The Malaise of Wealth: Transition to Post Scarcity

[The Dharma Bum]

[Sandman]

[Revenant]

[Mathurin]

[Homer]

Leaving aside 3D printers of the future & star trek style replicators, I think there is a genuine issue here that isn't going to go away, and will in reality only get worse.
We can see this already in the reduction of customer service & retail roles with the growth of things like internet banking affecting staffed high street banks, ebooks/amazon leading to book shops closing, calls for driverless trains on the London underground & the closing of ticket desks. Increased automatation in the car industry.

These are jobs that aren't coming back, and population growths will only exacerbate the problem.

[The Dharma Bum]

Yeah. The idea that the entire population can be employed as repairmen is pretty short sighted. We are very close to to time when the production of 10% or less of the population will be more than enough to sustain society. Manufacturing is gone forever. The service sector is drying up. That leaves being some type of repair, delivery or some type of personal service that has to be performed by a human. Yes, even the world's oldest profession is under assault with the advent of semi-realistic sexbots. (really there's not much a human can do that a machine can't do a lot better). Where does that leave society as a whole?

Quite simply the current system of monetary exchange and private ownership of the means of production is not going to be adequate to handle the ongoing social transformation. Just like feudalism wasn't adequate for the newly emerged merchant class in the free cities of the medieval era and the "nobility" lost control to the merchant class the current order isn't ready for what's coming next, which is the rise of the labor class, and they too will lose control. The labor class already has the power of numbers they just aren't conscious of this power as a class yet. If the entire class is suddenly left destitute without recourse I imagine the world will find out very quickly what kind of muscle we are talking about here. The power of sheer billions. Hopefully we can recognize what's happening and have the foresight to prevent massive loss of life for something completely unnecessary. If we know history we can avoid repeating the same mistakes. We will probably make new mistakes but at least they will be our own mistakes and not some imposed on society by superstition from a completely irrelevant, long dead culture in the Middle East.

The feudal order developed first into the capitalistic order, and then into today's mixed market economic order. From here we will need to develop into something that relates to the society as it actually exists, and not an idealistic vision of what society should look like, if we want to avoid the turmoil of past social transformations.

[Mathurin]

[The Dharma Bum]

[Mathurin]

[Mathurin]