Kelos's goal was to enable almost everyone to receive half your income from diversified investments by about age 50.
That could lower the nominal work week to 20 hours. Herbert Marcuse defined toil as work you do not choose to do. All other work he viewed as play. His only optimistic book, Eros and Civilization, greeted automation as an important way to liberate mankind. In his opinion, if we can reduce toil to less than 25 hours per week, we would see a dramatic, extremely positive, change in civilization. Mark Goldes Co-Founder, Chava Energy CEO, Aesop Institute www.chavaenergy.com www.aesopinstitute.org 707 861-9070 707 497-3551 fax ________________________________________ From: alain.coetm...@gmail.com [alain.coetm...@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Alain Sepeda [alain.sep...@gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, January 26, 2013 11:50 AM To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Subject: Re: [Vo]:Another article about the impact of automation on employment as explained in the wired, and as experienced in the 50s, the automation will reduce some work, but create others that we don't imagine, or we don't dare to. there is also old need that will be covered better like elderly care, better health care, disabled care, ... vacation will develop (I don't understand why people in US don't imagine that worktime will change). about deconcentrating wealth, during technology transition the card are redistributed and the old riche , keep their wealth, but since all other wealth increase, they are relatively lowered if they don't adapt and innovate... this is why incumbent try to block innovation, typically by frightening the mass with fear to lose their old job... A bit like Malthusian ideas, that are spread by the fear of invation by enriched poors, and lead to manipulation of the mass to block the change. never seen a Malthusian prediction true. never seen a productivity increase bad for the population on long term... and you can even suspect that the trouble of technology change are not because of change, but because the incumbent try to block change, and use resource that would rather help to train the workforce to enter the new generation. 2013/1/26 Mark Goldes <mgol...@chavaenergy.com<mailto:mgol...@chavaenergy.com>> Louis Kelso, inventor of the Employee Stock Ownership Plan - ESOP - used by 11,000 companies, saw this coming decades ago. He suggested a Second Income Plan. See: SECOND INCOMES at www.aesopinstitute.org<http://www.aesopinstitute.org> for a current version. Independent of savings, it would open a path to end poverty, and provide the purchasing power removed from the economy when jobs rapidly disappear due to automation. It offers a way to harmlessly deconcentrate wealth. Mark Mark Goldes Co-Founder, Chava Energy CEO, Aesop Institute www.chavaenergy.com<http://www.chavaenergy.com> www.aesopinstitute.org<http://www.aesopinstitute.org> 707 861-9070<tel:707%20861-9070> 707 497-3551<tel:707%20497-3551> fax ________________________________________ From: Jed Rothwell [jedrothw...@gmail.com<mailto:jedrothw...@gmail.com>] Sent: Saturday, January 26, 2013 7:37 AM To: vortex-l@eskimo.com<mailto:vortex-l@eskimo.com> Subject: [Vo]:Another article about the impact of automation on employment See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-world-without-work-as-robots-computers-get-smarter-will-humans-have-anything-left-to-do/2013/01/18/61561b1c-61b7-11e2-81ef-a2249c1e5b3d_story.html This subject is starting to attract attention in the mass media. I wish cold fusion would. Cold fusion will lead to more unemployment than most breakthroughs, but not as much as improvements to computers. I have a chapter about that in my book. It is surprising how few people work in energy. Here is a thought-provoking table showing all major occupations in the U.S.: http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm That is the entire universe of work. Here are some comments I made about this table elsewhere: The economy has not produced any new "Major Occupational Group" since roughly 1880 (when precision manufacturing began) because every kind of labor we want done for us is already done. As I said, people have moved from one group to another, as the amount of labor ebbs and flows in different sectors. But there are no new groups, and robots will move into all groups simultaneously. . . . Granted, Category 15, "Computer and Mathematical Occupations" did not exist in 1880. But every task now done by "Computer" occupations was done back then by people in category 43, "Office and Administrative Support." All of the other occupations in this list were already in existence by 1880. Most of them existed in Heian Japan, for that matter. There are no new tasks. That is to say, there are no occupations with novel outcomes or purposes that did not exist back then. The methods of achieving these purposes have changed. For example, in category 27 our methods of entertainment have changed, but the purpose -- entertaining people with fiction, music and so on -- is the same. There is a limited market for this. We cannot watch TV or listen to music 20 hours a day. Nearly all of the occupations on this list, and the sub-category occupations in the table, could be done better by a Watson-class computer than by a human being. . . . Someone else summarized the situation quite well: "Until recently, technology advances made machines stronger, faster, and more reliable than average Joes. But, even at the slow end, he was much better at mopping a floor, understanding speech, packing a box, or driving a lorry than even the best supercomputer. So, he had some major competitive advantages for just being human." - Jed
