I'm a free market capitalist. But I'm not stupid. I can see the writing on the wall. Capitalism at some point on this planet is going to wither away. Maybe not all at once, but little by little. Its time is coming, and some of us would be surprised at what is killing it.
Capitalism is killing capitalism.
To understand why we have to go back when every automobile was built by hand. Sure, they may have had a few tools here and there, but at the end of the day every car was built more by man than by machine.
Enter Henry Ford.
His idea, the assembly line, revolutionized the automobile industry. Instead of a luxury for the most wealthy of society, now almost anyone could afford one.
Little did Henry Ford probably know where we would be just over 100 years after he founded the Ford Motor Company that used this idea.
Businesses by design want to become more efficient. Its a basic principle; generate more revenue while lowering cost. One of the primary ways of doing that? Automation. Get rid of the human element (and the human cost).
In the past, we could have a reasonable idea of what automation would do to the human workforce. Machines would be built that could do a specific task or a set of specific tasks. We could determine what type of worker would be replaced and thus how many people would be looking for new work and possibly retrained.
Then automation got modular. It still requiring human intervention but parts of the machines could be switched out and configured differently to handle a variety of tasks - perhaps even some tasks that were not considered at the time they were built.
Today? With advances in microprocessor design we can train neural networks and other machine learning algorithms to learn how to do tasks. Some companies are even working on training systems on how to code.
Software engineers, how do you feel about your job safety? :)
This is a significant difference than the automation of the past where humans still were in control of the limits of what a machine can do. If machines today can learn to do practically anything, then based on the capitalistic principle of efficiency we want to teach them to do all of society's work while we pursue our own interests.
How would this work? Well, ultimately automated systems are still creating value. The question then becomes how does that value get distributed in some way to compensate all those who "would have been" working? Yes, I said it. It was a very, very anti-free market capitalism question to ponder. Again, I'm a free market capitalist but I'm not dumb but I see the writing on the wall. Capitalism led to technological progress, technological progress has led to automation, automation evolved so that it could learn new automation and that in the end will kill capitalism (or at least bring it to its knees).
I hate the "t" word, but in this case I will make an exception. An automation tax (gah!, I said it) that companies pay that will contribute to a universal basic income for everyone. It won't let anyone live like a king, but nobody will go hungry sleeping on a sidewalk in the rain either. Individuals who want to do better than that can always try to pursue business opportunities but they would have to compete with the quality, efficiency and cost of the automated systems or provide a good or service that automation hasn't reached. Yet.
Switzerland just had a vote on a universal basic income (2,000 or 2,500 Swiss Francs per month per citizen, if I recall correctly, which is about the same as $2,000 to $2,500 per month). It failed, and it failed by a lot, but the reason why was interesting. It wasn't because they didn't think it was a good idea. It failed mainly because, according to voters, they felt that it would cause a huge immigration influx into Switzerland, where roughly 25% of the population are already expats.
At some point, as automation increases along with the population and job opportunities decrease unless everyone goes full-on entrepreneur we are going to have to evaluate how we determine the value of automation and how individuals get compensated for that value to offset the job losses.
So what do you think? Is automation going to do our current economic system in? Is capitalism killing itself? Are we headed toward a more socialistic society where automation creates the value and the value gets distributed? I'm curious to know what other Steemers think about where the world is heading.
For those following my posts, no, this wasn't the one I intended to write for today. That one is still on the backburner for now. :)