The surplus population and the end of work

Uncanny valley
In aesthetics, the uncanny valley is an hypothesized relationship between the degree of an object's resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to such an object. The concept of the uncanny valley suggests humanoid objects which appear almost, but not exactly, like real human beings elicit uncanny, or strangely familiar, feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers. Valley denotes a dip in the human observer's affinity for the replica, a relation that otherwise increases with the replica's human likeness.

Examples can be found in robotics, 3D computer animations, and lifelike dolls among others. With the increasing prevalence of virtual reality, augmented reality, and photorealistic computer animation, the 'valley' has been cited in the popular press in reaction to the verisimilitude of the creation as it approaches indistinguishability from reality. The uncanny valley hypothesis predicts an entity appearing almost human risks eliciting cold, eerie feelings in viewers.


Toby Walsh, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia, writes in the on-line Guardian about the upcoming impact of the increase in productive power in robotics technology and the pressures upon population that will inevitably follow:

Will robots bring about the end of work?

Let’s turn to another chief economist. Andy Haldane is chief economist at the Bank of England. In November 2015, he predicted that 15 million jobs in the UK, roughly half of all jobs, were under threat from automation. You’d hope he knew what he was talking about. And he’s not the only one making dire predictions. Politicians. Bankers. Industrialists. They’re all saying a similar thing. “We need urgently to face the challenge of automation, robotics that could make so much of contemporary work redundant”, Jeremy Corbyn at the Labour Party Conference in September 2017.“World Bank data has predicted that the proportion of jobs threatened by automation in India is 69 percent, 77 percent in China and as high as 85 percent in Ethiopia”, according to World Bank president Jim Yong Kim in 2016. It really does sound like we might be facing the end of work as we know it.

This might be a good time to re-visit Clause IV of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom?

The original version of Clause IV was drafted by Sidney Webb 100 years ago in November 1917, and adopted by the party in 1918:

To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.

This section was widely seen as the Labour Party's commitment to socialism, even though it is not explicitly mentioned. The Manchester Guardian heralded it as showing "the Birth of a Socialist Party".

There will always be work, the work we need to do everyday to look after ourselves and each other, society needs to be defended against the madness of economic reason.

"And the Union workhouses?" demanded Scrooge. "Are they still in operation?"

So asks the central character Scrooge in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens of two gentlemen collecting for charity and then advises them on his philosophy:

"Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don't make merry myself at Christmas and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.''

"Many can't go there; and many would rather die.'' 

"If they would rather die,'' said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

Later in the story, the Ghost of Christmas Present reminds Scrooge of his earlier words and then of Tiny Tim:

"What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population." Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.

"Man," said the Ghost, "if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. Oh God! To hear the insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust."

What was Dickens really doing when he wrote A Christmas Carol? Was he taking aim at the father of the zero-growth philosophy, Thomas Malthus, and weighing in on one of the central economic debates of his time, the one that raged between Malthus and one of the disciples of Adam Smith, Jean Baptiste Say.  

Say argued on the other hand, as had his mentor, that the gains from global population growth, spread over vast expanses of trading, trigger gains from a division of labor which exceed those ever thought possible before the rise of the market order.

Malthus famously argued that in a world in which economies grew arithmetically and population grew geometrically, mass want would be inevitable. His Essay on Population created a school of thought which continues to this day in "Neo-Malthusianism", a concern that overpopulation may increase resource depletion or environmental degradation to a degree that is not sustainable with the potential of ecological collapse or other hazards. 

The term is also often connected with eugenics. Population Matters is a good example of this contemporary phenomenon that does contain an element of a throwback to the essentially Romantic sensibility for a disdain for the collectivity of the human being and its existence. 

“I live not in myself, but I become portion of that around me: and to me high mountains are a feeling, but the hum of human cities torture.”George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Formerly known as the Optimum Population Trust, Population Matters is a UK-based charity that addresses population size and its effects on environmental sustainability. One of the organisations patrons, TV naturalist Sir David Attenborough, has warned that human beings have become a “plague on the Earth”.

The 86-year-old broadcaster said the negative effects of climate change and population growth would be seen in the next 50 years. He told the Radio Times: "It's coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It's not just climate change. It's sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now. We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia - that's what's happening. Too many people there. They can't support themselves - and it's not an inhuman thing to say. It's the case. Until humanity manages to sort itself out and get a co-ordinated view about the planet, it's going to get worse and worse.

This is, perhaps, connected to the original great Malthusian dread that "indiscriminate charity" would lead to exponential growth in the population in poverty, increased charges to the public purse to support this growing army of the dependent, and, eventually, the catastrophe of national bankruptcy. 

Neo-Malthusianism has since come to be identified with the issue of general over-population, the original Malthusian concern was more specifically with the fear of over-population by the dependent poor. 

Now the manipulation of the environmental impact agenda is stoking fears in the parts of the world which has the capacity and power and resources to shape policy. 

Malthusian theory is a recurrent theme in many social science venues. John Maynard Keynes, in Economic Consequences of the Peace, opens his polemic with a Malthusian portrayal of the political economy of Europe as unstable due to Malthusian population pressure on food supplies. 

Many models of resource depletion and scarcity are Malthusian in character: the rate of energy consumption will outstrip the ability to find and produce new energy sources, and so lead to a crisis.

In France, terms such as "politique malthusienne" ("Malthusian politics") refer to population control strategies. The concept of restriction of population associated with Malthus morphed, in later political economic theory, into the notion of restriction of production. In the French sense, a "Malthusian economy" is one in which protectionism and the formation of cartels is not only tolerated but encouraged.

Absurd, Theater of

It's all madness!!!!!!!

But help is it hand, at least in terms of an overview where the usefulness of art and the usefulness of garbage becomes interchangeable.

This is a paraphrase of text found in Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson's amazing collaborative project From Cliche to Archetype, in the chapter discussing the Theater of the Absurd and the Bald Soprano by Ionesco.

"Ionesco's absurd is the unconscious brought up to daylight inspection."

Pascal, in the seventeenth century, tells us that the heart has many reasons of which the head knows nothing. The Theater of the Absurd is essentially a communicating to the head of some of the silent languages of the heart which in two or three hundred years it had tried to forget all about. In the seventeenth-century world the languages of the heart were pushed down into the unconscious by the dominant print cliche. (page 5)

Perhaps this is where some of the madness of reason starts, in the denial of the "rag and bone shop of the heart". 

"How to elicit creativity from these middenheaps has become the problem of modern culture."

(see below & page 184 of Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson's From Cliche to Archetype)

The Circus Animals’ Desertion
By William Butler Yeats
 

I

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last being but a broken man
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

II

What can I but enumerate old themes,
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his fairy bride.

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
`The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it,
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love
And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

The sculptures of angels climb Jacob's Ladder on the west front of Bath Abbey