On May 14, 2013, Kevin Drum writes in Mother Jones:
You can never get too much robot punditry, can you? So here are two more followups from my magazine piece on the coming rise of smart machines. First, an interview with Dylan Matthews over at WonkBlog. Here’s my take on what happens as we disemploy more and more people along the road to our eventual robot paradise:
“It seems like if you have a huge section of people who are unemployed, who don’t really have resources but have a lot of spare time, then there’s a possibility of really huge political mobilizations on the part of those people, like you see in countries nowadays with mass unemployment.
“I think that’s likely to be one of the things that happens along the way. Societies that suffer from mass unemployment, the history of what happens to those societies is not a bright one. At some point you have to respond, and there’s going to be a lot of resistance to responding because of ideology, because
of politics, because of pure greed, but eventually we are going to respond to this. It’s going to be obvious what’s happening, that people are unemployed due to no fault of their own, and that we have to respond.
“In the meantime, we’re going to resist responding, and we’re probably going to resist responding very very strongly, because rich people don’t like giving up their money. We’re in for a few decades of a really grim fight between the poor, who are losing jobs, and the rich, who don’t want to give up their riches.”
OK, fine, that wasn’t the most lucid description of the problem ever. In a few years a robot will be able to make a better fist of it. But you get the idea. The big question is: how long will it be before everyone finally caves in and admits that something new is happening, and we’re not just suffering from the same old economic problems as we have in the past?
With increasing punditry, scholars and others are writing about the impact of the Second Industrial Revolution where tectonic shifts in the technologies of production are destroying and degrading jobs due to the shift from labor worker input to the non-human factor––human-intelligent machines, superautomation, robotics, digital computer operations, etc.
The question that requires an answer is now timely before us. It was first posed by binary economist Louis Kelso in the 1950s but has never been thoroughly discussed on the national stage. Nor has there been the proper education of our citizenry that addresses what economic justice is and what ownership is. Therefore, by ignoring such issues of economic justice and ownership, our leaders are ignoring the concentration of power through ownership of productive capital, with the result of denying the 99 percenters equal opportunity to become capital owners. The question, as posed by Kelso is: “how are all individuals to be adequately productive when a tiny minority (capital workers) produce a major share and the vast majority (labor workers), a minor share of total goods and service,” and thus, “how do we get from a world in which the most productive factor—physical capital—is owned by a handful of people, to a world where the same factor is owned by a majority—and ultimately 100 percent—of the consumers, while respecting all the constitutional rights of present capital owners?”
Solutions are to be found in the platform of the Capital Homestead Act. Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/05/robots-mass-unemployment-and-riots-streets
