The intelligent car is a promise of free time. The end of work as a hope or a curse.
All this thanks to the help of the replicant, the one who calculates with a speed that we are unable to reach, the one who predicts, suggests, supports us, with the precision that reduces errors, the one who works for us, without feeling the fatigue. It is he who profoundly changes the structure of society. He is the subject who makes us useless. He is the one who gives us time and takes away work. He is the manager and the employee. It is the worker, the taxi driver, the truck driver, the carer, the waiter, the teacher, the bricklayer, the auditor, the plumber, the electrician, the banker, the representative and any white collar worker, the technician of anything and yes, even journalists and the like.
Will there be other jobs? Maybe, but they won't cover the lost ones. This is where we need to start, even if we don't know the boundaries of this journey. Awareness matters a lot in this story.
The first certainty is that the global capitalism of intelligent machines cannot afford the disappearance of the consumer. Production costs will always be lower, but if there is no one who buys, the goods remain unsold. There is no profit to be made with warehouse stock. The consumer, in fact, buys if he has a salary or an income. This revolution, deeper than the invention of the mechanical loom and the steam engine, is the last act of that journey that began with the internet network and with the breakthrough of Google (global database) and virtual squares. The McKinsey Global Institute claims that half of human jobs could be replaced by machines within 20 years. The International Monetary Fund speaks of 40 percent, but in less time.
However, these are only hypotheses and, after all, we are here to divine the future, some are more optimistic, others are pessimistic. The fundamental question, the one that could be scary, is whether we are really at the end of the job. If in the next hundred years we find ourselves dealing with large masses without employment. It is, in fact, a social and economic revolution. What to do? There are those who believe the use of universal citizenship income is inevitable, for everyone, even for those who have a job, so as not to create differences and conflicts.
It is the most direct solution to save the wage bill and, therefore, the global consumer.
All this is clearly not at zero cost. The first is economic: who pays the universal income? States will probably try to involve large private groups that will make immense profits thanks to artificial intelligence. It is no coincidence that we have been thinking about the idea of transferring a large part of taxation from humans to machines for some time. It seems like a dystopian scenario, but not thinking about it would be a mistake. On the other hand, the resources for universal income should be found somewhere. However, here a rather disturbing scenario opens up.
A second's pause. What is the spark of democracy? On what principle is the sovereign asked to give up a slice of absolute power? The origin could be article 12 of the Magna Carta, or the provision that the king of England John Plantagenet (Robin Hood's John Without Land) was forced to grant to the barons of the Kingdom on 15 June 1215. They are just four words : no taxation without representation. It is the cornerstone of the freedoms in which the patriots of the American Revolution recognize themselves. It's the Boston Tea Riot.
Dear sovereign, if I pay taxes I have the right to have my say in parliament. Taxation as a demand for democracy. Now, with universal income, the opposite phenomenon occurs. It's a mirror. It is the “sovereign” who pays you and, at that point, representation becomes a sort of favor. If your survival depends on state charity, what voice do you have left to claim your rights?
The promise, the exchange, then becomes free time. It is liberation from work. It is the end of the exploitation of man by man. It is the final point of alienation. The end of paid work allows you to cultivate your true interests. There are those who go fishing, those who read, those who write, those who work with wood, those who think and those who simply enjoy daily idleness.
As Marx writes in the Grundrisse, the individual finally escapes the “serpent of his sorrows”. It is precisely the vision of the individual.
It is the hope of a better human being, conditioned by the hopes of a nineteenth-century philosopher who marked the centuries to come. It is strange, however, that Marx's creative idleness stands out for once from the masses. It is the self that dreams of emancipating itself from the slavery of work. What will the masses do?
It is not certain that they are so different from the urban ones of the first century BC. It is the Rome of Caesar and Pompey. It is the Rome of the plebs that survives thanks to the grain of the Republic and spends its time blaspheming this and that in the crowd of the forum. It is the Rome of Milo and Clodius, two factions in constant struggle in the streets and at the crossroads, one which supports the optimates, the other for the populares. A civil war between ultras. Clodius, brother of Catullus' Lesbia, was killed at Bovillae on the Appian Way. Milo falls from the walls in the Turino countryside, hit by a stone from the besiegers. The civil war instead seems to continue century after century. It is free time that becomes binary and ideological, just like now, in the season of social media.
It is the free time not of individuals, those who lounge and create, those who go fishing, but of the squares where everything is politics.