When most people talk about technology and innovations replacing jobs, they appeal to the Luddite fallacy. They assume that the job loss would be outpaced by any job creation that results from the technology. The Luddite fallacy has been debunked ad nauseum, but it’s not the only potential issue that could result from technology making more and more jobs obsolete. Mance Rayder wrote about this issue at the Libertarian Institute, saying:
If it were proven tomorrow that automation could provide for the needs of 80% of the population, with only 20% needed to either service the A.I. or to do things they can’t, where would humanity position itself from an epistemological standpoint? Is one of the fundamental principles of libertarianism “hard work,” or is it the non-aggression principal. Is labor a part of that credo?
The question I wish for you to take away is this: Can liberty exist within a system where technology, and not personal labor or a pooling of resources, provides all of your daily needs?
To be clear, it’s not that Mance doesn’t have answers to this. He just wanted to present the question. So I’m here to answer it.
While there can certainly be benefits to hard work, it is not a requirement for “good standing” in libertarianism. Similarly, a healthy diet and exercise have obvious benefits and would generally be considered good practices, but they are clearly not fundamental principles of libertarianism. In fact, they are not principles of libertarianism at all.
A fundamental principle of libertarianism, however, is non-aggression. Choosing not to work is not an aggressive act. People may consider it unsavory, but it is unsavory in the same way that drug usage, a cranky mood, etc. would be.
But it may all be a moot point anyway. With the massive advances that we’ve already seen with technology and the subsequent replacement of jobs, why hasn’t it come with a massive reduction in the amount of labor hours required to live a normal life since, say, 1925?
The answer isn’t exactly straightforward due to the numerous variables in play, but there are some general points that can be made even if we ignore the deleterious effects of government action. First of all, the question is misleading or it at least depends on what’s being asked. What is a “normal life”? Is it based on the average person today or in 1925? To live by 1925 standards of living, much less labor from any given job of today would be required to sustain that life. But people tend to not want that sort of life and are willing to work just as much or more to be able to increase their standard of living.
But it depends on the person. Some people value leisure time over more money and thus choose to have off during the weekend. Others choose to continue working: look at how many highly successful people work long, hard hours.
We can imagine a world where technology advances to the point that basic needs and more are met for everyone, but that wouldn’t guarantee that people en masse would stop working. It’s difficult to predict what sorts of goods and services people will demand in the future that we cannot even imagine today and they would presumably require some labor to be able to afford. Yet even if robots could be built that literally perform every bit of labor imaginable, it’s hard to imagine that it would lead to conflict among people. It would be much easier to imagine that in a world with less scarcity of resources, conflicts would become scarcer.
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