{"id":34081,"date":"2017-02-03T01:23:44","date_gmt":"2017-02-03T09:23:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/02\/after-robots-take-our-jobs-what-will-we-buy-in-a-society-without-money"},"modified":"2017-06-04T13:47:52","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T20:47:53","slug":"after-robots-take-our-jobs-what-will-we-buy-in-a-society-without-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/02\/after-robots-take-our-jobs-what-will-we-buy-in-a-society-without-money","title":{"rendered":"After Robots Take Our Jobs, What Will We Buy in a Society Without Money?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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After labor, not all of us will want to explore inner consciousness. Abundant leisure will not turn everyone into the Buddha. Many of our tastes are in the gutter, and I have no objection to leaving them there. I\u2019m not a fan of shopping per se, but buying stuff is deeply satisfying and motivating for many people. Is it possible to rethink the pleasure of conspicuous consumption in a way that decouples it from the competitive labor economy? The post-work world I\u2019m imagining will have little surplus money for unnecessary shopping, even if robots and computers can dramatically lower the overhead of such production. So, a non-consummatory form of shopping will have to be cultivated.<\/p>\n

Some people marshal all their evolved predatory skills to hunt down the perfect sweater, shoes, or watch. Could we redesign shopping as a system of \u201ccatch-and-release,\u201d so that, like sport fishing, it\u2019s the adventure and not the prize that becomes central? Maybe we will hunt for luxury items, but then instead of keeping them, simply photograph ourselves wearing the items<\/strong> (like a fisherman holding a giant pike). It\u2019s an unlikely adjustment, I\u2019ll grant you, but I never thought catch-and-release fishing would be fun until I did it, and it was. The way some people already buy and return items suggests to me that catch-and-release shopping is not impossible.<\/p>\n

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After labor, not all of us will want to explore inner consciousness. Abundant leisure will not turn everyone into the Buddha. Many of our tastes are in the gutter, and I have no objection to leaving them there. I\u2019m not a fan of shopping per se, but buying stuff is deeply satisfying and motivating for [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":413,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,1878,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-employment","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/413"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34081"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34081\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65211,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34081\/revisions\/65211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}