Autosocialism — Economic System Of The Future

in #art6 years ago

First, I had an idea to write about the present. Recent events made me think that, despite all of the progress and wealth we as a species have created in the last 100 years, we still ended up with a terrible world: unprecedented levels of health related deaths, and cancer related deaths have tripled since 1950s. Recent celebrity suicides shed more light on the fact that suicide rates have risen in almost every state since 1999. With all of the technology we have at our disposal that promises to make it easier to connect us, half of Americans still view themselves as lonely.

It’s definitely depressing, but I’m a product guy, and I like to think about a better future.

What will the future look like?

Thinking about all of the automatization and robotization coming our way, it is clear to me that jobs will be displaced, and new ones will be created, but will it be enough? Is basic income the solution, where we all get paid a certain amount irregardless if we work or not?

With time, there is little doubt that computers and robots will start taking away more and more of mundane and largely physical tasks from humans. Nothing surprising here, as this has been happening over the last few hundred years — i.e. cars, electricity, smartphones have all enabled and empowered humans to do all kinds of previously unimaginable things. On the other hand, this has influenced a shift in jobs that resulted in people having to learn new skills as old jobs were dying out.

Also, physical work is more and more replaced with cognitive, and there has been a steady shift over the last 100 years. With all of the progress humans have made, how is it that we are still working the same number of hours (8 on average?) or more? In 1920s, The Ford Motor Company scaled back from a 48-hour to a 40-hour workweek after founder Henry Ford believed that too many hours were bad for workers’ productivity. Why did we stop at 8? Wouldn’t all this progress and continuous development result in a reduction of hours needed to get the job done?

A big reason why this has not happened is capitalism — the very system that helped us make progress and get where we are today. At some point, I think it is inevitable for capitalism as a system to be counter-effective for the human race. Current system was designed for the industrial age, for a very different environment comparing to one we live in today. The whole rich-getting-richer and poor-getting-poorer could eventually result in a collapse of the system (inequality is rising not only in the US, but globally, too). The problem lies in the fact that because “few” have “many” (companies, capital, employees), any progress in the sphere of robotics and automatization will result in a job loss for the “many” and the financial upside for the investor/owner. Because of this, wealth will keep accumulating amongst very few (I’m looking at you, duke Bezos of Amazon). Take the example of self driving cars. As the technology gets more advanced and standardized, and the government makes necessary changes to support it, the outcome will be 2.4 millions of lost jobs in the US, and many people who considered driving a career will no longer have one. Sure, the benefit for the society as a whole will be clear, through reduced need for car ownership, increased safety, reduce in traffic congestion among others, but the biggest economic benefit will be for companies who develop and manage the technology. Few will get wealthy because of it, many will lose their paychecks. The argument always exists that as new technology gets invented and it replaces the old ways of doing things, labor tends to shift to a new kind of jobs that didn’t exist previously. Because change is happening too fast, it seems like people can’t catchup with the rate of change (The Labor Department reported there were 6.6 million job openings in March, and enough for the 6.6 million Americans who were actively looking for a job that month).

So what does a positive futuristic outcome look like?

Robotics will take care of the food production, transportation, energy production and maintenance and basically all of the tasks necessary for human existence and survival will be taken care of by the large systems of computers.

What is left for humans to do is live their life to the fullest, enjoy their time on earth with a limited number of “credits” that one can spend to buy activities like travel, play sports, raise children and buy food. It is important that everyone has the same access to these credits and they are limited because our planet itself is a limited resource. This would solve the problem we are facing today where majority acts as if our planet’s resources are unlimited. Also, having less choice is good for us. According to Berry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, “more choice requires increased time and effort and can lead to anxiety, regret, excessively high expectations, and self-blame if the choices don’t work out”.

How are we going to spend time?

1) Part of the population will be free of work, getting benefits to study arts and sciences, travel and enjoy getting better and living a full life.

2) Part of the population will be involved in maintaining leisure activities actively developing new travel, games, and organizing ways of entertaining others and filling up their time.

3) Part of the population will be involved in creating new ways of doing things (innovation) for the benefit of everyone.

Wealth creation as a purpose for a business was something that my business classes emphasized and list as the very foundation of economic progress. I know that this simply isn’t true. Many people who’s innovative ideas and business changed and impacted the world in grand ways started out not because they wanted to be filthy rich, but they had a pain to solve or a vision for a better future. They created something out of a desire to make the world a better place and perhaps saw money as a way of keeping score. In the current economic system, making the world a better place usually results in an economic benefit for the individual, but often, throughout history, greatest inventors (Nikola Tesla gave away his patents for free) gave up on wealth because that wasn’t why they did what they did in the first place.

In this new system, there still will be those few determined individuals who will move the society forward with the only reward being recognition and prestige, knowing they did something great to improve the lives of millions of others. Their biggest motivator was and has always been to do good.

To realize this future, a big hurdle to overcome will be enabling automation to occur.

I predict that the future in our lifetime will be dominated by:

1) Increased development in software and hardware (robotics) across all areas like agriculture, transportation, infrastructure, etc, for example:

  • end-to-end corn production, with automated irrigation, soil control and replenishment, controlled irrigation, feeding, harvesting, processing all the way to consumption.
  • roads, bridges, railways designed, mass produced, assembled, maintained and disassembled by robots.
  • automated design, production and disassembly of vehicles for transportation of people, food, energy (or any goods)
  • housing design, development and demolition
  • all of power needed to run all of this will come from the sun
  • robots will create more robots, making an endless cycle of progress. Robots may even be more responsible for innovation due to their superb intellect and advancement of emotional intelligence

2) Increased demand for leisure activities and travel industry will see a boom. This will be due to increased availability of free time, since most of the chores/tasks will be automated, and work itself as we know it today will be dramatically reduced. Humans will get involved in anything that interests them, and we will see an increase in demand for arts because people will no longer have a pressure to pursue only economically viable careers. Instead, it will allow for everyone to pursue and discover activities that interest them, which will result in increased happiness and higher levels of health and engagement never before seen in human history. It will be like a lifetime of education for people of all ages.

It is like socialism infused with technology advancement (previous version of socialism was built on the premise of people equality and people creating all of the value). In this case, socialism is built on technological advancement so human society benefits as a whole from this progress and everyone gets more than enough to lead a happy, healthy life.

I call it “autosocialism” — socialism that draws its power from human advancement in robotics and technology, spreading the wealth and resources more equally across the world.

How much would 90 years of an average but fulfilled life cost the Earth for 8 billion people? Average life, for example, could be to travel twice a year, be able to enroll in 3 activities every 3 months, get quality, healthy food daily, get access to exercise, games, etc. What would the cost of that be? And if we took all of the wealth on Earth today and divide it by 8 billion, would that be enough to sustain life like this on Earth?



Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://selfscroll.com/autosocialism-economic-system-of-the-future/
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