism.
Subsistence farmers weren't cramped in filthy disease ridden workhouses, getting paid in company scrip, getting mangled by machines (OK they were but probably not as often) or being locked into burning buildings because preventing theft of stock was more important to owners than the lives of employees. And subsistence farmers owned what they produced and the means by which it was produced, whereas industrial workers owned nothing but the pennies in their pocket, and likely owed more than that to the company.
It took years of often violent protest for workers to return to even the basic level of dignity and rights once afforded to craftsmen and farmers. Not that the lives of subsistence farmers and craftsmen were good, but they were better than what the dehumanization of mass production and automation created.
But then comparing farmers and workers in this context is a bit specious. It would be more fair to compare, say, textile workers before the automated loom and textile workers after. Obviously the former had it much better off, which was precisely the problem automation was intended to solve.
The dream then was to go to America and become a farmer and OWN your own farm. No one dreamt to immigrate to America to work in the industrial factories.
Why was that the American dream at the time if farming was the worse option?
> I don't know why people expect the automation of intellect and creativity to be any different. Working at a keyboard instead of on a factory floor doesn't exempt you from the incentives of capitalism.
people are, unfortunately, and collectively, not ready to seriously interrogate the economic or political situations in which we find ourselves. we will never see the utopian promise of automation under capitalism. there will always be an underclass to exploit.
I hate to beat up on this because I agree with the spirit of it. But I think this is a little too cliche for my taste:
> that requires recognizing the humanity of 99.9% of people
I will go as far as to say there was never a time in history when people got rights because some other group “recognized the humanity in them” or something. No, it was through necessity. The plague in Europe caused a shortage of workers and brought an end to feudalism. Unions got us Saturdays off through collective action. The post-war boom and middle class prosperity happened because employers had no other options. Software engineering was lucrative because there was a shortage of supply.
Even if there is some future where robots do chores, that’ll only leave time for more work, not poetry writing time, unless there is a fundamental change in how the economy is structured, like I outlined above.
