this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2023
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This is my one obsession. Fear of how we can't possibly all be employed, because of automation, and how the resources and power will keep concentrating in the hands of those who own the automation. I've had this argument with friends that aren't as left leaning as me, and what i'm told over and over again is that i just lack the vision. That this has been a scare since forever, and yet look at how new jobs keep popping up. "There'll be jobs you can't even imagine right now", they say. "Fearmongers like you have been around since forever". "Employment is actually going up".
In my mind though, we're like the horses when the engine was invented.
It's funny that the people who usually say someone else lacks vision are the people keeping themselves blind. They assume that things must stay good because that's what they've experienced. They can't imagine the case where things are different, which most of the evidence is pointing towards.
Your friends are provably wrong. I'd have to look up the actual numbers and dates again, but since around 1994-2000 automation and industrialization has replaced more jobs than it has created, and has in every year since at an exponentially increasing rate. Unfortunately while it would be nice to do this peacefully, the first Rosie the Robot is likely to cause a mass upheaval. Stupid people will try to ban them outright, the smart ones will simply tax the companies that make them and control them providing universal basic income from the revenue.
It's hard to comprehend what 8 BILLION people really means as well. All of these social systems. Religion, governments, anarchy, empires all existed before there were even one billion people. Before globalization, before instant communication. During the fascist revolutions in China in the 70s there only a third that many people on the whole planet and no one had a cell phone.
Capitalism is failing because it's a pyramid scheme that's becoming flattened by the monstrous scale of the base. It makes it so clearly obvious what's going on now.
I feel like most of our attempts so far aren't equipped for the scale we're talking about. I hope someone with the resources to help can figure out how to educate the right people with the right perspective to come up with an alternative.. but probably not in my lifetime. Which is a bummer.
We definitely need to figure out how to average out the access to resources and influence. Lots of people think I mean communism but I don't. That's an old idea that we should consider borrowing from though.
We're simultaneously the horse and the rider. We're centaurs, lol. It would be like if centaurs invented cars. They could still run for fun or for exercise, but at some point they have to accept the car is better at certain things.
A reduction in economic opportunity will naturally be met with declining birthrates which we're already seeing. People who aren't thriving don't want to have children. I don't expect that to change, I expect it to accelerate as automation reduces opportunity further and further.
You don't need genocide, you just need to wait 80 years.