Singularity-minded

What is obvious to anyone with a functioning brain is that there are far more people in this world than any plausibly functional model of our “economy” has a use for.  There are only so many “McJobs” and robots, as the linked article re-hashes, will take most of those. 

The question from there is what to do about that.  I do try in these posts to propose solutions, not merely rail against the myriad of “wrong” in the world, but this one poses a problem to even come up with something which would work, regardless of how unlikely it is to be implemented due to standard human failing and venality.  Here we go anyway.

The population problem is the biggest one.  Back when everything we ate came from family farms and c.80% of the population was occupied doing this, there were c. 1 billion people on Earth.  Now (in developed countries) significantly less than 10%  of the population is engaged in producing our food.

This doesn’t cover all “productive” forms of work, but it does bring the productivity gains of modern technology and organization into focus.  During the early stages of the Industrial Revolution everything was done by hand in a very inefficient but manpower-intensive fashion, resulting in rural depopulation as people rushed to the factories for work.  As time went on and clever people designed labour-saving machines to do unskilled work, those least talented were thrown out of work.  This process began in the 18^th Century and continues today.  Remember that women weren’t part of the workforce at that time (although children were); now we have twice as many people we need to find jobs for.

This frames the problem, but the only two solutions I see popping out of this are:

·         Remove the surplus population, or;

·         Smash our technological base and get us all back making buggy whips or subsistence farming.

It is to be noted that the second option will bring about the first, but without the productivity to make things work; in other words, complete civilizational breakdown.

Nature may soon do something about there being so many of us; Ebola is making its’ way out of Africa for the first time.  The ability of mass international rapid transit to vector diseases worldwide first really got attention during the SARS breakout in 2003, and that had nothing like Ebola’s death rate, albeit it spread even more easily.  Ebola comes in different variants with differing lethality, symptoms and incubation periods so we’ll be dealing with this for a while.  Just imagine if SARS came back too…

Getting back on track, we are in what I’ll call a “luxury-scarcity period”.  It is conceivable to feed everyone, and with very local and temporary exceptions this happens.  If you live in a warm climate (Africa, for example) that is most of what you need to survive; good thing too, given the limited to non-existent social and community housing expenditure there. While there are many people in Western societies who struggle to make ends meet, the number of actually homeless are statistically barely significant and are mostly people with serious mental problems who are essentially un-employable. 

The real question if things don’t completely collapse is: what do we do with the jobless?  I do not believe that there is any “self-evident right’ to anything produced by someone else, although many disagree.  My test of these ideals is how much effort it takes to achieve these “natural” rights.  In this case, it takes the coercive power of a government to make people pay taxes, and it has been always thus.  Breathing is about the only thing that I’d call free, everything else requires somebody to do some work.

“Tax the rich” comes out a lot, usually from people who can’t count past 100 but occasionally from hypocrites like Warren Buffet.  That will not work for the fairly obvious reasons that taxing something makes less of it, and that there isn’t that much money held by “the 1%” compared to what a country spends in a year.   Next year that money won’t be there as the (formerly) rich are confiscated from and those smart enough to see it coming (most of them or they wouldn’t be rich in the first place) will relocate.

There goes the Marxist-Anarchist solution, what next?  Expansion of the current welfare state would seem to be out as that “Scandinavian” model has proven itself unsustainable in the last 20 years.  Shorter work week?  The thing that this glosses over is that there is only so much money in a business to pay people.  If there are 40 person-hours per position and you cut that into 2 chunks, each of them will only be getting paid for 20 hours. 

What all of these ideas have in common is a lowering of living standards. Less money means less stuff, full-stop.  I’ve worked part-time, and it’s great for students or stay-at-home parents who want to generate some more household income while the kids are in school. It was a a time in my life when I had no responsibilities beyond myself and I most certainly could not have supported a familiy on that income. Time is traded for money in pretty-much any type of transaction you can name; the value of that time is highly variable, but however you slice it, ΔTime = Δ$.

Any kind of post-scarcity geek (or other) utopia is based on cheap and abundant energy.  With enough cheap (clean) energy you can do almost anything you want, and paying the heat and light bills of non-productive members of society becomes plausible then..  I am partial to the Culture books of Ian M. Banks as far as post-scarcity sci-fi is concerned, but that construct only works because nearly omniscient AIs are running everything.  The suspension of my disbelief for that is far less of a strain than to assume that people with no profit motive (Star Trek Next Gen) could create and sustain such a thing.

In case you somehow missed it, I am a small-r realist, and I do NOT believe in the perfectibility of Man.  “Pretend to pay them, they pretend to work” didn’t work for Communism so any version of confiscatory taxes intended to level the playing field will have a similar effect.  It takes money (or equivalent) to get stuff done, so I remain at a loss as to how to deal with computers taking our jobs.  It happened to me once already, but the consolations were another job and the fact that the program did a far worse job than I had.  These consolations will be in increasingly short supply.

The irony is that developed countries are just that, developed, and their decreasing birthrates are in step with increases in productivity with Japan leading the way in both.  These countries will not remain prosperous if they have to take in millions of unemployable (because there are no jobs) immigrants (Japan again, but an exception to this).  That is another issue, and panicky diseased epidemic migrants could scupper us all even before the robots do.