Has Equality Become a Quaint, Obsolete Vestige of the Past?

I know, I know, you're probably saying "what equality?" When did we ever live in a world of equality? We didn't but we did at least once treat equality in some things as a desirable ideal. That we embraced equality as a value is evident today in the angst many suffer at our rapidly growing inequality. According to a piece from BBC, inequality could soon get far worse and very quickly. In fact, your existence might be treated as redundant.

[In the 19th and 20th centuries] equality became a dominant value in human culture, almost all over the world. Why?

It was partly down to the rise of new ideologies such as humanism, liberalism and socialism.

But it was also about technological and economic change - which was connected to those new ideologies, of course.

Suddenly the elite needed large numbers of healthy, educated people to serve as soldiers in the army and as workers in the factories.

Governments didn't educate and vaccinate to be nice.

They needed the masses to be useful.

But now that's changing again.

[Robotics-driven automation]  is one reason why we might - in the not-too-distant future - see the creation of the most unequal societies that have ever existed in human history.

And there are other reasons to fear such a future.

With rapid improvements in biotechnology and bioengineering, we may reach a point where, for the first time in history, economic inequality becomes biological inequality.

Until now, humans had control of the world outside them.

They could control the rivers, forests, animals and plants.

But they had very little control of the world inside them.

They had limited ability to manipulate and engineer their own bodies, brains and minds.

They couldn't cheat death.

That might not always be the case.
...

The rich - through purchasing ...biological enhancements - could become, literally, better than the rest; more intelligent, healthier and with far greater life-spans.

At that point, it will make sense to cede power to this "enhanced" class.

Think about it like this.

In the past, the nobility tried to convince the masses that they were superior to everyone else and so should hold power.

In the future I am describing, they really will be superior to the masses.

And because they will be better than us, it will make sense to cede power and decision-making to them.

...

We might also find that the rise of artificial intelligence - and not just automation - will mean that huge numbers of people, in all kinds of jobs, simply lose their economic usefulness.

The two processes together - human enhancement and the rise of AI - may result in the separation of humankind into a very small class of super-humans and a massive underclass of "useless" people.

...

Once you lose your economic importance, the state loses at least some of the incentive to invest in your health, education and welfare.
It's very dangerous to be redundant.

Your future depends on the goodwill of some small elite.

Maybe there is goodwill.

But in a time of crisis - like climate catastrophe - it would be very easy to toss you overboard.

Dismiss this if you like but I think we can all agree that it poses serious questions that we need to ask, issues that we need to discuss. Unfortunately it comes at a point where governments seem to have no great interest in discussing serious issues with us. Maybe they already see this writing on the wall.

Send In the Slaves

When it's completely boiled down what are robotics except the process of capital owning labour?  What are the implications of that if capital is given a free hand to dislocate human labour with its mechanized alternative?

A report in the Sydney Morning Herald claims that robots could replace half of human jobs in the next 20-years.  Something that radical usually results in guillotines in the public square.

University of Oxford Associate Professor in machine learning Michael Osborne has examined the characteristics of 702 occupations in the US, predicting 47 per cent will be overtaken by computers in the next decade or two.

Those most at-risk jobs are in accommodation and food services (87 per cent of workers at high risk of being replaced), transportation and warehousing (75 per cent) and real estate (67 per cent).

By contrast, only about 10 per cent of workers in the information sector, software developers and higher level management were at risk of automation.

Professor Osborne said machines and computers still struggled with creativity, social intelligence and the manipulation of complex objects, making jobs with high requirements in these areas less vulnerable to robotisation.

History is full of examples of machines replacing workers.

At the start of the 20th century about 40 per cent of US workers were in agriculture. That's now about two per cent but the unemployment rate has remained relatively steady.

The invention of the car savaged jobs in the horse transport industry but gave rise to tourism and all the jobs that come with it.

In the early 19th century the Luddites rioted against labour-replacing machinery in the English textile industry, coining a name for someone resistant to change.

"These people weren't irrational. There were genuine risks to their jobs," Professor Osborne said.

"And while overall in the end unemployment wasn't affected, there certainly were very severe negative consequences for those workers in the short term.

"I think the story here is fairly similar actually that in the end, yes we may see new forms of work generated but it's not clear that the kind of people who are put out of work, which I said ought to be those at the low-skilled end of the spectrum, are necessarily going to be those that move into those new forms of work."

The dislocation triggered by mechanization can be ameliorated in an expansive economy but what does it mean to a world of scarcity and retraction?  We're not there yet, thanks in good measure to some economic parlour tricks, but we're not far off either.               

But Robots Don't Buy Bread

The CBS show 60 Minutes ran an item tonight about how robots were displacing humans in America's work force.   The story featured great minds from MIT and elsewhere discussing how humans were becoming redundant to industry.

Fair enough.  Yes, we can replace human labour in a great many slots in the modern workforce.   And we can have robots do their jobs more reliably and at much lower cost.   What we can't do is make these mechanical marvels want to eat bread.

Ours is the ultimate consumer society.   Consumer spending drives our economy.   Without willing buyers able to part with disposable income to buy products we have no one to sell stuff to, plain and simple.

A robot consumes electricity.   It doesn't drive a car or buy a house or rear and educate a gaggle of kids.   There's a reason robotic labour is so cheap - because it doesn't contribute to the economy, only to the bottom line and, even that, only temporarily.

Are robots going to line up to buy crap from other robots?   No, of course not, we don't pay them.   Robots don't have capital (wages) to inject into the economy.   Once robots displace wage-earning consumers to a certain level they cut their own and their owners' throats.

Henry Ford knew better than  this.   He knew it was in his interest to pay his factory workers a wage sufficient to enable them to buy his cars.   He knew that an adequately paid workforce was essential to demand in a consumer economy.   Without that, Ford would have wound up with a yard full of unsellable cars.

That's not to say that business won't be bull-headed enough to press the point.   They're already doing that.  The 60 Minutes report, however, showed how robotic jobs continue to displace human employment.   But, until the factories find a way to get real wages into the hands of those robots and have them start buying bread, industry is on a dead end road.