Sex work is cool and all but it's also cool to be able to support your friends without it requiring them to give you pictures of their buttholes in exchange for money. I can't help but feel like this particular phenomenon is a product of a uniquely American capitalist hellscape and that maybe this sort of thing wouldn't need to be a normal occurrence in a semi-functioning society. What do you guys think?
I'm not sure about that. I think, with increasing automation, we are very quickly reaching a point where we don't need everyone working in order to have a fully functioning society (if we aren't there already).
I mean, some people are still gonna have to work for quite awhile into the future, and I specifically mentioned cleaning and daycares because those are jobs that I imagine won't be automated for quite some time. But my cautiously-optimistic vision of a non-dystopian, near-future is one in which a large portion of jobs have been automated or eliminated, basic needs (food, housing, healthcare) are provided automatically, and working is something that people do largely voluntarily, for extra money or some other kind of incentive.
Ie, you'd have an apartment, food, and healthcare, so you don't need to work if you can't, or even if you just don't want to (society won't really have enough jobs available for everyone, esp if the economy isn't fully oriented towards capitalist growth as it is now). But if you, like, want to get a Playstation 9 or whatever, you'd probably have to do some work, because we'll still need some people working to do some of the basic stuff that isn't easy to automate.
In a society like this, prostitution and selling nudes will likely still exist, but, unlike now, people won't be forced into it because its the only way to make sure the utility company doesn't turn their heat off.
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Well, I'd expect hours will be reduced vs what we have now, but there comes a point of diminishing returns. where having like 60 different people doing the job of what would be one person today probably greatly reduces efficiency. For example, operating a train: let's say that today, a train operator works 8 hours a day, five days a week/~20 days a month. We could imagine a society where instead, there's about 40 people and they work for 4 hours, once a month.
In this scenario, efficiency is greatly reduced, because it takes time to train people, takes time for people to get experience etc. I'd rather be on a train that's managed by someone that's got the experience of being there week in and week out for years, not a dude who only comes to work 12 or 24 times a year. Same with many other jobs.
Seems more reasonable to say that this one person's job will be split, let's say, 2 or 3 ways, so that she needs to work like, say 5 hours a day for 3 days a week instead. I'd imagine we can both reduce hours, and reduce the number of people working.
As to how close we are to "full automation", well, that'd be a long process over many decades. But it might happen faster than you imagine. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42170100 heres one study suggesting it may be 800 million jobs worldwide that get replaced by automation by 2030. With most of that happening in highly developed nations like Germany, China, and the US (since poorer nations can't afford the robots). Now imagine what the year 2050, 2080 or 2100 might hold for us.
Of course, some of this will be balanced by the growth of new jobs in other areas of the economy (robot repair man, for example) but I just don't see how it will be possible (or preferable) for there to be enough new jobs to replace all the old ones.
I called this my "optimistic" vision of the future because my pessimistic one is one in which the twin forces of the climate crisis and automation renders vast swathes of the global working class extremely impovrished by the end of the century. I think these are the two forces that are most likely to create a situation that will allow socialism, or something like it, to happen.
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