The problem is that as a society we believe that people need to work 40 hours a week to survive.
We replace people with robots and retain the same output. We are more productive than ever before, yet work the same amount. Physical and uneducated work is being replaced by automation, yet we expect these people replaced by robots to find jobs to survive where there are now none.
I don't believe in Universal Basic Income though, we live in a society and it is our duty to contribute to that society. I think the answer is that we need to move towards a shorter workday. Raise wages and shorten work hours. People used to work 12 hours a day, now we work 8, why not move to a 6 hour workday? Eventually we may move into a post-scarcity society where all our basic needs are automated and work becomes an optional extra, but we're not at that point yet.
> I don't believe in Universal Basic Income though, we live in a society and it is our duty to contribute to that society.
There are plenty of things people do that are valuable to society yet are not captured in the GDP, and are thus not highly valued by contemporary society. They range from visiting and looking after elder parents, playing with your children, writing poetry etc. Then there are undervalued activities which, due to being undervalued, are often rejected by people who would be good at them but can't afford a sacrifice (e.g. teaching, various kinds of social work, etc).
As the marginal cost of production asymptotes towards nil, peoples' sense of self worth from work (which is largely a modern belief anyway dating from the middle of the industrial revolution) can be sloughed off.
> I think the answer is that we need to move towards a shorter workday. Raise wages and shorten work hours.
I agree that we should do this urgently, but beware a belief in the "lump of labor fallacy".
Also, because people currently do develop a sense of self worth from their work, we should be investing heavily in helping people readjust to the loss of economic value in their work. For example governments offer retraining programs, but while a 20 year old coal miner may be able to find a job repairing trucks or writing reactive web apps, a 60 year old coal miner, who after two years of training becomes a 62 year old auto mechanic or web developer, will struggle to find employment. These people (both at 20 and 60) need assistance that also preserves their dignity.
I knew a guy who worked 6 months a year doing contract work and then spent the other 6 months on hobbies and personal projects.
I remember asking him if he gets bored during those 6 months not working and he said to me "I don't base my life enjoyment off of making someone else money". That advice has really stuck to me and its really cool to see the electronics projects he builds in those 6 months.
My father had a co-worker who did this. 8 months in the DC office doing construction cost management consulting, 4 months in Montana hunting (he was into falconry, archery, and conservation of all the natural resources needed to sustain his hobbies).
He also used to raise his birds in the office (when they were newly hatched) - that was pretty darn cool as a 1st grader.
I have done similar things and it generally isn't. Or it is getting very hard to make it so.
Western society has become much more hierarchical in recent years. It is harder and harder to find any "cracks in system" on a fundamental level. Even if you would consider leisure to be neutral, and not in need of meaning, most people aren't even starting from a neutral point. So if you do something else you end up being underprivileged rather than in leisure.
Not unlikely, which is why I wrote somewhat vaguely. Ironically I don't have time to read your resources at the moment. My point is that there just isn't that much room for other things these days. So many things, from a $5 coffee to housing, is based on the idea that everyone is working all the time. You can of course quit working, pay the same rent and lock yourself in a room trying to forget the outside world until you can't. But I am not sure that is a road to happiness either. I mean, many people can barely achieve "weekend glory" these days.
I think I get what you're saying, now. Sounds like more of a critique of North American/protestant work ethic coupled with our acclimating to convenience.
I think that's probably a whole other subject to be tackled.
Aristotle's core point above would be along the lines of:
Relaxation (in order to) -> Work (in order to) -> Leisure (the goal, for its own sake)
Leisure and relaxation being entirely different activities, or lack thereof.
Maybe think of leisure in this case being the activity of passion/deep interest or communal good or else that might not come in returns that pay for any other aspect of your life directly. Work being the activity (that you may well enjoy enough, or have interest in) that pays for everything and allows you time and/or resources for leisure. Relaxation is what helps you essentially stay sane and healthy in order to follow through with the rest.
So it seems like you aren't taking on peoples' ability for leisure, but NA society's values that prevent it [for most people].
Right. I am saying that if you take time off you end up being at odds with much of society. You realize that many things, even leisure activities, now only exists in relation to work. And after not working for a while few of these things are exciting anymore.
So I am not saying it isn't a good idea. Just that it is hard from a practical perspective. Which is why younger people who take sabbaticals often end up in e.g. Asia.
I don't think it needs to be that grand of a scale to fulfill the reasoning.
OP's example was a fellow taking time off and exercising his other interests in electronics by learning and experimenting.
Another example might be a hobby. A hobby is a great example of a leisure activity as its [usually] done completely for its own sake. For instance, a sheet metal worker who spends much of their time off work playing in an amateur cricket league [however unlikely and obscure an image that might be].
I don't think I understand, though, how you mean it puts anyone at odds with society. Could you elaborate?
To take the example at hand, for many young(ish) people taking time off work to learn electronics wouldn't necessary be a nice experience. Because their lives exist to a large extent in relation to work. They have moved to a new city, because of work. Where the live in a small apartment, to be close to work. They have friends, from work. And they have coffee on their way to work, to talk about work or even to do work.
They couldn't just take time off and have a similar life. By leaving work they would lose a lot of the connection to their de facto lives. It wouldn't be worth living in an expensive city, in a small apartment and have expensive coffee "just" to learn electronics. Increasingly the things in people's lives aren't "neutral". Their small apartments are made for going to work from, not necessarily for doing things in. But you can't necessarily move either without losing context.
On the other hand if you are already established. You have a house, a family, friends outside work and whatever else you need, it isn't necessarily that hard to go down in the basement and learn electronics instead of going to work for six months out of the year. Because your environment is "neutral" and exists whether you go to work short-term or not. A lot of people aren't really established like that though.
To me, your example sounds more like a lifestyle choice, my friend.
My advice to the person in question would be to pull your head out of work and sample a little more of that big city while you're paying so much to be there.
There's no reason why every moment of time that isn't paid for by work to be spent on work, outside of that being a choice (given our current example, which sounds like a well-enough-to-do tech worker).
Personally, I couldn't live that way, and I'm probably filling out a few of your checkboxes above. I like the people I work with, but I value [and fear] time too much to give it all into my job—be it tasks, networking, socializing, whatever.
The example you extended sounds more like a problem of agency than one of [a lack of] leisure.
> The example you extended sounds more like a problem of agency than one of [a lack of] leisure.
It is. But you can't just take time of work, not replace it with anything and expect to be able to have some sort of leisure. At least not in my experience. I don't live in a big city anymore, but that doesn't really fix things. The equation is as hard as in a city, just in a different way. That is why people like 'bunnie' who do electronics as a passion end up in Asia. There are just so much easier to live and so many more things to do. People who stay e.g. in the US end up moving around different small to medium size cities instead looking for something that makes sense.
I think you're misunderstanding what I've been saying about leisure, then. I've not suggested you take time off work, nor to fill your time with nothing.
Work is additive, "free" time is not subtractive.
I don't understand any else of what you're saying. Electronics is something you can do anywhere, and I'd argue there's a gaping need in much of the spaces in between towns and cities in North America...
I think you're just discussing personal preferences at the end there.
I guess it is hard to explain if you haven't experienced it.
It is just that doing electronics on the weekend when you are tired from work, you don't have enough time to finish even part of something, in a place where parts are expensive or you have to wait weeks for delivery isn't that enjoyable.
Doing electronics in a place where you don't have to worry about rent, you have plenty of time, there are plenty of other things to do, parts are cheap and there is a community is a totally different thing.
Far more people are going to enjoy the second scenario.
Here is an article about Shenzhen [0]. The middle part is about people doing electronics for fun. This is probably around a year before Scotty, in the article, started Strange Parts on youtube.
Does this guy have a family and kids? I worked with a guy who does a similar thing. In fact his contract just ended. The only reason he said he’s able to is because he’s older, single, and doesn’t have kids.
I have an old college classmate who does this with a twist: he has a number, and when he hits that number he stops for the rest of the year. Last time I spoke with him that was about six months.
It was just stuff like building power supplies and little Tesla coils. Every few weeks I'd get sent cool videos like a lightbulb being wirelessly lit up by the coil.
Seems like everyone "knows a guy" that does that but when I attempted the same thing it failed miserably. I took a paltry three months off and then every recruiter and hiring manager was immediately suspicious of me when I started going on interviews again. They all suspected I was in jail or something. Meanwhile, I literally just took three months to catch up on my life.
In my current role, I could probably work 3 days a week and meet my same obligations. Our scrum master could be fired and nobody would even notice.
Higher wages with shorter work hours would be a great step in the right direction. I believe Keynes even suggested it.
But, a post-scarcity society, where labor is nearly valueless, still requires everyone have their needs met regardless of what they "own". But in that future as through all the past, most people are born owning little more than their labor.
So a post-scarcity society does not just require the technology we are approaching. It also requires a radically different perception of ownership. This is the harder problem.
In the language of today, it means a person without property and whose labor will always be essentially valueless, gets the produce of someone else's robots, ownership of which will be passed down though generations. Changing this is close to unthinkable in current society.
But unless this massive social shift emerges, it appears that larger and larger portions of society will be converted into a euphemistically renamed servant class where their labor has not intrinsic value except prestige or amusement value to the person hiring.
Pardon the following if it's upsetting, but I notice our current path is to add more and more store clerks, waiters, maids, sign spinners etc. Not because machines/systems can't do theses things (amazon, self serve restaurants, billboards) but because the customer enjoys/gets a kick out of them.
On the current path, what would have become a post-scarcity society will instead have vast numbers of such people earning their minimum requirements at such jobs. Plus perhaps homeless people permanently converted into a prison workforce.
> Higher wages with shorter work hours would be a great step in the right direction. I believe Keynes even suggested it.
No he didn’t. He suggested we’d have chosen to work fewer hours and have more leisure because we could afford both greater consumption and greater leisure than were possible when he wrote. Higher wages than now, with shorter work hours than now is possible only with growth in economic productivity so we can produce more (goods, services) with less (material input, labour). We can’t just decide to work 20 hours a week and maintain our current standard of living by fiat.
Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)
Measured in 1960 US$ the UK’s GDP per capita was 1181[1]. In 2016 US$ U.K. GDP per capita was 40,341[2]. Even if we assume the 2016 dollar is worth half as much as the 1960 one because of inflation the average U.K. resident is 15 times better off. If people wanted to live in 1960s houses with what people in the 1960s would have considered a lavish standard of living they could do it easily by working half the year, or having a part time job. The 1960s were already a hell of a lot better than 1930, when the essay was written.
If you want to live in the paradise Keynes described you can. That’s what the financial independence, retire early subculture is about[3]. Work for 20 years and retire instead of 40 or 50. Or those people who contract half the year and spend half of it in Thailand. If we wanted to take more of our compensation in leisure we absolutely could. People choose not to. They need to keep up with the Jones.
We have made those strides in productivity and they all went to rent seeking and taxation/regulation of small businesses and personal conduct (see also $150 red light cameras and $350,000 school admin salaries)
$150 for going on red light I have no problem with, do it few times and have driver's license revoked temporarily (as in Switzerland, on top of massive fee). That's how innocent people are killed, be it pedestrians or other drivers, by arrogant/DUI folks.
I understand that on empty roads at 3am in the middle of nowhere there are no consequences whatsoever, but generally that's a big infraction. Just watch few car crash compilations, ignoring lights is like 50% of the reason and the results are often very grim
You might be assuming the cameras work as they do in Switzerland.
In the US a common scenario is a private company installs the cameras for free and gets to collect most of the revenue. They adjust the yellow timing downward so that you don't have time to stop between the light turning yellow and it going to red. Then they send tickets in the mail to people who ran the light. Then if you do a study proving that they adjusted the timing downward to unsafe levels as a state sponsored scam, you get arrested and fined for "unlicensed practice of engineering".
Is there really such a thing as a post-scarcity society? Certain things will always be scarce. Beachfront real estate. Penthouses. Apartments next to a park or downtown. Sure we can get arguably get to a point where energy, food, and maybe small to medium sized items are free but if Jill Smith wants 400 cars where is she going to put them? Even if we all beam into cyberspace there will not be unlimited storage nor unlimited computation. There will still need to be a way to either get more from the powers that be for special needs or it will be traded leading back to have and have-nots.
Parent (and the article, although it fails to clearly draw the obvious link) could more accurately be said to be referring to a post-labor scarcity society.
In other words, a society where there is more labor available than we actually need to fulfill demand (caveat: in high-productivity industries).
To illustrate, take the article's example: the shift from an agricultural to industrial economy. Someone walks off a farm, they get employment in a factor. That factory worker can make 10-100 widgets / hr based on their labor.
Now look at the post-industrial economy we live in now. In software and heavily automated industries, the same single laborer can make 10-1,000,000 "copies" of their work product.
It seems fairly obvious there would be a breaking point at which productivity is so high that it disengages from driving demand. One worker can only buy so much, and his or her fellows can't buy anything because they're not employed.
This gets even more "extreme" when we talk about digital artifacts ... once the initial labor of creating a piece of music, or film, or game, or program is expended, the cost of infinitely reproducing copies of those approaches zero in many cases.
Amen to that - more than this, I worry that "we" didn't decide anything, but rather that keeping people in a state of imagined scarcity proved handy for preserving the status quo in terms of concentration of power.
What would a population do if people were able to act freely and do the things they cared about? How many folks would be fighting climate change but are _instead_ doing Dumb Shit That Doesn't Matter (most jobs) because we have to pay bills?
How many people work a job that is at best a net neutral to society, and at worst parasitic, because it personally enriches them, but makes everyone else poorer? How many are doing that only because they decided to buy a house close to work, so now they have a pile of debt, so now they _have_ to spend their time working for the last owner of the house instead of for themselves?
Why do we make it so goddamned hard to live cheap? Want university? That'll be an arm and a leg. Want a house? Expect to pay many, many years of income for it. Decide you're ok with a small home and riding your bike or taking the bus? Screw you, that's illegal, build a damn parking spot and make sure you meet minimum size reqs and oh btw you're not allowed to build in this old neighborhood because the existing homeowners' cartel made it illegal.
You can build a modest home for ~$40,000. It's expensive because we made it (mostly) illegal to build new homes anywhere near jobs. Not only that, instead of putting homes where they're cheap to serve (close to electric, water, etc) we push everyone out to the middle of nowhere where it's massively expensive to provide services. Not to mention that instead of relying on your feet and a $300 bicycle to get around you now need a gigantic money incinerator (a car) for basic mobility.
God help you if you get sick or hurt. A broken wrist could bankrupt plenty of people in the wrong circumstances.
How many people make six figures (yes, that's a lot of money relatively speaking - try leaving SF before sneering) and still manage to somehow worry about money? How the fuck did we decide this was the best way to build a society? Why did we make everything so goddamn expensive?
Building supplies and calories are cheap after all - practically free.
Maybe it's because keeping a population in fear ensures they can't organize to better their situation at the cost of tearing down existing power structures.
Here's another perspective you might not be accounting for. Currently, people who work elite jobs tend to live around people with elite interests. If you're an upper class developer, you'll live in a neighborhood with other developers, lawyers, doctors, white-collar workers.
If somehow housing were made affordable everywhere, how would that pattern be maintained? By definition, there would be nothing stopping "Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel" (from The Simpsons) from moving to Mountain View, CA.
So you end up with a situation where elite software engineers are trying to sleep, because they have work tomorrow, and Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel is keeping them awake by blowing up fireworks or firing his shotgun at 2am. What recourse do you have? You can't kick Cletus out--that would violate all sorts of human rights and so on.
So when you look at it this way, higher price housing is almost inevitable. Before you can have any realistic hope of addressing it, you need to figure out what to do with Cletus!
Thanks for pointing out a motivation for density restrictions that isn't purely cartel-ish. I appreciate the perspective.
I'm not sure what to do about Cletus, to be honest. I'd like to say "enforce the laws about making tons of noise and discharging weapons" but I know that can be a fool's errand in some cases. After all, I was a loud student once.
Ultimately I think that neighborhoods near the core of cities need to grow (densify), as they did for most of history, and the existing homeowners can enjoy the consolation of watching their home become substantially more valuable as a result of somebody wanting to put 10 apartments there instead of one house. It's telling that in many places the most desirable neighbourhoods are the ones built _before_ current laws made them illegal.
'course, I just bought a house in the country, so we'll see how that goes.
Also, Cletus was a caricature... Poor people can be quiet and rich people can be loud.
I've spent a lot of time living in poorer areas and I can tell you from experience, noise ordinances are not effective. It'll take months or years for Cletus to work his way through the court system for noise pollution, and in the meantime, he's not going to be very happy with his neighbors for reporting him. You'd better hope he doesn't do something in retaliation! Oh, and while you're twiddling your thumbs waiting for his eviction, ten more will move in down the street. You know, because you magically made all the houses $40,000.
It's not that simple though - if you read the article it talks about how
1: High paying jobs aren't really increasing in number but are becoming ever better paid
and
2: Low paying jobs are exploding in number but not in wages paid.
So part of the problem is that there aren't many mid level jobs that get people in and help them then increase. Tech doesn't really automate the stuff that's not super low level (like cleaning toilets, or mopping floors), and it doesn't do stuff at the high end (M&A banking, negotiating policy, writing code). But it eats a ton of stuff in the middle.
I think a three day weekend with a "day of service" is a much better solution.
Working 8 hours a day already leaves enough downtime in my schedule to get bored, but not enough to turn that boredom into something productive. 6 hours would be outright hell.
The problem is, the extra two hours don't really provide me with any compelling new opportunities to contribute! That's barely enough time to get at a school and volunteer and get back to work. Barely enough time to get into the flow of things if I'm volunteer programming. Etc.
But an entire additional day off of work would be great. I could commit to do real things. I could bake so much bread for the church's food shelter. I could build an entire web app using the city's open data to help people avoid tickets. I could spend an entire day in a classroom. Etc.
If you distribute service days evenly and treat them like "just another business function" for businesses, then you could pretty much replace the teaching aspect of higher ed with volunteers. 2-3 people prep+lecture+office hours one day a week, 2-3 people are spending all their service hours helping design curriculum, 2-3 people do a day of grading each week. A <10 person team can teach an entire university course @ 1 day per person per week. Multiply across the whole city, every company. Universal 4 year higher education for "free". And there's still tens of millions of volunteer days per week left over for all the other stuff.
I'd prefer the shorter days. A 6 hour day would leave more time for daily exercise and cooking healthy food for dinner and lunch the next day. I would probably also feel more relaxed on the weekend to work on personal programming projects.
People can contribute in many ways, I don't agree that only contributions that furthers someone else's economic goals should be judged worthy.
That said, I don't think we will see shortening of the workday without some sort of incentive for employers. From their point of view, why not simply make more money? Indeed, for many boards of directors profits is the only goal.
IMHO, this is where a basic income would fit in. Perhaps when people are allowed more freedom of movement they will find novel ways to contribute to society.
The problem with moving from 8 hours to 6 hours is that there will always be workers willing to do 10 hours or even 12 hours. These workers end up producing 50-100% more with about the same overhead. If you have a worker that will work 12 hours, you only need to pay for one health insurance plan as opposed to having to pay for two insurance plans if you need to get two 6-hour employees.
On top of that, the 12-hour employee is accruing experience at twice the speed of the 6-hour employee. For some fields, putting in the additional hours can make the employee willing to work more hours more productive on a per hour basis. Obviously this doesn't apply to all professions, but for many professions it does apply to some degree.
You'd basically have to outlaw working more than 6 hours to keep overachievers from taking all the good jobs.
Our productivity has indeed grown immensely, but, for good or for bad, instead of making things cheaper we're directing all our free resources to making them better.
Instead of cheaper cars we're making safer cars, instead of cheaper houses we're building bigger houses, and so on.
A very large percentage of free resources are being hoarded in wealth and cash piles, would you actually claim a company like Apple is directing all of it's free resources to making better products? Why the stock buybacks and 200 billion pile?
It's a mistake to think of money as resources--as if money is something we dig out of the ground and need in order to make our machines run. No-one eats cash. Whatever could be done if Apple spent its cash, could be done if Apple didn't spend its cash. Money's only purpose is to incentivize people to do things, so you're basically asking Apple to play king and start directing society. I'd prefer they just sit on their money rather than that!
That's capital. It gets given back to investors, who invest it elsewhere. They don't just stick it under the mattress. It is moved from Apple to a place where it can be put to use. With a buyback (or dividend) apple is saying "we ran out of productive ways to spend this money"
Even if they did just keep a few billion dollars of physical cash in a vault somewhere, that would just increase the purchasing power of the remainder. The total value of all currency in circulation (all forms combined) tends toward the total value of all of the goods available for purchase.
Taking money out of circulation is a bit like making a loan to everyone in proportion to the amount of currency they hold; when you do decide to put it back into circulation, that increase in value (deflation) represents the interest you receive on the loan.
But I DON'T work just 40 hours a week. I work more like 50-55 hours most weeks. I LIKE my work, and I don't want to do less.
I agree that the belief that we must work 40 hours a week in order to be a good person lies at the root of many of society's problems. And I do think that people ought to contribute to society. But somehow that does not lead me away from the idea of a Universal Basic Income, but instead leads me to believe that something roughly that shape is what we need to save society.
I guess the key difference is who defines "contribute to society". If it is employers, then we need a system where as many people as possible must report to an employer who controls how they spend their time. (Requiring people to get paid a salary seems to do that quite effectively.) If it is the government that defines how one ought to "contribute to society" then we get mandated work programs. But if you believe that each individual is the best judge of how they ought to "contribute to society" then it leads to the belief that we should order society such that as many individuals as possible have a choice about how they spend their time. Some variant of UBI seems to me like a good way to achieve that goal in a society no longer tightly constrained by scarcity.
> Well, with a sufficiently progressive tax, you might choose to stop volunteering your time for what will be diminishing returns in income.
A solution that incentivizes successful people to hold themselves back from fulfilling their potential is going to make society poorer overall. If you want to redistribute wealth, you should incentivize the creation of wealth so you have enough to move around.
Just because you don’t have to work doesn’t mean you wouldn’t want to anyway - perhaps money is not the only motivation for working when your basic needs are met.
But this theoretical Elon Musk would need to raise capital, correct? Would people who provide the capital still be taxed so much they don't find it worthwhile?
If not, you've just created a class who is going to be making a ton more money than anyone else.
> We replace people with robots and retain the same output
That's not how manufacturing works. Most manufacturing still requires human input because robots aren't very flexible. You have to build an entire line around a robot which means you adapt slowly to changes in the market.
What is your evidence that UBI reduces people’s contribution to society? If you’re referring to people not “working” in the traditional sense, not all contributions map nicely to economic output.
Exactly, the UBI would enable people to be paid for often non paying contributions like open source contributions, keeping park lands clean, creating educational content online and lots of other things. If I was paid a UBI I would still spend most of my time contributing but I would just do the things I see value in without having to worry about how will I make someone pay for this.
I'm curious how you plan to have a less-than-40-hour workweek while still having living wages? It's going to be hard enough to get the capitalists on board with just paying people who do work they find inferior enough to live.
I don't see how this tracks. Particularly in relation to many of the jobs going away, productivity isn't inversely related to hours worked. People working 6 hours instead of 8 will get three quarters as much done. How would their wages go up?
If you are proposing the government cover the difference, then you're effectively proposing a bastardized version of UBI with an employment requirement, and payout that is proportional to current economic advantage. I'm not even sure it wouldn't cost more than current UBI proposals given that proportionality.
I don't understand why you would be in favor of this, but think UBI was bad. Or how it could possibly work, if it wasn't the government paying for it.
I think the argument is that most people are truly only attaining maximum productivity for 5-6 hours in a day, so why are they even there for the extra 2-3? If you make $100/hr for 8 hours but are only productive for 5 of those hours, your employer is really paying you $160/hr. Why are we wasting employees time and employers money?
This is very IT-centric point of view, where mostly creative work can be done in various speeds, depending on effectivity and motivation in given time. I know its definitely valid for me and colleagues.
Imagine tons of other jobs where this simply doesn't apply - doctors, teachers, bureaucrats, farmers, drivers, shop/restaurant crew, people working in tourism, many factory jobs and probably tons of other types of jobs. Yes, I just mentioned more than 90% of the world population.
We can gradually improve efficiency of probably every single job out there, but simply slashing 30% will have very direct negative consequences on output for most people, in many cases directly proportional. Now who wants to take 30% pay cut?
We replace people with robots and retain the same output. We are more productive than ever before, yet work the same amount. Physical and uneducated work is being replaced by automation, yet we expect these people replaced by robots to find jobs to survive where there are now none.
I don't believe in Universal Basic Income though, we live in a society and it is our duty to contribute to that society. I think the answer is that we need to move towards a shorter workday. Raise wages and shorten work hours. People used to work 12 hours a day, now we work 8, why not move to a 6 hour workday? Eventually we may move into a post-scarcity society where all our basic needs are automated and work becomes an optional extra, but we're not at that point yet.