A Discussion Regarding Technological Unemployment

A DISCUSSION REGARDING TECHNOLOGICAL UNEMPLOYMENT

Work to earn a living!

It's been promoted as the best and most honourable way to gain capital, and has served us for millennia. Since time immemorial, people have wanted goods and services, and those goods and services have needed people to bring them into being. That meant employment opportunities and society's organised around the employer/employee relationship. Sure most jobs are not in any way fun or interesting for the people who have to do them (which is why monday is widely held to be the worst day of the week and the weekends are almost universally adored- at least for those who don't have to go to their jobs on saturday or sunday) but it has always been necessary for people to do jobs.

But the incentives of capitalism has never been about providing jobs for people. Rather, it has always been about increasing profit for the owners of capital by lowering marginal costs. People who complain about loss of employment and the harm being done to local communities following the closure of some business and its subsequent move overseas in order to be more competitive miss the point that the CEO is tasked with increasing shareholder value and nothing else. Of course, businesses will provide jobs for people and build communities if this helps increase profit or lower marginal costs, but if a better method of doing either that does not involve employing people should come along, you can bet the most successful businesses will adopt that method.

(Professional driver: Soon to be extinct? Image from Wikimedia commons)

This is why some have been keeping a wary eye on automation. Could there be a cambrian explosion of specialised robots and narrow AI, resulting in countless ways to automate jobs and squeeze human workers to the point of making employment seeking impossibly difficult? Can robot minds become as, or more, capable than human brains, resulting in artificial labourers who work for nothing 24/7, never taking holidays, never getting sick, never organising into unions and making demands?
In short, could the way of life that has applied for thousands of years, one in which capital growth requires people to find employment in jobs, come to an end, giving way to a new era in which machines grow capital with only a few humans in the loop, or maybe none at all? More to the point, if technological unemployment does happen, what should we do about it?

Economists have long held the assumption that technological unemployment is never going to happen, or if it is going to happen, not for a long while yet. No need to plan for some far distant future possibility. Many have pointed out that tech creates jobs as well as eliminating them. We can retrain and move from being office workers to 4 dimensional holobiomorphal co-formulators or whatever the hell people do in 2030 to earn a living. If it is always that case that tech creates jobs and that people's labour will always be the most cost-effective commodity one can hire to fill the vacancies those jobs open up, then we can carry on as we always have. If.

UBI is another possibility, probably the one most often argued over on this forum. If technological unemployment is going to make it impossible for most people to get a job ('darn it, I have applied for a thousand different jobs but that Roboworker 2000 has been installed in every single one. It's replacing jobs faster than I can retrain!') we have to sever the link between jobs and wages. It's all very well lowering costs by eliminating jobs and replacing human workers with ultra-efficient and capable robots, but if those robots receive no wages and people can earn no wages, where are all the consumers with money to spend going to come from? Can an economy really work if wealth is concentrated into .1% of the population leaving everybody else with little to no disposable income?

In this discussion we are going to assume that technological unemployment IS a reality we will be facing in the future. I want to know: APART from UBI, what can we do to ensure the robot revolution benefits as many people as possible? How should we organise society so that it is best-placed to meet that future in which so few people are needed in jobs?

Here is one idea. Money needs to be reinvented so that as technological capabilities increase and more and more jobs are automated, the value of each coin in your pocket goes up. At the moment, fiat money and fractional reserve banking is designed to redistribute money from the bottom of the pyramid to the top, without those at the top necessarily making any contributions to the real economy. This is achieved through inflation and other methods. Rather than inflation decreasing the purchasing power of the money in your pocket, the purchasing power of money in ordinary people's pockets should be increasing, as indeed I believe it did during the 19th and early 20th century. Material wealth needs to become cheap, so cheap that anybody with half a brain to at least save something and prepare for the tech unemployment to come, can comfortably live in that fantastic future in which capitalism has reached its peak.

Any other ideas?

REFERENCES

Zeitgeist Movement Defined

Rethinking Money by Bernard Lietaer and Jacqui Dunne

The Singularity and Socialism by C. James Townsend

The Second Intelligent Species by Marshall Brain