Chapter 20: Automation
Since the Industrial Revolution of the Nineteenth Century, automation has brought both major benefits and equally major damages. It can free us from repetitive, dangerous, boring and unsatisfying tasks while raising productivity. It can allow us to get more done in less time, spend less time getting around, and thus free up big chunks of our time. On the other hand, in a socio-economic paradigm driven by profits, stock price and market share above all else, automation also eliminates jobs. It’s often more profitable to automate than to pay flesh-and-blood employees. In a culture where we need currency for even our most basic needs, fewer jobs mean fewer ways to survive. Access to currency is thus scarcified alongside goods and services, ultimately at the whim of the modern feudal lords. The hardest hit are the most struggling segments of the population. The paradigm inevitably spawns such a dynamic, based on its most fundamental operating principles.
Under the current paradigm, automation is a classic win-lose-lose-lose-lose scenario. Because there are fewer jobs, employees lose. Because access to currency is thus scarcified, people have less currency to spend, forcing them to rely on credit if they can get it. The only winners in this scenario are the modern feudal lords at the top of the pyramid: the major stockholders, banks, CEO’s and those with close ties to them.
A more competitive job market intensifies destructive competition, resentments between individuals and between groups, and makes it harder for people to work together for mutual benefit.
Once the current dominant feudalistic paradigm is shut down and replaced with one based on synergy and symbiotic peer-based mutuality, the downside of automation will disappear and the benefits will at last be fully realized. With the need for currency eliminated and all resources directly, freely accessible to each and all, automation will no longer threaten people’s livelihoods. Then automation will only eliminate tasks that are dangerous, mind-numbing or unsatisfying for human beings and increase productivity, freeing people to pursue other, more satisfying pursuits where they can make their best contribution to their communities.
Where automation would cause harm to people or the environment, then nothing will prevent it from being left out, not implemented.
Some tasks will never be subject to automation, but those practicing them will likely benefit from automated processes to augment their work. Some tasks that can be automated my not necessarily need to be completely automated. For example, furniture making can benefit from automation; yet there are skilled cabinetmakers whose passion for their craft and the unique quality of their products need to be encouraged, empowered, and appreciated. In such fields, we might benefit both from a hybrid of human skilled and automated processes.
Most importantly, automation decisions will be based on the benefits to human beings and the environment, period. With the death of the self-devouring cycle of compulsive overproduction and over-consumption, production loads will be a fraction of what they currently are in any case. Real, authentic needs will be fulfilled. There will be no artificially-programmed, inflated “needs.” Friction between groups and between individuals will diminish, since all will have access to what they need and usually to what they desire. At long last, automation will achieve what many touted in the early days of automation: the freeing of human beings from drudgery, the reduction of workload, and a Renaissance where everyday people normally have time and energy to devote to their dreams to mutual benefit. The Transition cannot come too soon. The sooner, the better.