Some Stuff I Wrote Again

I think some of it overlaps because I wrote this in multiple sessions. It's six pages double-spaced.

Edit: Now the text isn't black, like the page is.

Edit: The formatting is a bit screwed up because I had to set the text to default. This was copied from my Google document. But now it shouldn't be black or in bold (or super-bold). 
Edit: Everything is still black, so I'm making it all that shade of green I made it white now.


Technology has always affected what people do and modern employment is no exception. It has changed what people do and how they do it. This means that jobs have come and gone in different numbers. For almost all of time, everything was done by hand. There was plenty of work to do, as survival wasn’t quite as easy. Now, less and less is done by hand. More work is getting done, and something known as leisure time now exists. A lot of work can be done so fast that people don’t have to try nearly as hard to get everything done. Surviving takes much less work than it used to, and so does living comfortably. A few hundred years ago, doing things like washing clothing, making chairs, and getting food were time and effort consuming. Most people worked farms, and the crafting of furniture was often either done by a carpenter or yourself, both taking quite a bit of time. In these cases, everyone was doing something to get by--the farmer tends his crops and the carpenter makes things from wood for a living. Then complex machines came along and changed everything. The farmer that once paid twenty people to help him now only needs two as he can do most of the work himself. What used to take a lot of of effort then took much less, and so less people were needed. Then there’s the carpenter--someone creates a machine that can create dozens of chairs in a single day, rather than a single chair in a couple of days. However owns this machine can make quite a bit of profit, as they have something that is effectively dozens of carpenters that don’t need to eat, sleep, or get paid. When these machines are produced, many, many carpenters need to find something else to do. The same thing is seen with weavers and those who work with fabric and textiles. When the Spinning Jenny was invented, cotton production soared. A Spinning Jenny can handle eight spools at once, instead of only one. This means that yarn could be produced much faster. Sixteen-spool machines were also designed. The cotton gin also made it much easier to take seeds out of cotton, which boosted production too. After production of cotton skyrocketed, there was too much cotton, considering the supply was higher than the demand after a bit of having so much. In the end, far fewer people were needed for producing cotton. It’s in these situations that we see how technology has removed jobs.

    The other side is how technology has created jobs. During the Industrial Revolution, many people worked fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, for next to nothing. Most of the people were still alive, though. Employers needed many works for simple, repetitive work with the machines. Technology wasn’t so advanced that the machines were able to run themselves, so jobs were kept in this way. People were also needed for human services and resources, administration, designing, planning, and keeping things running in general. Even though not everyone had a job, most people were able to do something to get by. Since then, humans have done everything that machines can’t. But the number of things that have to be done by people has been going down. Where once we had bank tellers, we now have ATMs, which run 24/7 and don’t ask for a raise. We have answering machines to take calls for us. [Incomplete]

   

The number of ‘production jobs’ has consistently decreased over time, while total production has either stayed the same or increased. Because of this, the total wealth of the world has gone up, but the number of jobs has gone down. People have found jobs producing things machines can’t produce and doing service jobs, but how long can it last? Eventually [soon?] machines will be able to produce more delicate things and perform more complex tasks. An example is of ATMs--they replace human tellers. As machines become more intelligent, they’ll be able to do more jobs that humans used to do.

    As for human manufacturing, we’ll look at cars and iPhones. Right now, machines are great for putting together things like cars. THe work isn’t exactly delicate and requires strength. Because of this, machines are extensively used in the manufacturing of cars. If we look at iPhones, however, we see that they’re primarily assembled by hand, as machines just don’t have the dexterity to do something like that yet. There are two other sides to this though: look at the small parts of the iPhone, such as the computer chip. That can only be made by machines. It’s so small that everything in it has to be synthesized together in the beginning. Technology has been getting smaller for a long time, and eventually many things will need to be made the same way, as they’ll be so tiny. The pattern with size is that machines can do large and incredibly small things, but aren’t good at assembling medium-sized things. Humans are best are doing things in between, but machines are getting better. Foxconn, a company that employs over a million workers in China, is already replacing its assemblers with machines. The jobs that will be left are designers of technology, some administration, a few people for transportation, and mechanics to take care of the machines. Human service jobs are still required, but machines are also getting better at tending to people. Once they gain the ability to creatively think, much of it will be over.

    Eventually, and likely not too far off, almost all of the jobs will be in administering machines, designing things, and human services. We can’t have ten billion people doing that; there aren’t even five billion positions to be filled, which is over the world’s current population. The problem will only grow as the population does. The design of a super-intelligent AI, which would be able to design even smarter machines, would effectively replace most people like engineers and those in human services, too. That would leave very little left.

    Here is where another problem is seen--there are two things in the world there aren’t enough of, those being resources and jobs, which form an ironic combination. There’s not enough food? Get more farmers. We don’t need more farmers? Why don’t we have enough food? The world needs things to be done, but no one can do anything if no one has a job, as no one wants to pay for it. The world’s population is a such a level that resources can’t be mindless wasted. Thousands of years ago, society and economics were a bit simpler, so these problems didn’t exist. If people needed more resources, they moved to a new area. We can’t do that now.

    Related to this is the idea that capitalism is most efficient at using resources, as when profits are affected, people have an incentive to not waste things. But when their profits become so high that wasting is easier than reusing or recycling, and people get lazy, things start to become inefficient. It’s estimated that thirty to fifty percent of the food in the United States is wasted. There are starving people all over the world. There are starving children in the United States. This country also has a problem with obesity and being overweight. People are both wasting food and eating too much. Everyone could be fed, but instead they aren’t. One issue is distribution. The other is that few people want to donate ‘significant’ amounts of food. It’s “their food and they can waste it however they want.” This is a capitalist idea, one that has its roots in greed, that is harmful to society as a whole. This is not to say all capitalists are like that, but that way of thought is a part of capitalism itself. This problem is amplified when more people go without food, even when more than ever is being produced. When jobs go away, and the amount of food, or even total wealth, doesn’t decrease with it, society will either fall or be a horrible thing to live in (even more than it is now). This situation necessitates an overhaul of how all of this works. Not necessarily everything in the world, but a good portion.

[Onto a different section]

A possible solution is something that I’d call a ‘Distribution System.’ The term itself is fairly vague, but the main point is that a central body (the government) is responsible for distributing the things necessary for modern life. This may sound a bit like communism, and there are some similarities, but the two are not the same thing. Communism is a specific way of government, while a distribution government would be more of a category, as there’s a wide variety in how to do things. The idea is also quick to draw fear of a corrupt, repressive government that controls everything, such as the government seen in the Soviet Union under Stalin. This doesn’t have to be the case though. Personal freedom is something that I myself find to be very important, as life becomes a bit less worth living if it’s miserable. The government giving everyone food in proportion to individual needs doesn’t mean that you’re going to be forced to work in a factory in horrible conditions and will have no free will, being just another slave. What if everyone received food, shelter, and healthcare, so that they didn’t have to worry about getting by, but could get money from doing jobs or making money somehow? Even further is the ideal Utopian society. There, people wouldn’t need to worry about surviving, and people would do things for different reasons--not because they had to to survive, but because it was something they enjoyed. A person would be a doctor because they enjoyed helping others. A musician would create music because they felt good when people enjoyed their music. An architect would simply enjoy designing architecture.

For a society like this to exist, however, several conditions must be met. Society being very efficient with its resources and people in general being interested in helping society as a whole are the two main requisites. Basically, stop wasting everything and stop being [mean] to each other. With humans having been so horrible for so long, the second seems unlikely as of now, and so does the first with current general laziness.

[Onto a different section again]

  
  There are multiple possible outcomes. They are societal upheaval, global poverty, economic transition, or some currently unknown solution that keeps everything going forever without a need for such a change. The long term effe[reword this section]cts can include a drastic decline in global population, technological regression (we effectively go back in time three thousand years), | a destroyed or uninhabitable planet, or maybe even a Utopian society if things go right. (I just wish I lived long enough to see such things.)