In the early 1980’s, as I was studying economics and examining the details of various corporations, one thing became clear: The entire U.S. economy was dependent upon continued economic growth. Continued economic growth that was unsustainable given that there are resource limitations. For example, General Motors. General Motors’ entire pension system depended upon General Motors having more employees paying into the pension system every year. If instead General Motors went into decline and fewer employers were paying into the pension system every year, the pension system would collapse. Then there was the entire debt financed takeover craze of the early to mid 1980’s. It depended upon the corporations being taken over to continue improving in scale and absolute profit every year. If the corporations instead declined and had less business, less absolute profit, then they would be unable to service their debt and would collapse.
Which in fact is what has happened, multiple times. over the past thirty years.
Now we’re moving into a second phase, as the top 1% have increasingly monopolized disposable income in the United States. Retailers, too, depended upon constant growth in order to meet their debt service. But people aren’t buying because they don’t have money. Thus over 1,000 retailers closed in the last week of May. Retailers everywhere are hurting. Current estimates are that we’re going to see 400,000 jobs lost in the retail industry by the end of the year.
Now let’s look at another huge, huge thing that’s coming up. There’s around 3.5 million long distance truck drivers in the United States. Within the next ten years, approximately 3 million of them are going to be replaced by robots as robot-driven trucks become a reality for long haul trucking. The remaining drivers will be short-haul drivers handling jobs that the robots aren’t flexible enough to handle.
What we’re seeing, I believe, is the Cheyne–Stokes death rattles of capitalism itself. Robots have increasingly displaced humans in industrial jobs. It used to take thousands of human beings on an assembly line to assemble a car. Now it takes hundreds of robots, and a few dozen human beings. Now it’s moving downstream. Robots (thanks to the World Wide Web and e-tailing) are now rendering retail workers’ jobs obsolete. Robots are increasingly rendering warehousing workers’ jobs obsolete — Amazon, for example, uses pick-and-place robots extensively in their latest warehouses to deliver goods from warehouse shelves to the workers who do final packaging for stuff going out the door. Next, truck drivers’ jobs are gone. In fifty years, my own job — writing computer software — will be automated. What do people do once any possible jobs are taken up by robots? There’s actually only three possibilities here — either we go to guaranteed basic income scheme and people do whatever they want as a hobby, or a lot of people die, or Luddites ban the robots from large numbers of jobs that are reserved for humans. The last “solution” isn’t long-term stable, the first solution isn’t politically palatable to the 1% who determine who is elected to political office, so….
Man. It’s the other white meat.
Just sayin’.
– Badtux the Depressingly Apocalyptic Penguin
You’re right about the long-term state. We just don’t need everybody to have a job any more. I wrote about one possible short-term fix, a whole back. http://www.idiosophy.com/2016/12/institute-for-the-preservation-of-technology
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It makes you wonder how much longer the 1% can keep pushing the lazy person narrative before people realize that they are really the problem. Unless the 1% capitulate and realize that the economy needs to be more socialist, it is going to get ugly especially when all of those supposed high paying service jobs become automated by AI.
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Yes, one can only hope that the popular method of dying in Choice #2 is in human wave attacks on the .1%, and that a LOT of those attempts are successful.
Have you noticed our police forces are already gearing up to defend against that?
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That and how the 1% have been kissing up to law enforcement. It’s like they know that when things go south the only thing protecting them will be that thin blue line.
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Right off the top I can think of lots of things that fit under ‘lots of people die’. Climate change, resource wars, real wars (possibly even nuclear), religious terrorism, political terrorism (right and left), pandemics, collapse of supplies and collapse of infrastructure in any number of areas; food supplies, transportation, medicine. Mass movements of people due to the collapse of society. Spread of disease into previously untouched areas. Antibiotics becoming more and more ineffective. Might as well stop here.
I’ve always been a ‘glass half empty’ kind of guy.
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On the police defending the 1% note, there was an interesting comment made on “Radical Islam”. As a Muslim said, if all Islam was really this way, you have a problem. There are 2 billion Muslims worldwide, and if we really all thought that way, the Crusaders (Christians) would be wiped out already.
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And part of the problem with the “nobody has meaningful work anymore” situation is that you can only really go one of two ways. You can have fewer people, which is the “optimal” way to go, really…if not for the other option which is, as coloradoblue points out, to take those spare bodies and make them into soldiers.
With that you can extend your political “lifespan” a couple of decades or ten by “growing” through conquest. Yes, it’s a dead-end, because eventually you run out of places and people to conquer. But you can do a hell of a lot of damage and cause a hell of a lot of misery in the meantime, and that, I’m afraid, is just as if not more plausible than the “quiet slide into postindustrial civilization” scenario…
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One sad thing is that much of the work now performed by machines was not all that “meaningful” anyway. There was group spirit and pride and all that, but working on an assembly line would horrify our pre-Industrial Revolution ancestors. But…it provided security (to some degree) and luxury (to some degree) to “the peasants” for a brief period of time…and that is what all the nostalgia is about.
So…what do we do with people who don’t want to be/are incapable of being “artists” of “savants” or the other remaining tiny percentage of the work that will still be performed by humans? That is the question
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Do you really think that the world is going to move into widespread automated vehicle driving, especially trucks? I don’t foresee that, based on Peak Oil and Complexity Theory. I agree with James Kunstler that scarcity of petroleum at an affordable price is going to put an end to the “Happy Motoring” dynamic. I expect this to happen within my lifetime, and I don’t have THAT much longer to go. The idea that we’re going to keep burning fuel at even the present rate, to say nothing of what would be needed for a geometrically expanded population of yeast people, defies the limits of the physical world. It’s not going to scale up forever, as you note in your opening premise. I think humanity will hit that wall before trucks start driving themselves.
Plus, setting up a system where there’s widespread autonomous automotive transport is going to require SO MUCH complicated calculatory planning. And EVERYTHING will have to go perfectly, EVERY time, every metre of the journey. Otherwise, mom with a pram on the footpath gets crushed by the Peterbilt (when it’s not even being driven by an intentional terrorist.) How many billions of moving parts, literally and figuratively, would it take to have something like that functioning across America? What’s the likelihood that it would work with 99.9% error-less performance? How many snags in the just-in-time delivery systems would result when trucks just STOP, in computerised confusion, or screw up in other ways? The more complex a system is, the more fragile it is, because it’s harder to keep a system with a billion parts going perfectly than it is with one containing a hundred parts. Admittedly I’ve got a Luddite bias and I don’t know the techworld like you do, but I can’t see this happening.
I do agree with you that the likely outcome to the problem of too many humans with not enough to do is “fewer humans.” The Collapse. However, I was expecting that outcome all through the 1980s, had a brief decade of optimism starting in the mid-1990s, and then reverted to mordantcy by 2003. And my predictions of doom have never materialised! If I (and the world) have any luck, I’ll continue to be totally rucking frong.
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Bukko: I think we have been lulled into forgetting the long term realities by the last gasp of the cheap motoring era. (cheap gas! I NEED a 5,000 pound eight passenger truck to drive to my office every day).
Excellent riposte to the techno “utopian*” doom and gloom. I am thankfully too old to live into the post industrial era (being a peasant farmer sounds awful if one is doing it for subsistence).
* utopia for the owners, that is.
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