MINDLESS MUSINGS

The promise was fantastic! Machines would do all the hard work, and we would have loads more free time. All the work that needed doing could be done faster with the help of technology. We could smash the required tasks faster and clock off. The same would apply to household chores and maintenance. All the tedious tasks could be done by machines. The trickier stuff could be done much more efficiently with the help of technology until we could palm that shit off to robots or whatever too. The future was looking good indeed.

An 80s cartoon called The Jetsons captured this life of leisure and convenience very well. George works 1 hour a day, 2 days a week and supports his wife and two children. People live in skypad apartments and drive aerocars. Surrounded by robots and all sorts of time and labour-saving devices things have turned out very well for the average worker.

It appears that all the humans need do now is ensure that the machines are well maintained and just chill out. Of course, things go haywire every now and then, which is where most of the comedy for the show springs from. That and people complaining about the glitches and ‘how hard they work’ (we’re never fully satisfied remember).

In this utopia, relaxation and ease seem to be the prize. I suppose the main concern in this kind of lifestyle would be entertainment. Not exactly lofty heights in terms of human achievement, but it beats working, right?

So, what happened?

Why are we still working our asses off despite all the modern advancements?

Yeah, the machines made it possible for 1 man to do the work of ten, but then the goal post moved and 1 man was expected to produce that much for the same wage as the other guy. “We’re not going to pay you the wages of ten men! The machine is doing most of the work. It cost money to buy and maintain you know? Get back to work!”

The output increased, but so did the population and the potential profits for the people on top. I shudder to think how many times the poor grunts working in the industrial revolution era factories felt a glimmer of hope that their lot might be made a little easier thanks to some new whiz-bang machine. Only to discover that they would just be expected to produce more instead of being able to work less.

Looking back, we can see that things never really slowed down thanks to technology. The industrialists were competing with each other, and the workers were just one part of the profit-making apparatus. Here comes that fucked up contradiction again: The big-hearted owner who decided to let production stay at a steady rate and allow his workers to have better work conditions and quality of life would have eventually gone out of business. Those workers he cared so much about are now unemployed because their company couldn’t compete with Bastards Inc.

The only way things ever improved was through worker uprising in the form of united industrial action. This worked because it made not compromising with your staff a very costly exercise; but it was an ugly business. The only durable way conditions could be improved was through legislation. A law that forced all the magnates to play by the new rules. Oh, they’ll never stop searching for loopholes and any additional edge on their competitors, but messing with the government can be very dangerous and expensive, so they had to comply and probably dobbed any competitors in for ‘cheating’.

After all that, here we are, in the future (those 18^th century workers future) and the Jetsons lifestyle is still a fantasy. A large portion of us are now just an appendage to some kind of machine rather than a worker using a tool. Computers and machines are more productive than entire factories back then. We’re still working ridiculous hours and still struggling to make ends meet.

We have all kinds of ‘timesaving’ gadgets which have become necessities just so we can keep up. Amazing new entertainment and distractions galore! The ability to shop and gamble away our earnings in the palm of our hands.

Stay on track, stay on track. Plenty more posts to cover all of that.

The gag isn’t that the Jetsons world never came to be, the real joke was that people have been dreaming about this technological utopia for much longer than we think. The scary thing to me is that we may be the first to, not just realise it’s not coming, but that it could go in any number of other ways, and we have (not that we ever did) very little we can do about it.

The machines are going to do most of the work for us. Unfortunately, there may not be any work for a lot of us to do when that happens. How you interpret that outcome could be great or it could be horrible.

I guess we should just be happy that we’re not living in The Terminator (1984 film) future – now that would suck! We are well passed the date when Skynet turns on us, but shit man, that’s just a movie…