Technology and abundance

In 1931 John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay entitled Economic possibilities for our Grandchildren where he suggested the following

“The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems - the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion”  

(have read that some people thought he meant religion is a problem and anti Christian, its not meant like that at all, he meant problem as in quiz, something to understand)

What he envisaged was a future where work would take a back seat and most of our time would be leisure as automation will free us from these at times mundane tasks working just 1 or 2 days a week.

Far Fetched? Well not so.

There has been a lot of talk around the blogosphere and even mainstream newspapers recently on this subject, it seems the late great JMK was remarkably prescient about this.

Izabella Kaminsky at the Financial Times wrote a wonderful series of articles here

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/series/beyond-scarcity/

The point of those articles was that the world has now huge overproduction for the needs of people and how much “stuff” we really need.   We can see this in the price of a lot of goods over the last decade or so which actually has had a deflationary effect (covered up by inflation in asset prices and a credit boom) mostly of course these goods were manufactured by low cost labour in the far east but even without that it probably would have happened anyway if manufacturing had been kept in the west as to keep costs down more would have automated which is now happening in China (already quite advanced and accelerating in Japan & Germany) factories are becoming a few person operation with just some technicians to keep on eye on the machines.   Did you notice Walmart (Asda is the UK division) have been trialling holographic greeters? http://www.thegrocer.co.uk/companies/supermarkets/asda/asda-to-follow-up-on-virtual-assistant-holograms-trial/228861.article

so its actually across most sectors of the economy not just manufacturing.

For those of us in Freight Forwarding (you know who you are) how much lower have freight rates been driven over the last 20 years? we are making more on the other services that we provide.

Marx  certainly  had some things to say about a capitalist system which are part of this story as in the “Tendency of the rate of profit fall” 

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to_fall

What is this going to do to the jobs market? When I have spoken to people about this the first thing they always say is that someone has to build the robots but the latest advance is now that robots are actually building robots so no you only need to build 1 and then that replicates. Of course you will still need a certain amount of designers, programmers etc but even for them once that job is done it can pretty much run without them.

Labour is simply not required anymore in the same quantities and where you can really see this problem is in youth unemployment across the west, the figures are quite horrifying in most countries and the amount of short time working that’s happening everywhere although at the moment due to a lack of demand it wont change anytime soon and will find more and more jobs going that way.

Unlike in the past where technology actually created more jobs its now inverted and destroying more jobs.

Unfortunately our governments (of whatever persuasion) are completely in denial of this effect so solutions from 40 years ago are simply not applicable.

Is this future horrible?  Actually no I think this could be a really exciting time in the development of humanity if we grab the opportunity given and embrace it, there are other options than just letting 50% of the population starve and live off the scraps without descending into a 1984 type totalitarian communist or fascist state which I believe is likely if not recognised, we only have to look at 1916 to 1940 for that.

We can and will find other things to do, more for communities, learning, arts the list is endless so it’s going to be “work” as we understand it changing.