This post looks a lot like you stopped reading my post after the first sentence. Let me splice your list of assumptions with quotes to show why it comes across that way:
- efficiency and productivity is the be all and end all of human existence
Nor am I saying that such workers have no value as human beings because they have no value as workers…far from denying human value, I think the existence and inevitability of ZMP workers proves its existence independent from employment or productivity.
- the ones who want efficiency and productivity - large companies - determine what our society should look like
I’m not saying everyone can’t be employed, I’m saying that some people won’t add to overall productivity through their employment…the way society currently operates will not work…Better would be to start thinking about how a post-scarcity economy can be run, and how we can transition to one.
- this is just going to happen in the future because of automation - it hasn’t happened yet
There is debate about whether ZMP workers exist in the modern economy. Certainly for most of human history they did not. But as technology advances, the possibility that some workers will be ZMP increases.
- certain people will be a problem
I firmly believe that over the next century or so virtually all humans will become ZMP workers as automation begins to contribute more and more to net productivity.
I think all those are flawed.
Fortunately for both of us, they aren’t assumptions I’ve made and they aren’t necessary to my point.
People grow by working. They can get…
This isn’t always true. Makework is demoralizing. People like feeling like they’re contributing, and they can see through jobs that are invented for the sole person of giving someone a job. Even actually-productive jobs can be dehumanizing.
And setting that aside, this response fails to balance competing interests. I’ve presented a problem: some workers (maybe eventually all workers, as James would have it) don’t add to productivity, and may decrease net productivity, when employed. One solution is to say, ‘we should still employ everyone, because the psychic harm of unemployment is more costly than the loss of productivity.’ But that makes the assumption that there will never be a margin where the addition of human labor won’t impose costs on society great enough to outweigh the cost of the psychic harm of unemployment (not to mention the assumption that nothing but employment can provide a sense of accomplishment, responsibility, mutual obligations, etc. etc.).
Even taking as a given what I think is a not well-supported assumption that unemployment causes significant individual harms that can only be alleviated by employment, it is still possible, even likely, that a time will come when despite those harms, it is still worse for society to try to arrange for all (or even most) humans to be employed.