UBI is a partial solution to automation. However, there are some cases where automation fucks up very bad. See every recent Tesla car ever - new production cars needed to be hand-fitted and fixed well into the proper production run. The price of manual labour is going to skyrocket as a consequence, but it's going to be employed only when it's absolutely necessary.
In the long run, this might result in a cargo cult manufacturing culture, similar to the Technicians in the first Foundation novel - performing elaborate "rituals" which they know are going to result in something, but knowing absolutely nothing why it results in that something.
Hell, there are business intelligence systems that effectively murder middle management. The only problem is the AI can only account for what other people input and nothing else, creating problems any moderately trained manager could solve in a minute.
Technology has made everything a little bit strange. Take book publishing, for instance. Back in the day, you needed a typewriter, you needed to come up with a manuscript, you needed a publisher and an editor, the publishers needed typesetters and printing equipment and people to run and maintain everything, they needed paper and raw materials, they needed people to ship the finished books to the bookstores, the bookstores needed people to stock the shelves, and they needed people to keep the place tidy, and they also needed checkers to ring up the books you bought.
Now, I can write a bit of text, and publish it to you, like, right here, in this WYSIWYG editor, and hit post. There, I just published something.
Look at how many jobs I just eliminated.
I have full editorial control, and no editor, so whatever I say can be as crazy, as ill-informed, or typo-ridden as I like, though I endeavor to be factually accurate and legible in my own correspondence.
I have no typesetter, so what you get is whatever the default font of this editor is, because nobody really cares to see a bunch of
fancy fonts, they just want information.
There is no printer and there is no paper required; we’ve done away with the paper mill and chopping down trees.
There is no need for the box truck driver to ship the printed material, it goes right over the internet, through some Cisco routers and the proverbial series of tubes, right into Null’s forum database.
There is no need for the bookstore, or the janitors there, or the shelf-stockers, or the guy running the checkstand.
From my fingertips, to your eyes. Instantaneously. Just like the people who self-publish on Amazon, online, in e-reader format. And just like that, we’ve made thousands of people unemployed and homeless, but we’ve also saved many trees.
The so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution” is about reckoning with this brave new world, and the “cyberization” of things that used to take quite a lot of labor to do. Regardless of whether or not the authoritarians get their way, this will still be a problem; technology’s improving significantly with each passing decade, threatening to eliminate more jobs than ever before. There are neural networks right now that can
write website code based on a verbal description of that website, and
synthesize the voices and faces of actors and politicians from small samples of either of those things.
It seems that the problem of tomorrow won’t be finding resources for people to exploit, but work for them to actually do, after we’ve inadvertently done away with a great deal of it. I’ve always felt that freeing up surplus labor would help unshackle people from menial, sweatshop-like tasks and lead to an “information renaissance“ where there are fewer menial laborers and more contributors to science, culture, the arts, and so forth.
However, I have a feeling that there are a lot of people who will be left behind in such a world. This is going to sound really cruel, but let’s face it, not everyone’s intelligence level is the same. Not everyone can contribute to the sciences, to literature, or the arts. People who are sub-90-IQ aren’t going to be impressing anyone with anything but how fast they can glue the rubber feet to the bottom of computer mice.
Hey, I wonder if we can fix that, too? Think about Neuralink for a minute. The natural extension of a Neural Lace is the Exocortex; a device that interfaces with a brain and expands its capacity and processing power. Perhaps sometime soon, we will be able to greatly enhance the intelligence of the less-fortunate, and they won’t need to end up on some sort of dole after robots start doing their menial jobs.
And, yeah, that’s basically some of the weird cyberpunk shit I foresee happening sometime within the next hundred years. I mean, it sounds outlandish, right? It sounds like someone’s been watching too much GITS, or something. And yet, Neuralink does work, and it can, in fact, predict the limb movement of a pig based on their neural patterns. That’s just the Ford Model T of cybernetics. Early and primitive. The very beginning of something entirely new. What happens when we have the Ferrari Enzo of cybernetics? What then? What are the social ramifications?
I won't lie, I like some of those ideas. I live on the divide between suburbia and rural, and so many restaurants tout how the farms that are near us supply them with their food, naming them. It's one of the things that I thank Millennials for.
What's interesting is that I noticed how, once things were made in China (aka not America) is when the concept of planned obsolescence began to arise. I wonder if, due to lower quality, the items would break. And, not wanting people to make the connection, as well as seeing people buying more as a result, the idea that the breaking is from the engineer-side was pushed. Though I do have an anecdote regarding this, as I have a friend who designs washing machines and he confided in me that they are told to purposefully design them to break after about 5 years, due to parts or something. He didn't say it was a financial reason, or at least I didn't get the feeling. It was more that "these parts start breaking down/go bad after 10 years, so we'll design it so that problems start appearing at 5 years."
The push towards telecommuting is an interesting trend I've noticed. While you could argue that there are benefits, what is interesting is that it contrasts sharply with studies done. I don't have any idea how to access the paper (it was in a youtube video, in the 3GD flood thread), but it talked about how the Chinese built skyscraper cities for "peak efficiency". However, it ended up not being like that at all, and not just because the Chinese were behind it. There was a paper or something theorizing that the reason MIT (and the surrounding area) is behind a lot of the innovation is because of the ability for people to go and walk around the city, exposing them to various experiences that help new thinking, as a result of how the city is laid out or something. I will try to find the video again if someone doesn't link it before I can.
I will have to check out Veblen, as his ideas seem interesting (with the exception of saying money is meaningless). It's unsettling though that his ideas are like Marx, since it makes me feel like I'm Marxist-lite. Though at least I know that, while an interesting philosophical exercise, I'd never want it actually implemented. Just like post-modernism. Hmmm, maybe there's a link between the two? (Spoiler: there is).
ALSO, I am not sure if it is completely relevant (I will hold off on posting and analyzing the content if so) but I highly recommend people check out The Naked Communist by W. Cleon Skousen. Supposedly, Skousen is an FBI employee that the FBI personnel file on him refers to him as a right-wing extremist after he left. The book was published in 1972, and can be found on the archive.org site.
If nothing else, I can post passages as well as analysis that is more related to this Great Reset.
Thorstein Veblen is a must-read. I particularly recommend
The Theory of the Leisure Class, The Theory of Business Enterprise, and
The Engineers and the Price System as a primer on his ideas. Veblen isn’t really a Marxist; he’s more of a Post-Marxist, with some interesting practical ideas and some rather valid critiques that help illuminate what’s going on. Even if people disagree with Marxism, they should definitely read up on the theory to understand it and develop counter-criticisms. Every right-winger should read Trotsky, and every left-winger should read Hitler. It is always important to know—and engage with—the ideas of one’s opponents.
R.B. Langan once wrote an interesting, if a bit loopy,
essay on the Price System in 1944, from the perspective of the Price System confessing its sins. This would give one a fairly good idea of the Technocracy Movement’s position on money and prices. They basically regarded the very existence of money and debts as a form of needless superstition,
as this Onion article humorously demonstrates. To someone deep in debt, the idea of abolishing the price system and establishing a system of calculation-in-kind would be very appealing. Of course, the Technocracy Movement peaked during the Great Depression, and their influence waned after World War II, when their business suits, their uniformity, and their iconography reminded the American public of the
other kind of National Socialist.
Otto Neurath, a member of the Vienna Circle,
advocated what he called naturalkalkul, or the abolition of the price system and the accounting for resources by physical magnitudes (that is, a kilogram of wheat isn’t x number of dollars, it’s a kilogram of wheat). Of course, Mises and Hayek
came out against this sort of thing. Without a price system, you essentially fumble around in the dark, trying to figure out how much of each thing needs to go to which people, and so forth. A socialist system with central planning does not have the information (in the form of price signals) to weigh the relative advantages and disadvantages of each course of action, so naturally, resources end up misallocated.
The goal of modern-day socialists is to get around the economic calculation problem by using computers to characterize people’s habits, behavior, desires, et cetera, all to make central planning easier. You already take part in it all the time just by using many websites on the internet that track your behavior (YouTube, Facebook, etc.). They want to use
big data and electronic telemetry to make the Soviet dream a reality. That’s the core of all modern socialist thought; computers somehow miraculously fix the calculation problem and AI algorithms modeling human behavior decide how much stuff people actually need allocated to them.
Like I said, I have the NWO’s playbook. I’ve been theorizing about this stuff for years. I can tell you, right now, this “Great Reset” is going to be a nightmare if people let them get away with it. The rich and powerful will use it to consolidate their power and shut people out from attaining upward mobility. Far from establishing a utopia, these psychopaths will own everything, and they will have you rent it for the price of a few blowjobs if you want to live.
Look at this COVID-19 hysteria and all this nonsense. I bought into it, too, at first. I was fooled. Look at how many small businesses have failed. Look at how many huge conglomerates and multinational corporations have profited in the aftermath. They used the virus and the lockdowns as an excuse to obliterate the small-business “kulaks” and line their own pockets. They think we’re stupid. They think we can’t see what’s happening. People are starving. They’re miserable. The Elites believe that they’re in a perfect position to manipulate the public into doing whatever they want them to. After all, anyone will do just about anything if you promise them food and shelter.
The Elites are mistaken. The internet will expose their wrongdoing.
