"Most of the people involved in the Los Angeles riots had all the necessities of life," he said. "They've got the necessities, what they don't have is an interest in life. We deprive them of work. Basically I think activityI won't say 'work,' activity is the primary requirement for human existence."
Then was too much affluence a bad thing?
"Too much affluence is not a worry I've had in the contemporary world," said Peter D. Kramer, psychiatrist and author of Listening to Prozac. "The burden of poverty and need is so great that it just seems like such a long way to a society in which there are no have-nots."
Well, but wouldn't the average person go crazy, after nanotechnology, with nothing to do amid all the abundance?
"I can't imagine that," said Kramer. "There are many productive rich people. I would like to see, in my own life, the effect of enormous affluence on my productivity. It's a risk I'd be willing to take."
And even if life after nanotechnology was equivalent to being retired, retirement was not necessarily the bad deal it was often cracked up to be, said Kramer. "There are some people who are very contented in retirementother than for the problem of aging. The problem is not enough healthy retirement."
Still, there was something unnerving, something unwholesome about the prospect of turning the world's work over to a bunch of invisible machines. Lazing around in the sunshine, after all, was sloth, one of the seven deadly sins. If you were to live like thateven just tempo rarily, as an experimentthe odds were that something big was bound to go wrong, sooner or later.
There was an ethic behind that feeling, of course, the so-called Protestant work ethic, the notion that honest drudgery was right and proper, that toil was the morally fitting condition of humankind. But what was the relevance of the work ethic in an age when physical labor was no longer required? In the generation following the nano revolution, perhaps nobody would give a moment's thought to the ancient and outmoded "work ethic."
Unless, of course, the work ethic was a fixed part of human nature.
"People even work at their leisure!" said cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson. "There's a basic human desire to feel you're achieving something, whether you're keeping golf scores or doing your gardening."
All of which led to the question of how, after nanotechnology, the basic human need to do work, to create value, to achieve, would be satisfied. Were we going to pawn off elbow grease to the nanomachinesonly to be rewarded by making ourselves miserable? Would the irony be that work was really the good stuff of life, something that existence would be pointless without?
Plausible as that was, there were yet a few problems with
it.
For one thing, the idea that people would be suicidal over no
longer having to work for a living, well, that was a bit strained
on the face of it. Wouldn't they be at least slightly
relieved? After all, if they wanted to keep on working for a
living, there was nothing in nanotechnology to stop them.
And plenty of "ordinary" jobs would still be around for people to do, even in the nano age: There'd be cops, reporters, lawyers, restaurant chefs, waiters, judges, senators, writers, marriage counselors, mathematicians. Nanomachines, talented as they were, weren't going to be masters of every specialty.
Then, too, the notion of what counted as "work" would be redefined, as it often had in the past.
"When housework was mechanized, standards rose," said Bateson. "Our ancestors didn't change the sheets twice a week, more like twice a year, probably."
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