A George Jetson Nightmare

Coming soon to a nightmare near you.

When I study today's employment economy, I always recall the Hannah-Barbera cartoon from the 1970s, The Jetsons. For those who aren't familiar, it was a "futuristic" cartoon spoof, where people lived in Earth's orbit. (Apparently because Earth has been polluted to death, though a children's cartoon didn't make that explicit.) The characters would drive flying cars in space. Mostly, its humor was lame and forgettable Saturday morning crap, just like The Flintstones was, er--should have been.


Nevertheless, today's economy frequently reminds me of one of The Jetsons running gags. The only one I can recall, actually. Every episode, ad nauseum, a character would moan about all the drudgery they had to do while they sat on their butts. They then pushed a single button, the drudgery, that activated robots, which did all the labor. More moaning, and they'd push another button, or perhaps the same one, I don't remember. I recall every human character in the Jetson family (that is, not including the dog or the robot maid) took a turn doing did this bit. Such as the wife, Jane, would complain about the housework (of course) and the son Elroy would complain about having to clean his room. You want to shout, "All right! I get it! Consumers are never happy!" The Jetsons presented us with a fiction-verse where physical work had been eliminated, and the characters lived miserably unaware of it. Or they pretended to be miserable. They also maintained unbelievably slim bodies, probably with liposuction robots.

This stupid '70s cartoon becomes pertinent to me because we're at the point where the need for labor is being eliminated as fast as the rain forests. Now, this could be the a very good thing, except the oligarchs doing the automating are asking the obvious question the The Jetsons never did: Why the whiny button-pusher?  Why not downsize George?

So, what was mildly funny in a stupid H&B cartoon is threatening to become a dystopian horror story in reality. The reason George Jetson (and family) were so oblivious about the dearth of work was he somehow still got paid a middle-class wage. Similar to what they used to say in the Soviet Union, he pretended to work, but unlike the USSR, they really paid him. His boss, Mr. Spacely, might be a Saturn Rocket size-dick, but it seemed somehow George was better off than most members of the working class today. (Could it have been the government? On his own, Mr. Spacely definitely wouldn't have paid George a living wage.) His wife, Jane, stayed at home because the family didn't need a second paycheck. He owned a refrigerator (by definition, middle class to a conservative). Not only did he have an air conditioner, but he had an entire atmospheric regulator. He had his own reliable flying saucer car. He even had a maid! This in a fiction-verse where George does no work.

How and why does George Jetson get paid? That's a problem we, or the people who we've ostensibly chosen to lead are not solving. Or rather, their solving it completely in their own favor: George won't get paid. The boss keeps everything.

Granted, jobs being replaced by automation is a phenomenon older than capitalism, but we're about to see it happen on a scale we never experienced. Google has introduced a vehicle that drives itself. Not even the Jetsons' flying saucer did that. Think of five million truckers out of their jobs, along with bus drivers, taxi drivers, chauffeurs and delivery drivers. As automation goes on, whole classes of jobs will disappear, including ones we never expected to be replaced. We're going to change over to a Jetsons type of economy, and it's going to happen perhaps in as little as ten years.Think of cars that drive themselves and keep themselves within the law (which would save a lot of lives). This trend is continuing. Tech companies have invested heavily in robotics, apparently seeing that as the future.

There's hardly a paid position in existence now that can't be replaced, within 30 years, by a computer or robot. There are hardly any that will replace the ones lost, and many of those will disappear in the next wave. That includes doctors, lawyers, even writers and musicians. Bank tellers, grocery store clerks are already becoming extinct. Think of going to a grocery store and having robots bring you the items on your list and ring them up. Picture going to the bank for a loan and never encountering a human being.

We fiction writers like to think a machine can't do our job. Maybe a computer can't do it very well, but stories written by computer will have one advantage: publishers won't have to pay for them. So, I can see that they flood the market with "junk stories" and suppress the price and royalties for human authors. Because reading appears to be in a general state of atrophy, the audience of the future might just buy automated drivel. I mean they bought reality shows, for Christ sake. Or, at the same time, you can have certain duties of a fiction writer replaced. Have the computer generate an outline from scratch. Or write a basic scene that the writer then just modifies a little and publishes. The problems is, publishers can get the software that does that and hire the "writers" in-house at minimum wage, or worse, intern wages.

Imagine being an intern, working two years free for a position that's phased out by the time you were hoping to finally get paid. 

We're looking at a future where there's going to be less and less work, like global warming we're living in denial about it, and we (or rather our leaders) are otherwise mishandling its eventuality. If we don't wake up and make some changes, this threatens us with social strife and instability exactly when we're facing--perhaps existential--crises presented by Global Warming, resource depletion, and environmental degradation.

Why are people who have jobs working harder and more hours, then? Because that's an agreed upon policy. With the oligarchs in control, we'll have a growing totally unemployed underclass and a shrinking, perpetually overworked and underpaid working class. Jobs are destined to get rarer and rarer. Those who have them will have to extreme sacrifices, physical, psychological and moral, to keep them and literally be willing to work themselves to death.

This will keep the two classes divided. Both will see their interests differently, with the working class, resentful over their lack of time and living and looking down on the underclass' laziness.  

To make the problem explicit: if we go into this with the imbalance of wealth we have now, it's going to destabilize our society. Besides creating massive unemployment, this changeover will cut the few remaining ties between the upper class and everyone else. The upper class will own all the machine-laborers and will have no need to let wealth trickle down to anyone. I've always said the problem with trickle-down economics was that the rich are motivated to fix the trickle. They see the little wealth that reaches the rest of us as something that has to be repaired, and they are in a rush to do so.

The wealthy will simply not need the rest of us at all. We will be out of their sight, so they only have to think of us in the most abstract of terms if ever. If the rich are already clamoring to cut food stamps, social security and medicaid, you can bet they are going to be throwing tantrums about paying anything as the number of unemployed swell further.

The middle and lower classes are not going to respond very kindly to this, therefore, you count on the third effect: there's going to be a boom in the police, prison and security industries. That's where that fore mentioned hard-working class will be employed mostly. There won't massive unemployment in those sectors.

One thing the wealthy won't be counting on, though, is that the rest of us won't need them either. Because there still has to be some degree of reciprocity to things. Really, why would you pay a billionaire who's not supervising anyone for what his machine does for pennies? Ethics around property rights might restrain the dispossessed masses for a while, but if they're seeing starvation, respect for property shrinks from a moral concern to a quibble. 

The welathy will be supervising someone, though: the security forces. If the class struggles reach a peak, it's finally going to be the security forces who determine the victory. But my greatest question is, with global warming and other environmental problems, do we really have the time and resources to commit to this class struggle bullshit?  

Machines freeing us from work should hardly be a threat of Hell. If you think about it, not having to work live ought to be one flavor paradise. The Jetsons made the push-button future into a light-hearted joke for a reason: we looked forward to a future where machines would make work unnecessary and there would only be play.

What makes live-action different from Toon Town is mainly we're going into the change-over with such vast inequality between rich and poor. In the Jetsons, it appeared that the benefits of technology were shared more or less equally among the classes. George's boss, Mr. Spacely, seemed to have as much access to time saving, liberating technology as George and his family did. That's not what is going to going on in the real world. Automation is being adopted specifically so the wealthy don't have to pay the rest of us anything. Unless something is done, the direct effect of this will be an exacerbation of wealth inequality.


In a way, the rest of us are collaborating with the rich to do this to ourselves. One thing, we value work too much and we give it too much status. One works to live, and to get to a comfort level, but there shouldn't be any further prestige or status attached to it. We work to live, that's simple. We play because we're alive. In one way or another, we put other people in charge, and we choose to keep an economy that makes the rich richer and makes both very powerful. Wealth, status, governments and nations exist nowhere except human minds. Can human beings as a whole change their minds without massive upheaval and bloodshed? Learning how to do that quick is probably a matter of survival.  

For related reading, Thomas Frank just published an excellent interview with David Graeber, author of  “Debt: The First Five Thousand Years” in Salon just today.