Trying to remember where I first read this years ago (G. William Domhoff? Relates to: https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.e... ) but a quirk of US politics with huge implications is that the Democratic Party were historically aligned with labor unions, which lead to all sorts of job protectionism (even ad many reforms and protections were indeed needed) -- versus Republicans who became aligned with business owners and became the part of industrial progress (but resulting in industrial progress done in a way that mostly benefits the wealthy). Because of this history going back many decades, Democrat policy made it harder for the USA to really take advantage of the abundance that mechanization (and increasingly robotics and AI) could offer -- which overlaps your point.
I like the general idea of unions, and unions are to be thanked for a lot of social progress in the USA including the 40 hour work week. That said, many years ago I wrote about the sad way most unions are playing out in the USA now. Unions now essentially maintain a private welfare state with good wages and good benefits for an every smaller number of people -- since some unions started allowing newer hires to get worse benefits than existing hires, creating a bit of a race to the bottom with different classes of union members with employee turnover. Ultimately, this issue was not one unions could fix, as it required a broader social/political change than unions could manage in the past.
See the book "Voyage from Yesteryear" for a taste of a broader alternative (a book which contributed -- according to the author -- to labor movements and the fall of the iron curtain): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"However, the planners behind the generation ship did not anticipate the direction that Chironian society took: in the absence of conditioning and with limitless robotic labor and fusion power, Chiron has become a post-scarcity economy. Money and material possessions are meaningless to the Chironians and social standing is determined by individual talent, which has resulted in a wealth of art and technology without any hierarchies, central authority or armed conflict. ...
Hogan's essay "What Really Brought Down Communism?" explains the reception given to the book in the Soviet Union. In the mid-1980s, Hogan was informed that the novel had been serialized in a Polish science fiction magazine Fantastyka, and, in the absence of a functioning exchange mechanism, paid for it in Polish zÅotys credited to an account taken out in Hogan's name. The story was republished in other Eastern European countries where its depiction of nonviolent resistance against authority proved popular. In 1989, Hogan attended a convention in KrakÃw before travelling to Warsaw to meet the publishers of the magazine serial and draw out the money he had been paid. However, inflation following the collapse of the communist regime had reduced the value of the money in the account to just $8.43. Hogan concluded: "So after the U.S. had spent trillions on its B-52s, Trident submarines, NSA, CIA, and the rest, that was my tab for toppling the Soviet empire. There's always an easy way if you just look.""
Things might have been very different in the USA if the Democratic Party could have embraced automation -- perhaps leading to a 32 hour work week sooner like Bernie Sanders advocates, but ultimately decades too late:
"AI Could Wipe Out the Working Class | Sen. Bernie Sanders"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ).
The idea of "Bullshit Jobs" and "The Abolition of Work" relate to this as well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Bullshit Jobs: A Theory is a 2018 book by anthropologist David Graeber that postulates the existence of meaningless jobs and analyzes their societal harm. He contends that over half of societal work is pointless and becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth. Graeber describes five types of meaningless jobs, in which workers pretend their role is not as pointless or harmful as they know it to be: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. He argues that the association of labor with virtuous suffering is recent in human history and proposes unions and universal basic income as a potential solution."
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
"Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.
You may be wondering if I'm joking or serious. I'm joking and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn't have to be frivolous, although frivolity isn't triviality; very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. I'd like life to be a game -- but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps."
I also explored some of those ideas back around 2010:
https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-...
I'm reading a book right now called "Abundance" which touches on related things. It is ostensibly written by liberals and for liberals. It explores how a previous generations liberal policies (like protecting the environment) have become stumbling blocks impeding the next generation creating a greener infrastructure. Turns out, it is much easier in an ostensible democratic republic to use the law to stop development by saying "no" than to use the law to to facilitate development by saying "yes".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Abundance is a nonfiction book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson published by Avid Reader Press in March 2025. The book examines the reasons behind the lack of progress on ambitious projects in the United States, including those related to affordable housing, infrastructure, and climate change. It became a New York Times Bestseller.
Klein and Thompson argue that the regulatory environment in many liberal cities, while well intentioned, stymies development. They write that American liberals have been more concerned with blocking bad economic development than promoting good development since the 1970s. They say that Democrats have focused on the process rather than results and favored stasis over growth by backing zoning regulations, developing strict environmental laws, and tying expensive requirements to public infrastructure spending. ..."
It's possible that if either the Democrats or Republicans adopt some of Yang's Forward Party agenda we might see some progress on all this? Or perhaps it is too late for much significant pro-active political change in the USA -- given the tidal wave of AI and automation likely to sweep across the globe in the next decade as reflected in the original article about what is happening right now, for example, in China?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
One problem with political chaos (besides for everyone that gets hurt directly) is that it can be hard to predict what the outcome is. For example, progressive students took over the US embassy in Iran, but it was ultimately the better-organized hard-line Iranian clerics who emerged politically victorious as a result. Unfortunately, US head-in-the-sand political behavior about automation seems likely to lead to near-term political chaos when the USA can no longer effectively deny about all this global change with automation mainly happening elsewhere. In the USA, it seems conservatives right now (including big business owners) are better organized and so likely to emerge victorious (if anyone does) from chaos? Which means huge aspects of conservative political agendas will come along for the ride even if they have nothing to do with thinking about how best to build a society (like in Voyage From Yesteryear) that embraces AI, robotics, and other automation in way that benefits everyone.
A related satire by me from 2010:
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Marshall Brain's Manna which inspired my satire is more deeply thought-out though:
https://marshallbrain.com/mann...
Like Bucky Fuller said:
https://libquotes.com/buckmins...
"Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.... Humanity is in 'final exam' as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance in Universe"
Unfortunately, there is indeed a bit of half-truth to the notion that if violence or cruelty (or, jokingly, XML) is not working, you are not using enough of it -- and that tiny bit of half-truth is enough to support ultimately disastrous social (and sometimes, jokingly, technical) policies in the USA.
A related point from my satire: "Soon everyone was out of work [due to increased automation]. The politicians and their supporters said the solution was to lower taxes and cut social benefits to promote business investment. They tried that but the robots still got all the jobs."
I wrote much about all this (as above) circa 2008-2012 (including other things like "Post-Scarcity Princeton" and "Five Interwoven Economies"). It's both heartening to know people are now talking about the implications of advanced automation, even as it is disheartening to see the USA is probably in worse shape politically to deal with it than back then. I hope someday more and more people understand the idea in my sig (including reflection on how it might apply to Union labor contracts): "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
