Robots will bring down 30% of the jobs within a decade.
Neoliberalism is starting to be antagonized by vaste parts of the population, igniting the fire of populism.
Social Media exploited and society fell for it and social divisiveness is already building up.
In short, the Belle Epoque of our century has come to an abrupt end: the mandatory happiness that characterized the first 15 years of our century, is quickly transforming into anger.
Rise of the robots won’t stop at 30% job losses: anthropomorphic robots are bond to break the law of supply and demand, i.e. the foundation of capitalism. This won’t happen in just a decade, but within a decade it will be very obvious where the trend is going.
If UBI (universal base income) does not come in time, we’ll end up with millions of unemployed people with the potential to create social disorder. At the moment, we seem ill prepared to come up with a sustainable large-scale UBI within 10 years.
Meanwhile as of today nationalism and protectionism is the only concrete answer to the demands of western population for raising salaries and lowering perceived inequality (typically local inequality, rather than global). It would be hard to raise salaries within the neoliberalist framework: without taxing imports raising salaries would simply cause the companies to move their investments to other more lucrative countries.
Nationalism and right wing populism will grow cross border inequality, but recent electoral results teach us this is not an urgent concern for western population at the moment. Selfish or not, the reality is that our population is concerned with growing our wealth, and this cannot happen in a global market unless a vast majority of countries agree to common terms, which doesn’t seem to be likely to happen soon.
In 10 years time we could find ourselves in a world where populism will have stretched our perception of how a normal democratic state works and totalitarianism may not be frown upon anymore.
In that world, the social disorders caused by mass unemployment would result in mass arrests, a glimpse of which we can already have looking at the Philippines today.
Finally, once the problem gets overcome by mass employment of robots, we will be facing the real paradigm changing issue of our century, the one signing our entering into the third millennium: repurposing humanity.
Freedom from the obligation to work will be attained at that point, but humanity will still have a lot of challenges to keep them very much linked to their nature:
- Mortality
- Dependency on our physical/biological form
- Expansion of our knowledge
- Happiness
- Protection of the Earth Environment
- Expansion of our race to dominate the Solar System, Galaxy or Universe
- …you name it!
I think there’s more than enough for another year of blogging there!!
Happy 2019!
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