The quest of modern society is to make things as convenient as possible. Even if you are at the bottom of the stack, one of the main goals is to ease your suffering. This has culminated to a point where we are now at the beginning of an automation revolution that is going to radically change the nature of labor & work. At least until the first suitcase nuke is detonated by an ambitious resentful 15-year-old anarchist. Automation has been occurring slowly since the industrial revolution, arguably even before then. For example, the ox driven plow could be seen as an early form of automation.
Where this is headed, is to a servant class of fully automated robots & digital AI’s fulfilling the role of the Shudras. Inevitably this is the case, check out Boston Dynamics & AlphaStar to see the infancy of this reality. It’s easy to see that even if it’s not within our lifetimes, robots will do almost all of the “simple” labor jobs in our society. This is only the tip of the iceberg but it should be sufficient to make my point.
So if you grant the exception of catastrophic war or evil genius anarchists, it’s quite easy to see where the future is headed. All you need to do is follow the tech. In manufacturing, we already have things like CNC machines that only need to be programmed before performing whatever task is required, & these kinds of innovations will only get better over time. To the point (arguably this is already the case) that a handcrafted good by an artisan will be a true novelty.
Autonomous vehicles will soon be the standard mode of transport. First, as driver-assisted auto-pilots already available in 2020 model cars, until the pilot ape in the machine is gradually phased out as the routes of trucks, taxi’s & mail delivery will be so familiar to the machine learning AI’s they will almost never have accidents. We are already teaching them right now. Have you ever had to do one of those, “prove you’re not a robot” quizzes where you have to click all the squares that have a traffic light or bus? Well, that data is fed into self-driving machine learning databases that help the AI differentiate traffic signs, & hazards.
This will lead to the establishment of a never before seen class of people; “the useless class”. Unlike the working class that has leverage through its labor, this class will have no political power as they will have no leverage to negotiate with the powers that be. You may be thinking, well we should stop building these robots & automated systems so that we can avoid this, & the degradation of our environment. But this is a delusional fantasy, the benefits far outweigh the negatives.
It is not necessarily a terrible thing to lose these jobs to automation if we can transition society consciously & deliberately. We may, in fact, be on the verge of a golden age of human well being & creativity. It all depends if we can distribute the wealth of this new automation age effectively.
One thing to note as well is that there will still be jobs probably for all time, but much less of them. Initially, engineers will still need to design & maintain automated systems, & there will still need to be an oversight by human eyes. It will also be a while yet before industries like the service, education & medical industry succumb to automation. But eventually, it will. The only uncertainty is the timeline.
So really the question isn’t if we should implement a UBI, but when? The U.S may be the canary in the coal mine.
I’ve been passively observing the insanity of the U.S after the death of George Floyd. To me, it’s clear that the protest & riot response is not purely about the death of this one man. But also a building frustration towards the increasingly precarious class struggle. The middle class in the U.S is dissolving & capital is pooling to a smaller minority. A UBI will allow these increasingly desperate people the chance to breathe, pay their rent & survive in the world. I want to note as well that while the individual case of George Floyd is a racially motivated hate crime. The animus of the crowd is a struggle between class, which disproportionately affects African American’s & Indigenous Australian’s respectively. But it is not limited to race by any means, look to India’s caste system for an example of less racially motivated class structural oppression.
A UBI will also force the innovation of new technologies by providing equilibrium in the job market. For example, let’s say that a large law firm wants to hire a janitor to clean the office bathrooms. The labor market of literally any nation is such that the law firm can set the price at minimum wage & there will always be someone desperate enough to take the job at the set price. A UBI will allow potential laborers the ability to say no to these kinds of jobs, & instead focus on other endeavors such as raising children, planting a garden, or actually negotiate a reasonable wage price for their labor.
But who will clean the bathrooms? Well, what if the lawyers of the firm had a roster in which one of them would clean the bathroom each week on a rotating schedule? Or what if a robotics engineer designs a bathroom cleaning robot to meet the needs of the demand for janitors. The irony is that our current system actually stifles innovation by clinging to barbarian ideas of serfdom packaged as a noble, honest existence.
One of the major problems that this future holds, is that we are going to have to completely rethink our values, especially towards work. Currently, many people take a fetishized pride in their work. It is a source of meaning, to attend a workplace, get the seven-figure salary, buy the Lamborghini & climb a prestige ladder, play status games & subtly loath the slothful riff-raff that take life too easily. Increasingly, — & this is already starting to happen — life is going to become much more about friendships, love, & raising children than climbing corporate ladders & collecting trinkets to cover your gravestone with.
The title of this blog promises a lot, & UBI is not going to single-handedly accomplish everything. But what it will do is lift the bottom up, & provide the most disadvantaged & precarious of us to be given a chance not just to survive, but to thrive. The next genius of robotics could be an Indigenous Australian in Cherbourg or a Dalit in Dehli. I truly believe that a UBI or equivalent could be one of a few necessary lynchpins to propel the human race into its next stage of sci-fi innovations dreamed by our best storytellers. Alternatively, the other side of the fork is an inevitable descend into warfare, blood & death as every civilization has done before ours. The stakes are this dire, although in Australia few of us ever truly feel it. The veneer of civilized society holds back a dam of unfathomable evolutionary horror that humanity has worked so hard to overcome, & the more we hoard our resources, the weaker the dam becomes. For the dam is made of the souls of the common human.
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