[Doctorow-L] Column: Full Employment

[Cory Doctorow]

My latest Locus column is "Full Employment," in which I forswear "Fully
Automated Luxury Communism" as totally incompatible with the climate
emergency, which will consume 100%+ of all human labor for centuries to
come.

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

This fact is true irrespective of any breakthroughs in AI OR
geoengineering. Technological unemployment is vastly oversold and
overstated (for example, that whole thing about truck drivers is bullshit).

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0019793919858079

But even if we do manage to automate away all of jobs, the climate
emergency demands unimaginably labor intensive tasks for hundreds of
years - jobs like relocating every coastal city inland, or caring for
hundreds of millions of refugees.

Add to those: averting the exinctions of thousands of species, managing
wave upon wave of zoonotic and insect-borne plagues, dealing with
wildfires and tornados, etc.

And geoengineering won't solve this: we've sunk a lot of heat into the
oceans. It's gonna warm them up. That's gonna change the climate. It's
not gonna be good. Heading this off doesn't just involve repealing
thermodynamics - it also requires a time-machine.

But none of this stuff is insurmountable - it's just hard. We CAN do
this stuff. If you were wringing your hands about unemployed truckers,
good news! They've all got jobs moving thousands of cities inland!

It's just (just!) a matter of reorienting our economy around preserving
our planet and our species.

And yeah, that's hard, too - but if "the economy" can't be oriented to
preserving our species, we need a different economy.

Period.

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