From left to right: Google Founder Larry Page and Sergey Birn
Well I was just gonna post a lax and easy-going post today on Abolish Work but now I’ve got something to be irritated about.
So let me explain:
Of course I am all for people working less and people doing less stuff with their lives in general if that’s what makes them happy. But having someone like the co-founder of Google say shit like we shall eventually live in a time that “…robots and machines could help meet everyone’s basic needs much more easily.” makes me uneasy
If a libertarian said this then I wouldn’t be as worried about said person trying to use said robots and machines to more or less conquer the planet. But when the co-founder of a gigantic monopolistic corporation says this sort of stuff I can only imagine what sort of things that he’d have in store to “make it” so we’d have to work less. I am concerned that in the time that we wouldn’t be working it’d be Google World(tm) and not much else at that point if he got his way.
Some of this is obviously presumptuous to an extent and I admit that but man, I am not really about to trust the co-founder of Google with those robots and machines that are supposedly gonna help the slackers, loafers and good-for-nothings. Not for a second.
It also just kind of sucks when you have these rich fucks telling people that the answers to their problem that in the future most jobs will be obsolete. Whatever you think of the market today it isn’t hard to see why the rich people would be way more comfortable making said predictions than someone like me who is really poor. Of course they can say stuff like this because they don’t have to worry about their jobs going away if they had control. And even if they lost the job and somehow didn’t have as much control, why would they care even still? It’s not like it’s going to effect them.
What’s really going to effect corporations like Google in scenarios like this is who controls these robots and machines. Is it the workers? The bosses? The managerial class? The political class? The ruling class? Autonomous communities? Who exactly is going to have ownership over the new techno means of production? I can tell you one thing, it’s not exactly in the interest of Google (or their founders) to hand it over to the workers of as given firm or a given community, let alone an individual who wanted it to overthrow the economy that’s helped them become filthy rich.
So when rich folks like this say positive things about all of us “working less” I am always skeptical. Who are we working less for? Probably the company in question who is telling us we’ll be working less.
