People need jobs

This is something often heard, but a little examination reveals it to be untrue. People need jobs to get money and they need money to get food, warmth, shelter, clean water, etc - the basics of life. Needing to get money to access the basics for life must be the world's most outstanding immorality and we should be ashamed as a species that people are dying for want of food, water, shelter and other basics.

Our job as a species is to ensure that we survive and thrive as a species, which must include ensuring we safeguard the planetary resources that are essentially all we've got to survive on. The jobs that need doing are those that enable us to survive and thrive as a species. Plainly, if some or all of those jobs can be done by technology, that frees up human energy for doing those things that need some human involvement, or those things that aren't strictly necessary for our survival - like food and water - but which add quality to our lives - say art in its broadest sense.

At the moment, technological progress is held back because people "need" jobs for reasons explained. We have created a system in which our own ingenuity cannot work entirely in our favour.

If people should have to work to survive how can we make moral decisions about what work should be done? Why shouldn't someone go out and be - to take an extreme example - a drug dealer? The reasoning is that drug abuse is seen as being socially destructive. I'm not saying it is or isn't - the point is that why should anyone have to do a socially destructive job? There's nothing illegal about being a tobacconist, but the dangers of tobacco use are well known and we're employing people to try to stop people from smoking and to treat people who have become ill because of tobacco as well as people to sell cigarettes. It doesn't make any sense.

Some work is not necessarily socially destructive, but could be done by technology, but isn't because then people would lose their jobs, and therefore not get any money and therefore not be able to get the essentials in life.

I was on a course recently and the instructor was reluctant to give out electronic versions of his materials in case others should start teaching the same course and do him out of a job. This means money holds back education. I don't plame the instructor - that's what the system does. Derren Brown was on TV doing a documentary about a technique which claims to help blind people(even if they have no eyes) see - the Bronnikov method. At one point they weren't allowed to film because the method is a commercial product and they have to preserve their income. I expect the Bronnikov method is all bunkum, but the point is if it worked, or if some other technique or medicine works, how can we call ourselves civilised whilst not making it available as widely as possible without reference to money?

In the musical stage show "Britain's got Bhangra" the rapper character uses the hero's recordings to "mash up" a music track for himself. He is seen as having stolen the singer's work, but by inference this has deprived him of money and therefore the essentials of life. So, we are not to have a new piece of art derived from / built upon an old piece of art because it doesn't suit the monetary system. Even in the sphere of our aesthetic achievements money holds us back.

John Seddon, the inventor of the Vanguard method (Systems Thinking for services), based his method on the Toyota Production System (TPS) in which the customer "pulls" a car through the manufacturing system, so that only a car that is ordered is made and inventory and costs are kept low. One criticism of systems thinking is that a 'system' can itself be a subsystem - Seddon himself warns against optimising subsystems - he often uses call centres, which seek to optimise the phone answering subsystem but fail to help optimise the greater system of which they are a part.

The people buying a car from Toyota are in fact "pulling" a transport or mobility solution, or to abstract it a step further, they are pulling a solution to the problem that they are (sometimes) not where they need to be to achieve something they need or want to achieve. Keep abstracting a system further and further and you will reach the idea of the earth as the system to be optimised. Even the earth is a subsystem, but our scope for optimising the solar system or the universe is severely limited compared to our scope for optimising the earth.

Perhaps we are competing for scarce resources and perhaps money is a medium for allocating those resources, but it is also the means by which the resources are squandered. We have to have built in obsolescence - products which don't last as long as possible - so that money can stay on the move, but this leads to the cycle of consumption and terrible waste.

Returning to the work that needs doing for the true success of our species, and that can't be automated, there is the question of what will incentivise people to do it. Perhaps there is a role for money here, but also consider that people do and have all kinds of good things voluntarily, every day, for the good of society. It seems most work is currently done to get money rather than for the furtherance of our success as a species. If we stopped doing all that work, would there really be much left to do? Even if we didn't do all that we could, if we stop spoiling our planet and killing each other on purpose (war), it would be a major step forward.

This piece is my take on The Zeitgeist Movement and The Venus Project