Farmers are humanity’s first entrepreneurs. From a hunter-gatherer civilization that followed animals on the move to a settled farming community, the farmer became the foundation of not only a family’s but also a nation’s productive capacity. The farmer farms according to the laws of the land and adapts his physical habits to nature. They live their time with nature. And they are always focused on the future. We know that the narrower the gap in time between the past and the future, the more we can expand the “present,” that is, turn past events into future happenings, and focus quickly and broadly on the present moment to bring happiness not only to ourselves but also to those around us. They understand the nature of time and move naturally without thinking about it, as if it were an ingrained habit. They understand the seasons and have developed habits that align with the movements of the heavens. They get up early in the morning to watch their crops grow and tend to them accordingly. They have developed the tools they need to increase their productivity, and they have researched innovations in farming methods.
In a short period of time, humanity has been transformed by slave labor under long-standing class discrimination, blue-collar labor geared toward mass production, white-collar labor working alongside machines, and golden-collar labor trained in computer algorithms and standardized advanced processes. And there was an incredible increase in productivity, but this increase in productivity was formalized in the form of monopolized capital and universalized minimum subsistence for a small interest class. This has led to a growing need for a primordial orientation to the concept of time and freedom, which has been blurred by capital and labor. Carlo Rovelli explains the teaching of time in his book Time Does Not Flow. According to him, the idea of time goes back to Aristotle. Aristotle said that time is the measure of change.
Things are constantly changing, and we use time to measure and calculate these changes. Time is a way of organizing our situation in relation to the changes in things, and a way of positioning ourselves in relation to the changes and calculations of dates. There was someone who disagreed. Newton. He saw that real time flows regardless of objects or changes in objects, and that real time continues to flow coldly and equally even when all things stop and even the movement of our souls is frozen. There is a third person who unified this. Through the concept of space and time, he came to the philosophical idea that anytime, anywhere is always defined in relation to something else, and created the great science of relativity.
Since the Industrial Revolution, the ‘9 to 6’ way of working has been changing. Since the Industrial Revolution, humanity’s idea of “work” has long been based on eating three meals a day and providing at least eight hours of labor to maximize productivity. Despite the rise of the internet in the 2000s, this way of working is at the center of rapid change in 2020. We’re seeing a shift toward results-oriented work, away from useless emotional drain, and more individual responsibility and empowerment. Communication is still a problem area. However, the utilization of various work tools (asada, zoom, teams, etc.) and the evolution of data-driven thinking patterns will gradually solve the problem by making it a challenge.
“Why do we work?” is a fundamental question.
With the development of networks and alternative workforces such as robots, humans may experience a “collective alienation” from work that has been inevitable. Young people, who are supposed to be entering the new labor market, have been forced into involuntary unemployment due to a chronic lack of jobs for more than a decade. But more than that, unemployment and underemployment are a problem for all of us as a species in the age of the civilizational singularity. And we need to look at it as a problem solving challenge that goes beyond problem solving. That’s where the invention of unemployment comes in.
As Yuval Harari says, “The fear of machines taking jobs is not new, and the mass unemployment that was feared then has not happened. This is because outdated jobs have disappeared and new ones have evolved. Of course, there will be new jobs in the AI era. Virtual world architects, for example. But think about it. Will a 40-year-old taxi driver who loses his job to a driverless car be able to reinvent himself as a virtual world architect? They will eventually become ‘surplus human beings,'” he says, referring to our constant need to change.
Since the agricultural era, humans have changed, and although there have been differences in the role and value of labor, they have led to their own order and rules. We are on the verge of a society where robots will completely replace traditional manual labor, AI will continue to communicate human knowledge, and blockchain will automate distribution within communities. Virtual reality also brings us a history of new challenges. From 1811 to 1817, the Luddite movement to destroy machines led to the development of industry and the labor system, and on May 1, 1886, a general strike of 80,000 people in Chicago, USA, led to an eight-hour workday, giving birth to a new social class called the urban proletariat. And in the 21st century, the AI revolution will create a new class again. Faced with a declining human labor force, labor will become even more scarce, and environmental constraints will make it impossible to create jobs through economic growth. Therefore, we need to find a solution: invent a new kind of unemployment. The first is the reduction of working hours, which has ensured steady job creation even as productivity has increased since a century ago. In France, for example, the total number of annual labor hours fell from 55 billion in 1900 to 40 billion in 2015. We need a growth of consciousness that reduces working hours and moves to deeper human problem solving. And technological advances are creating new job concepts and breaking away from familiar ones. The threat in various media that almost all jobs will be replaced by artificial intelligence robots, including 85% of farmers, 80% of salespeople, 87% of taxi drivers, 52% of teachers, 57% of civil servants, 54% of doctors, 30% of lawyers, and 42% of soldiers, is a new fear.
We should think of a solution: the invention of unemployment. It is the creation of value in a hyper-personalized society that takes into account the civilizational change of humans. Through basic income, each person’s value capacity is expanded, and the focus is not on the number of hours worked, but on the value creation and empowerment of human communities. Humanity already experienced the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago
when the invention and mass production of machines led to unemployment and the Luddite movement, in which workers destroyed machines, but new industries were created and more jobs were created. Even now, we will evolve into a new type of freelance worker. The hope is that this will be a historic tipping point that will take us to the next level. The breakthrough in data technology will actually elevate humans to a higher level of mental civilization.