Global Economic Intersection
Advertisement
  • Home
  • Economics
  • Finance
  • Politics
  • Investments
    • Invest in Amazon $250
  • Cryptocurrency
    • Best Bitcoin Accounts
    • Bitcoin Robot
      • Quantum AI
      • Bitcoin Era
      • Bitcoin Aussie System
      • Bitcoin Profit
      • Bitcoin Code
      • eKrona Cryptocurrency
      • Bitcoin Up
      • Bitcoin Prime
      • Yuan Pay Group
      • Immediate Profit
      • BitQH
      • Bitcoin Loophole
      • Crypto Boom
      • Bitcoin Treasure
      • Bitcoin Lucro
      • Bitcoin System
      • Oil Profit
      • The News Spy
      • Bitcoin Buyer
      • Bitcoin Inform
      • Immediate Edge
      • Bitcoin Evolution
      • Cryptohopper
      • Ethereum Trader
      • BitQL
      • Quantum Code
      • Bitcoin Revolution
      • British Trade Platform
      • British Bitcoin Profit
    • Bitcoin Reddit
    • Celebrities
      • Dr. Chris Brown Bitcoin
      • Teeka Tiwari Bitcoin
      • Russell Brand Bitcoin
      • Holly Willoughby Bitcoin
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Economics
  • Finance
  • Politics
  • Investments
    • Invest in Amazon $250
  • Cryptocurrency
    • Best Bitcoin Accounts
    • Bitcoin Robot
      • Quantum AI
      • Bitcoin Era
      • Bitcoin Aussie System
      • Bitcoin Profit
      • Bitcoin Code
      • eKrona Cryptocurrency
      • Bitcoin Up
      • Bitcoin Prime
      • Yuan Pay Group
      • Immediate Profit
      • BitQH
      • Bitcoin Loophole
      • Crypto Boom
      • Bitcoin Treasure
      • Bitcoin Lucro
      • Bitcoin System
      • Oil Profit
      • The News Spy
      • Bitcoin Buyer
      • Bitcoin Inform
      • Immediate Edge
      • Bitcoin Evolution
      • Cryptohopper
      • Ethereum Trader
      • BitQL
      • Quantum Code
      • Bitcoin Revolution
      • British Trade Platform
      • British Bitcoin Profit
    • Bitcoin Reddit
    • Celebrities
      • Dr. Chris Brown Bitcoin
      • Teeka Tiwari Bitcoin
      • Russell Brand Bitcoin
      • Holly Willoughby Bitcoin
No Result
View All Result
Global Economic Intersection
No Result
View All Result

Three Visions of Our Future After the Robot Revolution

admin by admin
July 10, 2015
in Uncategorized
0
0
SHARES
8
VIEWS
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

by Fabius Maximus, FabiusMaximus.com

Summary: During the past 2 years the robot revolution has come into view, and all but Right-winger living in fantasy-land have begun to realize it might (like the previous ones) produce large-scale social disruption and suffering.

Here we look at three kinds of visions about what lies ahead for us.

“We did not come to fear the future. We came here to shape it.”
– Barack Obama’s speech to Congress, 9 September 2009.

Dark futures

Contents

  1. The center-left sees the problem,
    ……and offers mild solutions.
  2. Realistic analysis and prescriptions.
  3. Visions of dark futures.
  4. For More Information.

(1) The center-left sees the problem and offers mild solutions

Slowly people have come to see the coming robot revolution (aka a new industrial revolution), even economists. The Left has adopted this issue, as they have climate change, as a means to enact long-sought changes in the US economy. Like climate change, their solutions are far too small for the problem described.

(a) “A World Without Work” by Kerek Thompson in The Atlantic, July/Aug 2015 – “For centuries, experts have predicted that machines would make workers obsolete. That moment may finally be arriving. Could that be a good thing?” Typical of The Atlantic. Long, meandering, confused mish-mash of issues. Never confronts the core issue of how people will earn money to live. Lots of nonsense about people living by selling crafts to each other.

(b) “The Future of Work in the Age of the Machine” by Melissa S. Kearney, Brad Hershbein, and David Boddy at the Hamilton Project, February 2015. See the slides and transcript from the seminar they held for academics and businesspeople. Their prescription is aggressive application of conventional methods…

The Project’s economic strategy reflects a judgment that long-term prosperity is best achieved by fostering economic growth and broad participation in that growth, by enhancing individual economic security, and by embracing a role for effective government in making needed public investments.

(c) “The future of work in the second machine age is up to us” by Marshall Steinbaum at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, 23 February 2015 – They show that the robot revolution has not yet appeared in the macroeconomic statistics. But it’s coming. Their conclusions are the standard center-left recipe, like those of the Hamilton Project…

So what should be the focus of public policy is to figure out ways for workers to accrue more of corporate earnings, for more unemployed and underemployed people to find full-time, productive jobs, and for the broader economy to serve the interests of the actual people who inhabit it – those who overwhelmingly derive their living from their labor. We know what needs to be done and how to do it, because we’ve done it before.

Clear vision

(2) Realistic analysis and prescriptions

A few people have seen that a problem of this scale will require bolder solutions than liberals are willing to take (conservatives prefer imaginary problems where the past did not happen and will not repeat).

I am no fan of Jeremy Rifkin, but his 1995 book was a prescient attempt to grapple with the problem: The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era – He advocates a kind of socialism as the solution. Publisher’s blurb…

Jeremy Rifkin argues that we are entering a new phase in history – one characterized by the steady and inevitable decline of jobs. The world is fast polarizing into two potentially irreconcilable forces: on one side, an information elite that controls and manages the high-tech global economy; and on the other, the growing numbers displaced workers, who have few prospects and little hope for meaningful employment in an increasingly automated world. The end of work could mean the demise of civilization as we have come to know it, or signal the beginning of a great social transformation and a rebirth of the human spirit.

For a laser-like focus on the core issue see “Who Will Own the Robots?” in MIT Technology Review, –

“We’re in the midst of a jobs crisis, and rapid advances in AI and other technologies may be one culprit. How can we get better at sharing the wealth that technology creates?”

(3) Visions of dark futures

To image what lies ahead of us if current trends continue, we can turn to science fiction, especially cyberpunk novels – as in these summaries by Diana Biller from “The Essential Cyberpunk Reading List” at io9. They describe a world in which the 1% continues winning – executing conservatives’ plans to cut taxes for the rich and cut benefits for the 99%. Combine that with steady pressure on wages as jobs disappear (a growing “reserve army of the employed”) and you get visions of dark futures – a

“nightmarish world of corporate control and extreme wealth disparities.”

Neuromancer
Available at Amazon.
Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984)

Henry Dorsett Case used to be a hacker, before his employer caught him stealing and he was dosed with a drug that made him incapable of accessing the global computer network. Now a mysterious person needs his hacking skills, and promises him a cure in return.

The book that defined the sub-genre, this 1984 novel is likely the most essential of the books on this list (it was also the first winner of the science fiction triple crown, taking the Nebula, the Hugo, and the Philip K. Dick Award).

Gibson has written many influential cyberpunk novels, including the rest of the Sprawl Trilogy (of which Neuromancer is the first), the Bridge Trilogy, and the short story collection Burning Chrome.

Frontera
Available at Amazon.
Frontera by Lewis Shiner (1984)

“Corporate control, body augmentation, and other cyberpunk themes blend with golden age elements.”

Ten years ago the world’s governments collapsed, and now the corporations are in control. Houston’s Pulsystems has sent an expedition to the lost Martian colony of Frontera to search for survivors. Reese, aging hero of the US space program, knows better. The colonists are not only alive, they have discovered a secret so devastating that the new rulers of Earth will stop at nothing to own it. Reese is equally desperate to use it for his own very personal agenda.

But none of them have reckoned with Kane, tortured veteran of the corporate wars, whose hallucinatory voices are urging him to complete an ancient cycle of heroism and alter the destiny of the human race. {From the publisher.}

Metrophage
Available at Amazon.
Metrophage by Richard Kadrey (1988)

Welcome to our future: L.A. in the late twenty-first century – a segregated city of haves and have-nots, where morality is dead and technology rules. Here, a small wealthy group secludes themselves in gilded cages. Beyond their high-security compounds, far from their pretty comforts, lies a lawless wasteland where the angry masses battle hunger, rampant disease, and their own despair in order to survive. Jonny was born into this Hobbesian paradise. {Publisher}

This dystopian novel by the author of the Sandman Slim series takes place in late 21st-century Los Angeles, where the rich live in unimaginable luxury and everybody else lives in a wasteland of misery. And a small-time drug dealer discovers a strange new plague, and gets drawn into the secret warfare between huge economic blocs.

For More Information

Google News users: to see Fabius Maximus articles on your News page, click the ‘personalize’ button on the upper right of your News page and add us using the ‘Adjust Sources’ drop-down menu.

If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about women and gender issues, and about the 3rd Industrial Revolution – especially these…

  • Economists show the perils and potential of the coming robot revolution.
  • Automation hits the professions. Most remain delusionally confident, so far.
  • The new American economy: concentrating business power to suit an unequal society.
  • For Thanksgiving, Walmart shows us the New America.
  • Nike swooshs us into a future of fewer jobs, low pay.
  • The CEO of Boeing enjoys the sight of his workers cowering. Let’s feel their humiliation.

See these books to better understand what’s coming…

  • The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee.
  • Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen.
  • Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (2015) by Martin Ford

Previous Post

Exploring Our Moon Today to Learn More About Earth’s Youth Billions of Years Ago

Next Post

The French Left-Right Confusion Phenomenon. It Is All About HOW the Question Is Asked.

Related Posts

Ethereum ICO Whale Address Moves 145K ETH After 3 Years Of Silence
Economics

Ethereum ICO Whale Address Moves 145K ETH After 3 Years Of Silence

by John Wanguba
August 15, 2022
Australian Court Instructs Google To Pay $43M For Misinforming Users
Econ Intersect News

Australian Court Instructs Google To Pay $43M For Misinforming Users

by John Wanguba
August 15, 2022
Dollar Fell Marginally Last Week As Inflation Seems To Peak
Economics

Dollar Fell Marginally Last Week As Inflation Seems To Peak

by John Wanguba
August 15, 2022
Mark Cuban Sued For Supposedly Promoting Crypto Ponzi Scheme
Business

Mark Cuban Sued For Supposedly Promoting Crypto Ponzi Scheme

by John Wanguba
August 15, 2022
Germany Economy Lose $265B In Added Value  Due To Rising Energy Prices And War
Economics

Germany Economy Lose $265B In Added Value  Due To Rising Energy Prices And War

by John Wanguba
August 13, 2022
Next Post

The French Left-Right Confusion Phenomenon. It Is All About HOW the Question Is Asked.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Browse by Category

  • Business
  • Econ Intersect News
  • Economics
  • Finance
  • Politics
  • Uncategorized

Browse by Tags

adoption altcoins banking banks Binance Bitcoin Bitcoin adoption Bitcoin market Bitcoin mining blockchain BTC business China Coinbase crypto crypto adoption cryptocurrency crypto exchange crypto market crypto regulation decentralized finance DeFi Elon Musk ETH Ethereum finance funding inflation investment market analysis markets Metaverse mining NFT NFTs nonfungible tokens nonfungible tokens (NFTs) price analysis regulation Russia social media technology Tesla the US Twitter

Archives

  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • August 2010
  • August 2009

Categories

  • Business
  • Econ Intersect News
  • Economics
  • Finance
  • Politics
  • Uncategorized
Global Economic Intersection

After nearly 11 years of 24/7/365 operation, Global Economic Intersection co-founders Steven Hansen and John Lounsbury are retiring. The new owner, a global media company in London, is in the process of completing the set-up of Global Economic Intersection files in their system and publishing platform. The official website ownership transfer took place on 24 August.

Categories

  • Business
  • Econ Intersect News
  • Economics
  • Finance
  • Politics
  • Uncategorized

Recent Posts

  • Ethereum ICO Whale Address Moves 145K ETH After 3 Years Of Silence
  • Australian Court Instructs Google To Pay $43M For Misinforming Users
  • Dollar Fell Marginally Last Week As Inflation Seems To Peak

© Copyright 2021 EconIntersect - Economic news, analysis and opinion.

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Contact Us
  • Bitcoin Robot
    • Bitcoin Profit
    • Bitcoin Code
    • Quantum AI
    • eKrona Cryptocurrency
    • Bitcoin Up
    • Bitcoin Prime
    • Yuan Pay Group
    • Immediate Profit
    • BitIQ
    • Bitcoin Loophole
    • Crypto Boom
    • Bitcoin Era
    • Bitcoin Treasure
    • Bitcoin Lucro
    • Bitcoin System
    • Oil Profit
    • The News Spy
    • British Bitcoin Profit
    • Bitcoin Trader
  • Bitcoin Reddit

© Copyright 2021 EconIntersect - Economic news, analysis and opinion.

en English
ar Arabicbg Bulgarianda Danishnl Dutchen Englishfi Finnishfr Frenchde Germanel Greekit Italianja Japaneselv Latvianno Norwegianpl Polishpt Portuguesero Romanianes Spanishsv Swedish