What do you mean “may be the case”? As US society is structured right now, it WILL be the case. With 1 percent of the population controlling 47 percent of the wealth, we are definitely in oligarchy territory, and heading there faster and faster thanks to the political power of our conservative brethren and prevailing cultural mores in the US. And I don’t have much faith in the wealthy to see things the smart way, because most of them are probably only a little above average in intelligence. For every Elon Musk, a person we should all probably be glad has lots of money and power, there is a Robert Richards IV, an heir to the duPont fortune whom a judge allowed to skip jail because he “would not thrive in prison” after being convicted of raping his three year old daughter. (Actually, the whole duPont family is kinda rotten,if you read this article).
I think we ultimately will reach a system where everybody benefits from automation to the extent of getting their basic needs taken care of. But I fear a horrible transition in the US, with much needless suffering and waste of human life and potential.
Poor and middle class voters do not matter at all,according to some recent studies. They show that Congress listens to the wealthy and to well-funded special interest groups, especially on economic issues. Where middle class and poor interest groups have interests that are opposed to the wealthy, their influence as reflected in Congressional votes is ZERO, or so close to it as to be statistically insignificant.
The “haves” and “have nots” are nowhere near equal in number, yet the voting % would indicate otherwise. Must mean that the “have nots” have a greater % of politically apathetic than the “haves”. Voter turn-out is a must.
I’ve got the Congressional Record, which shows scads of stuff passed by the Pelosi Congress in 2009 and 2010 that gave the Koch brothers serious heartburn and sparked a huge Tea Party conniption on Wall Street. You are asserting that this was all some kind of feint?
Thing is, Tea Partiers and Republicans like to squawk about entitlements and welfare, but they don’t like to actually cut benefits for people. It’s easy to complain about freeloaders, but when we’re talking about Grandma’s social security, and Dad’s disability payment, and Bubba’s unemployment, and Sister’s student loans, and Junior’s GI benefits, nobody actually wants those things cut.
Oligarchs don’t hate paying for welfare because they’re inhuman bastards, they hate paying for shit because that means less money for them. But as I’ve argued before, all this disruption isn’t just for blue collar jobs, it’s going to affect white collar jobs as well. How will lawyers run things when automated systems provide better legal advice than human lawyers? Obviously, by passing a law that says that you can’t use automated legal advice. But why is it that “plutocrat” is a job that only a human being can do? Why aren’t captains of industry subject to the same sorts of disruptive innovation that lawyers and doctors and burger-flippers are? Why does a pension-fund manager make millions of dollars in 2214, when an automated system can manage a pension much more efficiently?
The only a fraction of what we call “the rich” today will still be “the rich” in 100 years. But as I’ve said before, owning a factory that churns out widgets will be a sucker’s game in 2114. It will be impossible to get rich by owning facilities for turning raw materials into finished goods. Even today it is extremely hard to make money by owning a factory where iPads are assembled, since Apple can get tab A inserted into slot B anywhere in the world. How do you make money serving ads to people with no money? How do you make money selling widgets to people with no money?
The remaining oligarchs will have to agree to social insurance, because otherwise what are they going to sell? What are they going to own? What are they going to produce? Yes, the economic disruptions we’re going to experience are going to be rough. But nobody’s going to starve to death, I can reasonably guarantee that in 2114 “the poor” will be fatter than ever, barring miracle weight loss cures invented by local moms that nutritionists hate.
I don’t think such a law would do all that much. What you will probably see is that a single lawyer can take on much more in the way of work because he or she mainly becomes the human face who interacts with clients–while all the research and analysis is done by the computer. Which still puts a lot of lawyers out of work, but it is less obvious superficially. Still, those unemployed lawyers will be a powerful political force. Maybe they will lean on the government to create more white-collar jobs of dubious necessity.
I agree with you though that in the medium term, the rich will not be able to make profits without a large mass of consumers to buy their products or services.
Wll, there are companies now buying water rights all over the place, so if everybody has to pay, they can keep the per person cost relatively low, and still make huge profits
And eventually, there will be a water subsidy for the low-income people.
Well let’s discuss this and see if we aren’t talking past one another. Let’s say that it’s 2035, and there are about 3.5 million oligarchs worldwide who own 90 percent of the arable land and 90 percent of the automated production facilities. I’ve got no basis for those numbers, just throwing them out. (For comparison, in America the top one tenth of one % owns 40% of the wealth, so that’s 350,000 people right there, and we are still the wealthiest nation on Earth). These oligarchs do need SOME people … the ones who run and maintain their factories and the machines that grow and harvest crops. Plus there are service jobs they will need … people to maintain their homes, pave their roads, prepare their meals, etc. And the people who work for them will need people too … it’s a familiar stepladder, but it can only go so far. Let’s say that the net effect of this is that for every oligarch, 100 total people are needed, everyone else having been displaced by automation. That’s 350 million people needed to provide housing, food, clothing, etc. in a world of seven billion people.
Now, what do those oligarchs need the rest of us for if their machines have displaced us? You may see, to keep up their fortunes, but hell, they can sell to the 350 million oligarchs and their necessary people, who DO have funds. Why do they NEED to sell CDs to everyone in the world? (They don’t.)
So where does that leave the remaining 6.65 billion of us? In a very unhappy place, I fear.
You might argue that the oligarchy needs the 6.6 billion to buy their stuff, but why? All we are really doing is cluttering up the best ski resorts, the nicest restaurants, the best places to build homes … with the rest of us gone, there’s lebensraum to spare! As has been stated, manufacturing cheap items for everyone is a fool’s game. So why wouldn’t the wealth concentrate on their 350 million elite and let the rest go hang?
Then they need us to build and run the ski resorts, the restaurants, homes etc. just for starters.
OTOH if you’re saying robots in this scenario are doing all of that, then why is it only the top 10% that are using them? Why don’t other businesses and individuals invest in robots to manufacture goods or perform services?
If they’re too expensive for all but the super rich to afford, why are the super rich wasting their money like that, when they can pay average joe to do those tasks?
In seriousness: I think **Mijin **makes a good point. Even without government intervention (which is almost inevitable), it’s hard to picture a way for the vast majority of people to get totally shut out of all economic activity if they are not provided even a basic safety net. Seems to me it’s more likely to be problematic a little earlier in the evolutionary process to a “post-work” society, like maybe ten or twenty years from now. It doesn’t have to be, but that’s a stage where libertarians and conservatives can still be in denial and cling to their Protestant work ethic, write off the masses not in the workforce as lazy people who ought to “get a job”. And they might from time to time still get enough voters to buy into it.
But fifty years from now? Fuggedaboudit. That dog just will not hunt by that point.
This is why the main premise of the film *Elysium *made no sense. (No spoilers here unless you consider the setup, revealed in the first few minutes, to be spoiler-y.) The super rich, who lived in what was essentially a gated subdivision called Elysium orbiting the Earth, had machines that looked like tanning beds that could heal basically any injury or illness, in a few seconds: cancer, serious trauma, whatever. In fact, *each household *had one, sitting near the fireplace and grand piano. But the hoi polloi on Earth, who labored away in factories making robots for the corporate CEOs that lived up in Elysium, had no access to these magical healing beds. They had big county hospitals, but with more or less the same tech we have in hospitals now. When of course the reality would be that there would have to be some middle level between “having one in your home” and “you can’t get one five-minute session in one per year or per lifetime, even with health insurance or by putting up your life savings”.
Well of course, long term, it won’t work. Problem is, I see the technology moving a lot faster than our cultural and political mores are moving, and what’s even worse, the cultural and political mores among the wealthy in the US are moving in the exact opposite direction of what would work for the emergent societies where most don’t need to work to provide goods and services. Even in Europe, the wealthy ends of society are moving toward conservative/libertarian views. In the US it’s especially alarming because control over wealth and political power are shifting rapidly to these wealthy elites. So we got robotics rendering more and more people unemployed, while the wealthy elites move toward less and less concern for the poor and the middle class, with the poor and the middle class having less and less political power.
I’m sure things will improve eventually, but it’s the transition that worries me: it sure looks like a formula for disaster for the people caught in that transition.
Yes, Elysium makes no sense in that there surely will be some transition between the wealthy and the poor. And the outer-space element makes very little sense. But the gap between the haves and have nots WILL be especially galling as medical breakthroughs occur permitting life extension and healthier living in general for those who can afford it. What attitude do you suppose wealthy libertarians will have toward life extension for the new unemployables?
The outer space element for the rich makes sense – to protect the rich from all the pitchfork wounds and torch burns that the rioting mobs of poor would apply if they were in reach.
Well I haven’t seen the movie, just trailers for it, which have not looked all that intriguing to me, but I note that in the US the rich live comfortably among us. For example, if I wanted to run amuck and kill me some ultra wealthy folks in my immediate surroundings, I know just where to go. There’s not a lot in the way of security to stop an armed mob at any of those locations. I live within walking distance of some of them. So I wonder how realistic that element is. I know in Mexico and other Third World countries,kidnapping the rich is pretty much an industry, and wealthy people DO live in gated enclaves protected by armed guards there.
Except, how does “owning a factory” make you an oligarch? Building and making stuff can’t make you rich if the marginal cost of making stuff is zero.
This is what I keep objecting to in this thread, the notion that ownership of the “means of production” will continue to be concentrated in smaller and smaller hands, and that said ownership will be more and more profitable.
In fact, ownership of the means of production will get less and less profitable. Providing services will get less and less profitable. Owning stuff will get less and less profitable. We’re already seeing this at the low end–I know tons of struggling families, and their houses are packed to the roof with cheap crap. They may struggle to pay the rent, but they’ve got dishes and clothes and food and all sorts of things, because those things are dirt cheap to produce. The guy who owns the factory in China that is churning out 10 cent plastic plates isn’t getting super-rich doing it. And his potential for profit is just going to fall, when automated fabricators can be set up anywhere and everywhere.
This doesn’t result in concentration of ownership of factories and automated systems–and remember that automated services are going to be even more ubiquitous than automated production of goods. Imagining that the oligarchs of the 22nd century are going to be industrialists and businessmen is like imagining that the oligarchs of the 20th Century would be feudal landholders. That entire system of obtaining and maintaining wealth fell apart in the face of the industrial revolution. Yes, there will be vast inequalities of wealth–Bill Gates has a net worth greater than the entire planet Earth in the middle ages.
But that wealth will be used to allocate different scarce resources than we’re used to, here in 2014. What resources are going to be scarce in 2064? Land? There are millions of acres of cheap land in the midwest and Canada. Bill Gates isn’t buying up the Great Plains is he? When you have mega-rich people, the very most desirable plots of land can get bid up to astronomical levels. That doesn’t mean you can’t buy acres of desert scrub or taiga for cheap. But what are you going to do with your plot of wilderness? Live there? Maybe, if you don’t need a job because all the goods and services you need for a decent life are provided by automated systems and pensions–money you earn just by breathing.