On February 8, 2017, Roey Tzezana writes on Futurism:
- Robots like the Moley cooking system are examples of how the technology of the future will possibly have a hand in every part of our day.
- Such infiltration could lead to the gap widening between the rich and the poor.
You’re watching MasterChef on TV. The contestants are making their very best dishes and bring them to the judges for tasting. As the judges’ eyes roll back with pleasure, you are left sitting on your couch with your mouth watering at the praises they heap upon the tasty treats.
Well, it doesn’t have to be that way anymore. Meet Moley, the first robotic cook that might actually reach your household.
Moley is composed mostly of two highly versatile robotic arms that repeat human motions in the kitchen. The arms can basically do anything that a human being can, and in fact, receive their ‘training’ by recording highly esteemed chefs at their work. According to the company behind Moley, the robot will come equipped with more than 2,000 digital recipes installed and will be able to enact each and every one of them with ease.
I could go on describing Moley, but a picture is worth a thousand words, and a video clip is worth around thirty thousand words a second. So take a minute of your time to watch Moley in action. You won’t regret it.
Moley is projected to get to market in 2017, and should cost around $15,000.
What impact could it have for the future? Here are a few thoughts.
IMPACT ON PROFESSIONAL CHEFS
Moley is not a chef. It is incapable of thinking up of new dishes on its own. In fact, it is not much more than a ‘monkey’ replicating every movement of the original chef. This description, however, pretty much applies to 99 percent of kitchen workers in restaurants. They spend their work hours doing exactly as the chef tells them to. As a result, they produce dishes that should be close to identical to each other.
As Moley and similar robotic kitchen assistants come into use, we will see a reduced need for cooks and kitchen workers in many restaurants. This trend will be particularly noticeable in large junk food networks like McDonald’s that have the funds to install a similar system in every branch of the network, thereby cutting their costs. And the kitchen workers in those places? Most of them will not be needed anymore.
Professional chefs, though, stand to gain a lot from Moley. In a way, food design could become very similar to creating apps for smartphones. Apps are so hugely successful because everybody has an end device – the smartphone – and can download an app immediately for a small cost. Similarly, when many kitchens make use of Moley, professional chefs can make lots of money by selling new and innovative digital recipes for just one dollar each.
ARE WE BECOMING A PLUTONOMY?
In 2005, Citigroup sent a memo to its wealthiest clients, suggesting that the United States is rapidly turning into a plutonomy: a nation in which the wealthy and the prosperous are driving the economy, while everybody else pretty much tags along. In the words of the report –
“There is no such thing as “The U.S. Consumer” or “UK Consumer”, but rich and poor consumers in these countries… The rich are getting richer; they dominate spending. Their trend of getting richer looks unlikely to end anytime soon.”
There is much evidence to support Citigroup’s analysis, and Boston Consulting Group has reached similar conclusions when forecasting the increase in financial wealth of the super-rich in the near future. In short, it would seem that the rich keep getting richer, whereas the rest of us are not enjoying anywhere near the same pace of financial growth. It is therefore hardly surprising to find out that one of the top pieces of advice given by Citigroup in its Plutonomy Memo was basically to invest in companies and firms that provide services to the rich and the wealthy. After all, they’re the ones whose wealth keeps on increasing as time moves on. Why should companies cater to the poor and the downtrodden, when they can focus on huge gains from the top 10 percent of the population?
Moley could easily be a demonstration for a service that befits a plutonomy. At $15,000 per robot, Moley could find its place in every millionaire’s house. At the same time, it could kick out of employment many of the low-level, low-earning cooks in kitchens worldwide.
You might say, of course, that those low-level cooks would be able to compete in the new app market as well, and offer their own creations to the public. You would be correct, but consider that any digital market becomes a “winner takes all” market. There is simply no place for plenty of big winners in the app – or digital recipe – market.
Moley, then, is essentially another invention driving us closer to plutonomy.
AND YET…
New technologies have always cost some people their livelihood while helping many others. Matt Ridley, in his masterpiece The Rational Optimist, describes how the guilds fought relentlessly against the industrial revolution in England, even though that revolution led in a relatively short period of time to a betterment of the human condition in England. Some people lost their workplace as a result of the industrial revolution, but they found new jobs. In the meantime, everybody suddenly enjoyed from better and cheaper clothes, better products in the stores, and an overall improvement in the economy since England could export its surplus of products.
Moley and similar robots will almost certainly cost some people their workplaces, but in the meantime it has the potential to minimize the cost of food, minimize time spent on making food in the household (I’m spending 45-60 minutes every day making food for my family and me), and elevate the lifestyle quality of the general public – but only if the technology drops in price and can be deployed in many venues, including personal homes.
FUTURE TECHNOLOGY GAP?
If it’s a forecast you want, then here it is. While we can’t know for sure whether Moley itself will conquer the market, or some other robotic company, it seems likely that as AI continues to develop and drop in prices, robots will become part of many households. I believe that the drop in prices would be significant over a period of twenty years so that almost everybody will enjoy the presence of kitchen robots in their homes.
That said, the pricing and services are not a matter of technological prowess alone, but also a social one: will the robotic companies focus on the wealthy and the rich, or will they find financial models with which to provide services for the poor as well?
This decision could shape our future as we know it, and define whether we’ll keep our headlong dive towards plutonomy.
https://futurism.com/tech-may-widen-the-gap-between-rich-and-poor/
What is surprising about this article is that the author fails to point to the reason “the rich are getting richer.” Obviously, the distinction between the rich and the non-rich is that the rich OWN wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets, the very essence of technological progress, and the poor only have their labor to sell to the wealthy capital ownership class.
The fact that the core function of technological invention and innovation is to invent “tools” to reduce toil, enable otherwise impossible production, create new highly automated industries, and significantly change the way in which products and services are produced from labor intensive to capital intensive, should surprise no one who is conscious and who has even causally observed the constant shift to non-human productive inputs in the manufacturing, distribution, and sales of products, as well as the delivery of services, that has been occurring during their lifetime. The first burst of this phenomena was the Industrial Revolution, which replaced many jobs, but still this was primarily an age of labor-intensive production. But now we are in an age of technology sophistication that is permeating every sector of industry and our day-to-day lives. Such exponential growth of technology is causing tectonic shifts in the technologies of production, which is and will continue to destroy jobs and devalue the worth of labor.
The urgency is to figure out means for people to earn an income without dependency on jobs. The focus should not be on a pro-job growth future but an alternative to wage dependency as economists across the board predict further losses as AI, robotics, and other technologies continue to be ushered in.
There’s nothing new about machines replacing people, but the rate of replacement is exponential and the result is that productivity gains lead to more wealth for the OWNERS of the non-human factor of production, but for others who have always been dependent on jobs as their sole source of income, there has been a steady decline to poverty-level labor incomes.
What must be understood (which unfortunately is not understood by conventional economists) is that there are two independent factors of production––human or labor workers and non-human or physical productive capital––productive land, structures, machines, super-automation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc.
Fundamentally, economic value is created through human and non-human contributions.
Also what needs to be understood is that human productivity has not advanced (our human abilities are limited by physical strength and brain power––and relatively constant), but that the productiveness of the non-human factor of production––productive capital––is the reason that private sector corporations, majority owned by the “1 percent,” are utilizing the non-human factor of production increasingly to create efficiencies and save labor costs. It is the function of technology to save people from toil and to enable us to do things that otherwise are humanly impossible without non-human input. The critical question becomes who should own productive capital? The issue of OWNERSHIP is unbelievably overlooked by those in academia and politics, as well as by the author of this piece. Yet we live in country founded upon private property rights and individuals owning the non-human means of production.
Today, large streams of data, coupled with statistical analysis and sophisticated algorithms, are rapidly gaining importance in almost every field of science, politics, journalism, and much more. What does this mean for the future of work?
The pursuit for lower and lower cost production that relies on slave wage labor will eventually run out of places to chase. Eventually, “rich” countries, whose productive capital capability is owned by its citizens, will be forced to “re-shore” manufacturing capacity, and result in ever-cheaper robotic manufacturing.
“The era we’re in is one in which the scope of tasks that can be automated is increasing rapidly, and in areas where we used to think those were our best skills, things that require thinking,” says David Autor, a labor economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Businesses are spending more on technology now because they spent so little during the recession. Yet total capital expenditures are still barely running ahead of replacement costs. “Most of the investment we’re seeing is simply replacing worn-out stuff,” says economist Paul Ashworth of Capital Economics.
Yet, while the problem is one that no one can no longer ignore, the solution also is one starring them in the face but they just can’t see the simplicity of it.
The fundamental challenge to be solved is how do we reinvent and redesign our economic institutions to keep pace with job destroying and devaluing technological innovation and invention so not all of the benefits of owning FUTURE productive capacity accrues to today’s wealthy 1 percent ownership class, and ownership is broadened so that EVERY American earns income through stock ownership dividends so they can afford to purchase the products and services produced by the technology economy.
None of this is new from a macro-economic viewpoint as productive capital is increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth. The role of physical productive capital is to do ever more of the work of producing more products and services at consistent high-quality, which produces income to its owners. Full employment is not an objective of businesses. Companies strive to keep labor input and other costs at a minimum. Private sector job creation in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work is constantly being eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role. Over the past century there has been an ever-accelerating shift to productive capital––which reflects tectonic shifts in the technologies of production. The mixture of labor worker input and capital “worker” input has been rapidly changing at an exponential rate of increase for over 235 years in step with the Industrial Revolution (starting in 1776) and had even been changing long before that with man’s discovery of the first tools, but at a much slower rate. Up until the close of the nineteenth century, the United States remained a working democracy, with the production of products and services dependent on labor worker input. When the American Industrial Revolution began and subsequent technological advance amplified the productive power of non-human capital, plutocratic finance channeled its ownership into fewer and fewer hands, as we continue to witness today with government by the wealthy evidenced at all levels.
As previously noted, people invented tools to reduce toil, enable otherwise impossible production, create new highly automated industries, and significantly change the way in which products and services are produced from labor intensive to capital intensive––the core function of technological invention. Binary economist Louis Kelso attributed most changes in the productive capacity of the world since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to technological improvements in our capital assets, and a relatively diminishing proportion to human labor. Capital, in Kelso’s terms, does not “enhance” labor productivity (labor’s ability to produce economic goods). In fact, the opposite is true. It makes many forms of labor unnecessary. Because of this undeniable fact, Kelso asserted that, “free-market forces no longer establish the ‘value’ of labor. Instead, the price of labor is artificially elevated by government through minimum wage legislation, overtime laws, and collective bargaining legislation or by government employment and government subsidization of private employment solely to increase consumer income.”
Furthermore, according to Kelso, productive capital is increasingly the source of the world’s economic growth and, therefore, should become the source of added property ownership incomes for all. Kelso postulated that if both labor and capital are interdependent factors of production, and if capital’s proportionate contributions are increasing relative to that of labor, then equality of opportunity and economic justice demands that the right to property (and access to the means of acquiring and possessing property) must in justice be extended to all. Yet, sadly, the American people and its leaders still pretend to believe that labor is becoming more productive.
A National Right To Capital Ownership Bill that restores the American dream should be advocated by the progressive movement, which addresses the reality of Americans facing job opportunity deterioration and devaluation due to tectonic shifts in the technologies of production.
The question that requires an answer is now timely before us. It was first posed by 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 capital ownership is. Therefore, by ignoring such issues of economic justice and capital ownership, our leaders are ignoring the concentration of power through monopoly ownership of productive capital, with the result of denying the 99 percenters equal opportunity and access to become capital owners.
The question, as posed by Kelso is: “how are all individuals to be adequately productive when a tiny minority (capital owners) produce a major share and the vast majority (labor workers), a minor share of total goods and services,” 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?”
There is a solution, which will result in double-digit economic growth and simultaneously broaden private, individual ownership so that EVERY American’s income significantly grows, providing the means to support themselves and their families with an affluent lifestyle. The Just Third Way Master Plan for America’s future is published at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797.
The solution is obvious but our leaders, academia, conventional economist and the media are oblivious to the necessity to broaden ownership in the new capital formation of the future simultaneously with the growth of the economy, which then becomes self-propelled as increasingly more Americans accumulate ownership shares and earn a new source of dividend income derived from their capital ownership in the “machines” that are replacing them or devaluing their labor value.
The solution will require the reform of the Federal Reserve Bank to create new owners of future productive capital investment in businesses simultaneously with the growth of the economy. The solution to broadening private, individual ownership of America’s future capital wealth requires that the Federal Reserve stop monetizing unproductive debt, including bailouts of banks “too big to fail” and Wall Street derivatives speculators, and begin creating an asset-backed currency that could enable every man, woman and child to establish a Capital Homestead Account or “CHA” (a super-IRA or asset tax-shelter for citizens) at their local bank to acquire a growing dividend-bearing stock portfolio to supplement their incomes from work and all other sources of income. Policies need to insert American citizens into the low or no-interest investment money loop to enable non- and undercapitalized Americans, including the working class and poor, to build wealth and become “customers with money.” The proposed Capital Homestead Act would produce this result.
Support Monetary Justice at http://capitalhomestead.org/page/monetary-justice.
Support the Capital Homestead Act (aka Economic Democracy Act) at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-a-plan-for-getting-ownership-income-and-power-to-every-citizen/, http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-summary/ and http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/ch-vehicles/.
See the article “The Absent Conversation: Who Should Own America?” published by The Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/who-should-own-america_b_2040592.html and by OpEd News at http://www.opednews.com/articles/THE-Absent-Conversation–by-Gary-Reber-130429-498.html
Also see “The Path To Eradicating Poverty In America” at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/the-path-to-eradicating-p_b_3017072.html and “The Path To Sustainable Economic Growth” at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/sustainable-economic-growth_b_3141721.html. And also “Second Income Plan” at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/second-income-plan_b_3625319.html
Also see the article entitled “The Solution To America’s Economic Decline” at http://www.foreconomicjustice.org/9206/financing-future…economic-decline and “Education Is Critical To Our Future Societal Development” at http://www.foreconomicjustice.org/?p=9058. And also “Achieving The Green Economy” at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=9082.
Also see “Financing Economic Growth With ‘FUTURE SAVINGS’: Solutions To Protect America From Economic Decline” at http://www.foreconomicjustice.org/9206/financing-future…economic-decline and “The Income Solution To Slow Private Sector Job Growth” at http://www.foreconomicjustice.org/9872/the-income-solut…ector-job-growth.
