WORK OUT

WHAT I'M DOING WHILE MY ROBOT CLEANS AND COOKS

A day will come when robots will have taken over all or most of our jobs. Robots will build new robots, and in the unlikely event they need supervision, robots will supervise other robots.

What will people do?

In my last blog I talked about writing novels,. painting landscapes, or playing golf. I even suggested leisure. What’s wrong with lying in the sun and getting a tan. of course, the possibilities are endless. This morning I thought about some of everyone’s favorite Americans, the cowboys. A song about a rodeo came up in my music mix as I was exercising. Cowboys made a great discovery. Thye could make big money showing off what they did everyday.

Cowboy chores like roping cattle and breaking wild horses became a sport when the occupation was no longer needed. Sports stars make more money than day laborers. Cowboys who once rode the range with pennies in their pockets became wealthy men.

Loggers also knew how to turn their skills into fun. They had holidays. Instead of taking the day off, they had competitions and worked harder than ever.

Recently our home had a make over. We put on a metal roof and new siding. Watching the men work was like watching a ballet. Every movement was choreographed. One man cut metal strips or siding to precise measurements; another man nailed the pieces in place. They walked on platforms, as sure footed as Michelangelo must have been when he painted the Cistern chapel.

There is something beautiful about work.Even grunt work can be beautiful I like washing dishes and folding clean clothing. These are daydream times for me when I work out sticky points in a novel or memorize a new list.

So work can be introspective as well as entertaining and beautiful.

When robots take all our jobs, we will create new chores. We might do it for the entertainment of ourselves and others or we might do it for private introspection and pleasure.

I named this blog “Work out.” I find the term interesting.People go to the gym to imitate movements their ancestors did every day and called work.

People used to walk or bike to the store or to work. Today we get in a car and drive around the block to shop. Then we go to the gym and walk on a treadmill. So many chores used to be more difficult.

I remember my mother getting down on her hands and knees to scrub floors. Today I walk behind a mop that is so sophisticatedI barely have to push it.

My mother had to apply real muscle to pound bread dough into place. I buy my bread at Whole Foods. Then I come home and work out with bar bells. When we don’t have work, we ralize that we need it to stay in shape and to satisfy a certain longing. Perhaps that longing is just for time to daydream

The future of work might be competitions where humans, not robots pound in nails and roof or side a house. No robots allowed. We might wash dishes make pretty loaves of bread. other humans will watch us and marvel at our skills at such wonderful old fashioned tasks.

Perhaps real human workers will work in a museum showing visitors how 20th and early 21st century humans performed their chores.

For those of us who don’t want to imitate cowboys and loggers by turning old skills into entertainment and competition, there will always be poetry to write, philosophies to learn, and dances to perform.

And sometimes we might just want to lay in the shade while a robot serves us fresh squeezed lemonade. This is the life. I can’t wait.

PRESIDENTS, PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES AND THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION AND WORK

Margaret Truman and Elliot Roosevelt both wrote best selling mystery fiction. Both authors are children of U.S. presidents and both are talented writers. They were double blessed. Of course not all authors are born to famous, or wealthy parents. But the wealthy clearly have more opportunities to obtain good educations and they have the more leisure to write novels.

Life classifies them as winners before they take their first steps.

I wonder how many talented authors, inventors and scientists, we lose because life circumstances rob them of opportunities and doom them to work in factories, garbage trucks or grocery stores.

What if everyone had the opportunity to learn as much as they wanted and the freedom to indulge in leisure? Would we see more great novels, works of art and inventions? We would. We would also see healthier people across all of America.

Work can be a joy; it can also be a drudge. Historically poor people did the grudge work even if their IQ was 190.

Rich people reaped the benefits. Is that fair? Of course, not.

Will it change? The answer lies in how we solve or attempt to solve two of America’s most serious problems. The cost of higher education and the shrinking job market.

Not surprising, all of the presidential candidates have ideas on education.

Jeb Bush who grew up in a wealthy family and who most likely did not have to work his way through college says there is no such thing as a free lunch. Work and work some more and get ahead by work, work, work.

This advice is from a man who never had to dig ditches, collect garbage or clean sewers. If he has never done those things, he can’t imagine how tired a person is at the end of eight hours.

Mr. Bush may not realize that many Americans now work two and even three jobs just to pay for necessities.

When I shop for groceries or pet supplies, I am interacting with people who have part-time jobs. Retail jobs are usually, part-time and minimum wage with no benefits.

Full time jobs are hard to find for many of us even those of us with advanced degrees. College professors, for instance, are now more likely to be part-time adjuncts than full professors. They are forced to work longer hours at more than one job. And they make a fraction of what professors once made.

So if education is too expensive and if the jobs aren’t there, what are we to do? We in working America already work as hard as we can; stop telling us to work harder, Mr. Bush.

What about other candidates? Aren’t Democrats the party that teachers turn to? Aren’t they the education party?

Hillary Clinton says students need to work at least ten hours a week. That sounds like the work study programs already in place. Hillary is not suggesting any changes.

Okay, Mrs. Clinton, let’s make the students work ten hours a week for their tuition. They have to find another job for room and board and textbooks and for cable television. When do they study?

Students need that study time. Jeb Bush had study time. HIs classes and necessities were paid for by his wealthy parents.

Mrs. Clinton says she worked her way through college. So did I. I had a factory job where I worked at least forty hours a week. Overtime was sometimes mandatory. I graduated Magna Cum Laude, so my grades were very good. I spent all my spare time studying and, in fact, had no social life. It took me over ten years because I took one or two classes at a time.

Not many people will sacrifice the way I did, nor should they be expected to do so. So what can we do for students?

Bernie Sanders wants to give all Americans a free college education at public schools. Is this an outlandish idea? Sanders says no and I agree with him. While students are taking these free classes, they will still need to work part time for their rent, groceries and their textbooks.

I would love to have government provide these for them. That way they could concentrate on their educations. If they have free time maybe they can write books like Margaret Truman and Elliot Roosevelt did. Maybe they can have a few carefree years like Jeb Bush did.

Taking students out of the workforce makes more jobs available for those with families to support and house payments to make.

What about the kind of jobs that pay a decent living wage and provide benefits? Those jobs may be a thing of the past. We know that many of the best jobs have gone overseas. We know that factory workers in third world countries will work for low wages and American companies in their greed lost no time in shipping our jobs to those counties.

In the future, robots are set to take over jobs like plumbing and performing surgery that we thought were safe. What do we do when all our jobs disappear?

We can enjoy learning and leisure. Pleasures once available to only the very wealthiest amongst us can be available to all. We can write novels like Margaret Truman and Elliot Roosevelt did. We can take up portrait painting or gardening. We can study history or astrology.

Leisure has never been a dirty word, at least not when applied to the wealthy. The rich man can play golf all day or lay on a deck chair on his yacht. But working class people are expected to slave every day even when jobs are not available.

We can all contribute more to the wealth of the mind and the spirit even if it is just our own individual spirit. We should have the luxury of less drudgery.

Haven’t we been doing the rich man’s dirty chores for too long?

WORKERS, STUDENTS AND ROBOTS.

WHAT ROBOTS MEAN TO WORKERS BY MARY ANN SLAVCHEFF Are workers disposable like outdated machinery? We may soon learn the answer to that question as robots take over more and more of our jobs.

Dead end jobs are a form of slave labor. If robots bagged all groceries, folded all clothing, scrubbed all floors and tended all assembly lines, the workers who now tend these jobs would be freed from repetition and drudgery. They could spend their hours reading books,walking in the park or grooming a pet dog.

But are we willing to grant these workers their freedom? Freedom from work is one thing. Support for unwanted beings is yet another thing. Society uses people and products and then dumps them. Look what happened to horses when motor driven vehicles took their jobs.

What do we do with unwanted human workers? This is an issue that should concern all of us. Unskilled jobs won't be the only jobs lost.

Several medical, and engineering jobs are now done by robots. Robots can teach, and that alone puts millions of people out of work.

What can we do? Retrain? Lower the retirement wage? Some wages are already at starvation levels.

Education may not be the answer when robots can do anything a smart person can do and do it better. Robots don't need breaks or vacations, and they make fewer mistakes. People with leisure will probably crave learning, and the role of robots in education will be to teach people not other robots. Thus education will change. It will no longer be about training for jobs, but about training for leisure and self enlightenment.

Back to the original question. What do we do with unneeded and, therefore, unwanted workers?

Let's look at our history. Perhaps we can find some answers there.

Workers skilled and unskilled were once necessary.

Survival throughout our history depended on working men and women. Great wealth could not have been created without our muscle. We built the bridges, roads and the pathways to outer space. We have been faithful employees to businesses, big and small. How much have we been appreciated? Our wages were kept as low as possible.

Governments had to create minimum wage laws to help us survive. Even skilled musicians and writers are often asked to perform for free. Labor despite its necessity has historically not been valued.

A leisure class developed. Their freedom met with little resistance. The wealthy could spend their days playing tennis, learning French, writing poetry or sleeping in the sun. They could drink themselves to death; gambling was a gentleman's sport.

These “gentlemen” probably seldom gave a thought to the men, women and children who mined their ore or toiled in their factories. Segregation exists that has nothing to do with race. The wealthy do not eat or socialize with their help. Maids take the bus to work; they don't get a ride home from the chauffeur. Air planes have first class accommodations. Those who can afford to spend a little more, don't want to rub elbows with the working class.

For lower or middle class individuals to be jobless, is practically a sin. The unemployed are called bums and freeloaders. These ad hominem attacks have increased recently. Ronald Reagan's fictional Welfare Cadillac was just the beginning. Listen to the rhetoric when Congress plans its budget. Attacks on the unemployed grow as globalization and robotics put more and more people out of work?

The wealthy take our jobs away, give them to unskilled workers in other countries or to robots, and they call us lazy bums. Then they return to their leisure. Is leisure the right of only the very wealthy?

What do we do with workers when we don't have enough jobs for them?

Do we give them forty acres and a mule and expect them to be self supporting?

Those who don't want the farm can perhaps have an eBay store.

Those ideas seem too simplistic. Too 18th and 19th century. (Yet an eBay store is just a small shop, and Thomas Jefferson dreamed of making America a nation of farms and small shops.) Do we do away with money? Greed used to be one of the seven deadly sins. But some people on Wall Street, and in Congress (and in Ayn Rand fan clubs) have turned it into a virtue.

The rich aren't going to want to feed us or clothe us if we aren't working our butts off. And they aren't going to part with their beloved bank accounts. Look at the currant resistance to taxation among the wealthy. They don't want to pay their share.

Is it possible we will give the working classes leisure?

In a world without other people's work, can we be our own masters as Thomas Jefferson and others dreamed we could be? What will workers do, if we don't have shelves to stock, groceries to bag or streets to clean?

We can write novels and poetry.

We can golf or hike or watch sunsets without being so tired from a day in the factory that we can't appreciate the beauty.

We can watch our children grow up and teach them to appreciate things like old cats and dogs, sunflowers, butterflies and dandelions.

We can grow tomatoes or walnut trees.

We can appreciate life before we get so old we are more ready for death than retirement.

Robots can do the work so men, women and children can enjoy the freedom even Thomas Jefferson never dreamed possible. Robots can provide food, clothing and shelter for all of us.

We can be a society where the different classes respect and support each other as equals, not as master and slave, upper and lower class.

What is the alternative? Robots serving their privileged masters while the rest of humanity dies? Let's hope not.

Please read the following.

http://www.newsweek.com/rise-turing-robots-leads-fall-wages-309498?piano_t=1