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and a social and legal theorist.
He teaches several courses open to undergraduates, including
Government 1092: Progressive Alternatives.
His work spans many disciplines
and emphasizes the search for alternatives to establish ways
of thinking about society and human nature.
Please join us in welcoming professor Roberto Unger.
No one should have to do work that can be done by a machine.
Everything that we have learned how to repeat, we can express...
in a formula, in a rule, in an algorithm.
And everything that we can express in a rule...
we can embody in a physical contraction a machine.
The point of a machine should be to do for us
what we have already learned how to repeat,
so that we can preserve our supreme resource: time,
for that which we have not yet learned how to repeat.
In the established forms of economic organization throughout much of history,
people have been compelled to act as if they were machines.
In this way, the true potential of the machine
for the liberation of humanity is wasted.
Nothing is more powerful than this combination of the person and the machine.
The person, always one step ahead of the machine,
into the unknown, the not yet repeatable.
But is it practical?
There now begins to emerge all over the world
a new form of production.
It is characterized not simply by the accumulation
of capital, technology and knowledge,
but also by a set of advanced experimental practices.
It attenuates the contrast between supervision and execution,
so that the plan of production is revised in the process being implemented.
It relativizes all specialized work roles,
It mixes cooperation and competition in the same domains.
It transforms productive activity...
into a practice of permanent innovation and revolution,
and it sets the stage for this higher relation of the person to the machine.
Now there are two objections to this project.
The first objection is that it would destroy jobs.
It would leave much of humanity without employment.
The truth is that, in principal, as it destroys some jobs,
it can create many others.
Whether in the aggregate it destroys more jobs than it creates
depends on the form of economic organization.
The situation in which more jobs are destroyed is a special case.
What are some of the characteristics of the other case?
One characteristic...
is that the market economy not be pinned down to a single version of itself.
That we be able to experiment with alternative ways of organizing...
decentralized economic initiative and reconciling it with economies of scale.
So that alternative regimes of private and social property
would come to coexist experimentaly, whitin the same market economy.
Another characteristic of this superior special case
is that economically dependent wage labor
would no longer be the predominant form of free labor.
In the 19th century the liberals and the socialist alike,
including people like Abraham Lincoln,
regarded "wage labor"
as a compromised and transitory form of free labor,
tainted by some of the attributes of slavery and serfdom.
The higher relation of the person to the machine is only likely to flourish
when wage labor gives way gradually
to the higher forms of free labor,
which are self-employment and cooperation.
The second objection to this project...
is that the preponderance of humanity has not been formed.
It has not been educated to have such a relation to the machine.
And indeed, this project requires a revolution in education.
It is not enough that education enable us to master...
analytic capabilities to problem solving.
It is necessary that it privileges cooperation in teaching and in learning,
over the combination of individualism and authoritarianism
that still characterizes the classroom.
And above all it is necessary that education be dialectical,
that is to say, that every subject be taught
from at least two contrasting points of view.
Then, people will be formed so that the whole of their activity
can be devoted to the not yet repeatable.
Underlying this project...
is a conception of the mind and an ideal of existence.
The conception of the mind.
The mind is both a machine and an anti-machine.
In one respect, the mind is like a machine.
It is modular and formulaic.
It is composed of specialized pieces with fixed roles.
In another respect, however, the mind is an anti-machine.
It is not modular, it is not formulaic.
It has the capacity to combine everything with everything else,
which we call recursive infinity.
And it enjoys the power to achieve insight
by transgressing its own presuppositions
and defying its own methods.
It has the power that the poet described as negative capability.
In this second respect, the mind is what we call "the imagination".
The relation between the person and the machine that I described
is one way in which we can turn our practical activity in the world
into a tangible embodiment of the imagination.
The ideal of the existence.
As we grow older, a carapace of compromise,
of silent surrenders and self-inflicted belittlement
begins to form around each of us.
A mummy in which we die many deaths.
To come into the fuller possession of life, our supreme good...
We must break out of this mummy.
Until we do that, we project the good
onto a historical or providential future that we cannot reach.
"That shalt to be king hereafter", cries the witch to Macbeth.
Hereafter is never. The real thing is now.
When no one has to do work that can be done by a machine,
we shall be closer to achieving what we should all desire...
which is to die only once.