Automatization Of The Economy (Blowing It Scenario #131)

Machines And Robots Do Not Purchase Goods.

How will the economy function when most of the workforce can be supplanted by robots or machines? What else has the power to make life exponentially better and at the same time drastically more difficult?

That’s the conundrum with machine learning and working machines. On one hand its wonderful, a machine to drive us, one to clean up after us, another to act as our personal assistant. But if machines can do everything for us, what jobs will be left in order to make a living? We’ll have to be creative. Creativity and mastery in a skill outside the realm of automating will be your work security.

I always love the irony of the fact, that those who build the technology to supplant the workers are in essence working to put themselves out of work. If the computer programmer built a program to write code and the program now writes better code than the developers code he used to write said program. That developer programmed himself right out of a job.

Soon cars will be able to do all the driving for us with a near perfect safety record. At that point what would be the purpose of paying for vehicle insurance. Along with it traffic tickets and other fines that will be obsolete. Which is great for the general public but if cars drive themselves that would displace truck drivers which is the number one job in 48 of 50 states. Whole industries could shudder along with the their entire workforce.

There is mass disruption on the horizon but there’s really know going backwards. It’s all part of our evolutionary make up. The need to keep pushing forward and finding new horizons to discover. Who knows machines or some form of alternative life force could be the next stage in evolution. When machines have vastly superior knowledge and can move autonomously with far fewer weaknesses than the homo-sapiens we might eventually go the way of the neanderthal. I’m sure it will be long after were gone but some day something other than a human being could be reading these words. I don’t feel like it’s too outlandish of a thought.

In the meantime I believe we’ll get to a point where economics will have to address all displaced workers and if that means handing out a living wage to every single citizen than so be it. But the time might be rapidly approaching.