re: #56 Obdicut

It’s also why automation can go either way. It can make a factory safer, aid in productivity, help reduce worker fatigue, or it can simply replace labor. A lot of the chemical plants in the US employ a tiny number of people for their output because chemistry is, well, chemistry: you get a bunch of tanks, you get computerized systems that regulate flow, heat, mixing, etc, and it’ll come out right every time. The workers are really just there to supervise the machines if something goes wrong.

To many people, this is an ideal or a great thing. The problem, of course, is that the profit from this operation is simply flowing to the capital-holders, with a tiny amount going to whatever workers they have. It’s using natural resources— which have got to, in some way, belong to everyone— to produce profit through the use of capital and exploitation of natural resources.

Kant’s premise is good to apply here: What if all companies were like that? The economy would collapse, because there’d be nobody with money to buy the products being made by these perfect-machine corporations.

Thing is that it’s not a question of “if” so much as “when.” The ideal is a system where self-replicating machines not only build more of themselves, but also repair themselves and even replace themselves when they reach the end of their lifespan. We’re creating a future scenario where human input is virtually removed from the equation, besides the initial programmers and specialized repairmen whose job it is to do repairs the machines can’t do themselves.

When that becomes the case, how does capitalism survive? We like to tell ourselves that, with the robots doing all the work, we’ll be free to engage in leisure and want for nothing. But how do we do that if we’re all broke? Who buys the products that the machines are making when only the people owning those machines have any money?