AOC Says People Should Be Excited to Lose Their Jobs So They Have Time to ‘Go to Space’

At SXSW 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was a top crowd draw, pulling more audience than any of the Democratic 2020 hopefuls. During her remarks, the ultra-liberal freshman offered more than one political-fodder-ready sound-bite, including on the topic of jobs, robots, and “techno-futurism” in her big Saturday appearance.

Taking questions from the audience, Ocasio-Cortez was asked about automation and jobs that may be replaced by machines and robots.

She began her answer by saying that the question of automation is not just about “automating people out of work”, but also “automating injustice.” After a minute or so on that idea, she addressed the question of jobs.

“One of the things that’s difficult is, people should not necessarily–we should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work,” she said. “We should not feel nervous about the toll booth collector not having to collect tolls anymore. We should be excited by that.”

She said we’re not excited because “we live in a society where if you don’t have a job, you’re left to die.”

“We should be excited about automation, because what it could potentially mean is more time educating ourselves, more time creating art, more time investing and investigating in the sciences, more time focused on invention, more time going to space, more time enjoying the world that we live in,” said Ocasio-Cortez. “Because not all creativity needs to be bonded by wage.”

Ocasio-Cortez said the time has come for the ideology of “democratic socialism or techno-futurism or like whatever it is” because capitalism is based on scarcity and technology will soon mean “infinite resources” and no scarcity.

She said capitalism will require “artificial scarcity” to continue. “That is what has happened, we have created artificial scarcity,” she said.

“We should be working the least amount we’ve ever worked,” she said.

“I like to think of it as ‘full Star Trek socialism’,” said moderator Briahna Gray.

Watch the clip above, via SXSW on YouTube.

[Featured image via screengrab]

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