The case for automation, loss of jobs and UBI...
So this is not going to be a popular opinion I think but I, and others, believe that despite where things are headed with automation and many other issues the future doesn't HAVE to be bleak.
First let me say that several things have to come together to make this work but done properly I think mankind could vastly benefit from automation. I know many here will not agree with me and that's fine.
Second I don't think it necessarily matters much what we think, vastly increased automation is coming to the workforce whether we like it or not. Which is an ever greater impetuous for us to have it done right. Because done wrong it could indeed lead to dystopia, wars, global unrest on a scale we have not yet seen. Recent studies have shown that 1/2 or more of all current US jobs are at risk of being automated either entirely or mostly. And it might surprise you to learn that it's not just menial jobs that are at risk, with the advent of self driving cars just about every job in the transportation sector is at risk, with the advent of advanced AI even jobs that require complex pattern matching and seemingly human like abilities like many in the medical and legal fields are at risk. Even lower end creative jobs, things like programming, and more will be heavily assisted by automation.
This may seem like a doom and gloom scenario and it COULD be! I see a lot of push back among liberals when it comes to this kind of thing and I can understand that. But you have to remember that technology hasn't JUST brought us pain and suffering. Without technology we would not have the modern germ theory, medicines, and vaccines that have greatly improved quality of life for all. Automation has lifted the majority of man kind out of subsistence agriculture, a back breaking lifestyle that for the majority of human history meant that people worked the fields from cradle to grave. In the larger picture we can thank automation and the fruits it has brought us for just about all modern progressive movements, civil rights, woman's rights, LGBT equality. All of them are made possible by a society in which people are freed from the most back breaking of labour to pursue other passions.
Let me be clear I am not trying to sell some pro technology Utopian bullshit. Technology and automation can indeed lead to horrendous horrors. From machines that disembowel children at a rate of hundreds a minute in the form of machine guns and bombs, to child labour on factory floors. But these cases don't point to technology being evil but the need for us to be hyper vigilant in its uses. The arc of history in general has meant that tech and automation has vastly benefited modern generations.
And yes I am fully aware that we are fucking killing the planet by doing this. It's a fucking disgrace. We are raping the planet and leaving a denuded barren empty shell of a planet for our children. But it doesn't HAVE to be this way, and the way forward as most have foreseen actually involves tech yet again, in the form of clean energy, renewables etc. The genie has been let out of the bottle already and we are not returning to subsistence agriculture, nor should we.
I see 2 paths before us both of which involve vast socioeconomic change due to technology and automation, we aren't going to stop this. It's VITAL that we choose the compassionate path.
That path involves realizing that human life is inherently of value, that the human condition is one of suffering, and that NOTHING separates any one of us on this blue dirt ball except random chance. That path leads to the necessity of some form of Universal Basic Income. Universal Health Care and other necessities. These would allow people who's jobs will be replaced to seek other means, to reinvent themselves, without fear, without suffering, without pressure.
This second path CAN lead to something of a Utopian world. I use that word with caution as there will always be struggles, there will always be horrors, that is just life. But I believe a future in which almost all menial labour is automated, where be use our collective intelligence to bootstrap ourselves into a brighter future IS possible. But only if we give up our barbaric outdated beliefs that suffering is earned, that clambering over your fellow man gets us somewhere, that we aren't all the same.
