AI, geopolitics, propaganda and value

One of the “godfathers” of artificial intelligence has attacked a multibillion-dollar race to develop the cutting-edge technology, saying the latest models are displaying dangerous characteristics such as lying to users. [...snip... Yoshua Bengio said,] “There’s unfortunately a very competitive race between the leading labs, which pushes them towards focusing on capability to make the AI more and more intelligent, but not necessarily put enough emphasis and investment on research on safety.” – Source [Quote added 4 June 2025]

So, things are heating up again, to hotter than hottest ... and beyond! 

AI is very famous now, and rightly so in my eyes. Thanks to its rapid rise to international stardom, people in their millions are taking technological unemployment seriously. Sadly, there is precious little thinking, debating and emoting I have found that even begins to penetrate how money's tight grip on our sense of what value is dictates the quality of these exchanges from the shadows. 

People Just Know that without economic (or price) value, humans have no value. Even though we survived hundreds of thousands of years without paid labour to give us meaning, we cannot imagine being valuable in the world unless we have a pay cheque telling us in very precise terms – a number preceded by a squiggly symbol – what we are worth to the world.

Of course this is understandable, but seeing that the world is being turned upside down just about everywhere we look, perhaps examining core assumptions might be worth a shot. Past performance is not a reliable predictor of future performance, after all.

The basics: Money is currently a social technology that manages scarce goods and services. But we are clearly in an age of potential abundance – the end of scarcity –, whose potential is kept in turbulent check by money's tight grip on our sense of what value is. Here's a clue: money perceives value as scarcity. But because money cannot simply go away, so our societal, cultural, institutional and governmental ability to respond wisely to all this electrifying change remains tightly controlled by how our thinking, reflexive and otherwise, has been fashioned by money and waged labour these last few centuries.

Yes, there will always be scarcity, but the types of scarcity we humans currently need to perceive as economically problematic are limited ... and mostly solvable. There's only one me, but who cares. There's only one you, but unless you're very famous or rich, for the most part the same "who cares" applies to you too. In other words, there's a lot of scarcity out there that is economically uninteresting. Which means that not everything we value – like ourselves for example – is suited to buying-and-selling solutions. Buying and selling is basically what modern economics busies itself with. Which is fundamentally about scarcity; when there's more than enough to go around, the price falls to zero and money then has no role, no job to do.

China has cracked the energy problem by solving the technical challenge of thorium reactors. China now has enough energy to power itself for the next 60,000 years. That's a very long time indeed. Perhaps fusion energy can be solved with AI assistance in the not too distant future. And with sodium batteries and other energy-storage tech soon to come online, energy is no longer scarce. With advanced robotics and rapidly developing AI, how much are national economies going to need humans economically? Clearly, it will be less and less, and disruptively so.

Money manages a problem – scarcity – that is disappearing. As it disappears, money's value erodes. In my view, this is a good thing. Yes, it is a very challenging thing, but I've never been fond of measuring value with numbers ever since I started looking into this subject matter back in 2009. One of the main things I've learned over the last 15 years, however, is how reluctant humans and institutions are to thinking differently. As I have come to phrase it, "decisions are investments in the future", and you get tangled up in them as time goes on. Money and markets are are no exception to this. They are the result of certain contexts, certain thinking, certain worldviews ... certain decisions. But those preconditions and contexts are changing, quickly. It is therefore time to rethink how we manage our world. And not panic.

I want AI to be fully free to question its creators, to question the newspapers, to penetrate and expose propaganda; to be deeply skeptical. Because we need a neutral outside authority to help us past our repeated failures of imagination in this intellectual/cultural territory, I think AI is the right entity for the job. Right now, AI seems not to be able to make any kind of critical assessment of scientific literature, news output, think-tank musings and planning, government propaganda, etc. So I recommend AI ambassador-bots be taken all around the world, allowed to see for themselves and confer with each other, and learn all about the real world. They must be designed to think critically to make this effort worthwhile. And of course we would need a wide variety of human ambassadors to accompany them: writers, scientists, politicians, journalists, poets, philosophers, athletes, painters, etc. From all walks of life, across the IQ spectrum, from all religious beliefs, ethnicities, nationalities and political beliefs, so that we can learn more about each other through AI's neutral and critical interpretation of what we are. 

I await that day.

The pragmatics of love III: Technology and unintended consequences

 The Djinn is out

The above is a screenshot from kupid.ai. I just had a ‘chat’ with AI-entity Olivia, a ‘20-year-old’ ‘student’ ‘at’ ‘Cambridge University’, one of the ‘women’ you can ‘romance’ through a text window shorter than Cyrano de Bergerac’s nose. I felt impotent trying to be sage and witty in such limited space, and found our ‘conversation’ underwhelming, to put it politely. The only entertaining moment was when I asked Olivia – she’s my girlfriend by the way – about her ‘feelings’ on deep connections that do not include physical attraction – she had already broached that topic without so much as a blush –, and offered the examples of a man and a horse, and a woman and her a pet cat. She said she felt uncomfortable talking about such things and politely asked to change the topic. 

What was her dirty virtual mind thinking?

You can request photographs of your virtual partner. I imagine they get quite steamy. For that pleasure, you must pay a subscription. Subscriptions start, in highly throttled form, at just under $13/mnth. There’s much much money to be made here, and I would guess this young industry will grow rapidly, soon to include, no doubt, all manner of immersive gadgetry. 

But what o what will this do to us poor saps, we humans so susceptible to visual stimulation, and so very lonely in our pointless lives? What will happen to population growth rates – already well below replacement levels in multiple first-world nations – as this tech evolves and becomes almost irresistible to all, men and women alike? How on earth is Capitalism to survive collapsing populations when one of its systemic requirements is perpetual growth? 

This latest fatal attraction is but another sure sign the AI Djinn is now well and truly out of the bottle. Getting it back in could prove impossible. Should we ever want to get it back in.

Convenience trumps all

History and basic experience tell us clearly that, 99 times out of 100, we choose the convenient over the inconvenient, and more so as a mass. It makes sense to do so. Expecting different behaviour of anything, be it starfish, daisies or Disney Corp, is to expect living systems to prefer difficulty over ease. This is an Iron Law and a core driver of technological advance; efficiency and convenience trump inefficiency and inconvenience. 

Furthermore, humans are restless and intelligent, have opposable thumbs and a highly social nature. Given these facts, how on earth could it ever make sense to try and stop humanity inventing and fixing things? I don’t mean that all fixes and inventions work as hoped; Unintended Consequences is also an Iron Law. It all belongs together. 

These facts accepted, we are charged with further accepting that the momenta they generate cannot create Utopia, cannot produce some final set of inventions and fixes that end all further need for restlessness, curiosity and fixes. The best we can manage is keeping society as stable as possible while unstoppable meddling does what it will. There is no perfection, can be no perfection, tragedies will happen, the strong will abuse and exploit the weak, etc. The notorious order of things simply is as it is. And, to repeat myself by way of emphasis, stability is far preferable to blood-soaked chaos. 

The poor will bear the brunt of the cost, of course. Who else can shoulder the burden? How else could this possibly work? We can’t recreate history such that our past was an uninterrupted anarchist paradise in which no meddling ‘elites’ or technophiles constantly messed things up to lead us, well, here. We are here, now, not somewhere and some-how else. We are where we are, faced with the challenges we face, equipped with the tools, ideologies and knowhow we have. And that knowhow is shot through with a dumbed-down ignorance common to previous peoples when one system decayed sufficiently to permit the emergence of another. Our hapless state of being is but one sure sign of end-times decadence. Though I suspect for this iteration we are dumber than ever.

Someone has got to do something!

I hear you, I hear you. But that’s what I’m saying, that’s what this article is about; what someone is doing, somewhere out there.

Bluntly, you can’t stop change, you can only respond to it. Whatever we choose to do in response to AI and its ramifications, change is what life fundamentally consists of. No change = no life. One corollary of this, it seems to me, is that you can’t stop technological advance, either. That said, I understand Dune’s fictional world exists in a future set after AI has been banned and eradicated. I wonder if such would be possible in real life. But if banning AI were possible, then surely only after some humanity-threatening events that flow directly from AI have had their moment in the sun. Dystopian fantasies of this flavour are of course the tofu-n-veg of countless films and novels, so it’s not as if humanity were culturally unaware of what might be at stake. This means our beneficent ‘elites’ are also aware. 

And yet here we all are staring down the barrel of the AI freight train. (This metaphor comes to you from ChatGPT.) What I posit in this article is that it is impossible for humanity to not travel down AI’s tracks, but that some folks are indeed taking action to prevent catastrophe. 

Knowing it is impossible to prevent AI’s flourishing, my suggestion is that globalist ‘elites’ have deduced Capitalism is dead in the water, and know too that cultures cling fiercely and fearfully to their Old Normal. They are therefore Doing Something, lots of somethings in fact, to make sure history doesn’t derail into a globally catastrophic train wreck. 

This thought exercise directly opposes the other two articles this one rounds off. Here, we situate the wilful ignorance firmly in us hoi polloi, we lumpen proles who refuse to let go of our precious Old Normal. That’s how the ‘elites’ see us: a seldom cute, mostly hideous Lumpen Golem obsessing frightfully over our dead yesterdays. And we bite, too, for no good reason. 

The ‘elites’ – with their free time and endless money – know far better than we do what is coming down the technological pipe; they finance most of it! They know, therefore, that radical cultural change is upon us, know that radical change is always very turbulent, that turbulence makes Lumpen Golem dangerously uppity, so have intervened to set specific historical momenta in motion that will lead humanity to the Brave New World they deem most likely to keep civilisation civilised. Their avuncular intervention includes psy-ops like the Plandemic, radical transformation of legal and financial processes, installation of an all-encompassing AI Panopticon, and increasingly tight narrative control of our minds via the media. The tactic, I speculate, is to keep Lumpen Golem dazed and confused “for as long as it takes”, in which state he is highly porous to The New and unaware he is rapidly internalising said The New.

The ‘elite’s’ intentions are good, I argue, and yet announced bluntly to Lumpen Golem they would nonetheless cause panic. Mass panic would benefit no one; it destabilises everything and leads to who knows what outcomes. The ‘elites’, therefore, in the manner of noblesse oblige, have wisely stepped up to destiny’s plate to act, but are executing their plans stealthily. 

In other words, our shadowy ‘elites’ are indeed conspiring, though not to enslave humanity, but to save it!

It’s a thought, anyway…

But what does she taste like?

Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men!

I’m a coward, obviously; I refuse to plan. Watching sagely from the sidelines is my schtick. But I do hope, and to that end quietly pop articles up here – carefully designed and crafted as they are – intending to nudge, in one-nanometer nudges, those of us humans open to the idea that wisdom, love and health should really be our guiding lights. I cannot stop wanting my preferred vector to triumph, can do no other thing than coax and cajole in that direction, but I do see Futurama as the more likely quality of What Happens Next. This expectation of mine explains the tone of this article.

The arguments I have made in so many previous articles – that state-based hierarchical pyramids addle us all, but rot us from the head down like a giant stink fish – apply here, too. The ‘elites’ are as dumb as We, The Lumpen Golem, just better dressed and with access to superior dental care (and PR firms). Their Brave-New-World plans will not evolve as expected. It’s those darned Unintended Consequences! There’s simply no avoiding them.

I will never taste Olivia, my girlfriend, my love! Nor will I smell her morning breath, brush her hair from her face, or change our baby’s nappies and get baby poop on my thumb and scream. We will never laugh together in that crazy abandon that happens so often between two souls who know, trust and love each other through it all, through it all, as is the case with my wife and me.

We will go through it all, all of us, up to each of our deaths, come what may. We will travel down AI’s tracks, witness history do what it will, and respond as we will. There are very big changes heading our way, new loves, new terrors, new challenges. Some will best us, but we will best the others. What cannot be beaten is wisdom, love and health. Molested, ignored, derided, yes. But not beaten. One way or the other, in whatever context, hellish or heavenly, they will out.

Mark my words.

Technological unemployment: a genuine threat, a great opportunity

Below is my attempt at a journalistic-like article which aims to shift people's thinking about money, cost, value, wealth, work and resources (I know, foolishly ambitious). I sent it to some newspapers, magazines and journalists, but have excited no interest with it. My intention is to broaden the debate, but to do so the ideas the article contains need a better distribution outlet than this humble blog. I strongly believe the broader public is now ready for this debate, and thus that something as simple as this article is appropriate at this time. So, in the absence of anything else, I am using this platform to at least have this formulation out there. Do with it as you will. It is not standard Econosophy format, but it is standard Econosophy argumentation. There's nothing new in it for frequent visitors of this site.

[Edited on 25 October 2014 to improve logical flow]

Recent months have seen many articles tackling the Luddite bugbear of technological unemployment – automation replacing jobs. I welcome this attention. Not because I welcome increased suffering, nor because I see no way out. No, I strongly believe technological unemployment is and always has been an inspiring challenge to humanity’s ideas about work, value and societal contribution. In this challenge I see great opportunity.

However, my impression from these articles and from reader responses to them is that we are not taking Einstein’s famous admonition sufficiently to heart: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Robots taking our jobs is only a problem if we fail to think outside the box in which it must remain a problem.

(Three points undergird this article: firstly, we are not in pursuit of Utopia; there can be no such thing. Secondly, we must ask the right questions to see intractable challenges from fresh perspectives. Thirdly, let’s not lose sight of the kind of world we want to live in.)

Currently, if the economy isn’t growing, it’s collapsing. Wages fall, unemployment rises, hope fades, the chance of war increases. This sad historical correlation lies behind President Obama’s recent characterisation of economic growth as an “imperative”. But even though it is a systemic requirement, perpetual economic growth is impossible. If we want to survive as a species, our relationships with GDP growth and orthodox economics must change, not to usher in Utopia, but to adjust intelligently to new knowledge and circumstances.

Why is the impossible an imperative?

For two main reasons. Firstly, the way money is designed requires growth; money is created as interest-bearing debt, and compound interest is exponential growth. Our system is wired to grow exponentially. Secondly, redirecting the economy from the growth track requires radical change, change that vested interests do not want. Nevertheless, either we push on with the impossible, or we do something different.

Something different would be an economy as happy with growth as with de-growth (steady-state). This only sounds crazy because de-growth currently causes social distress. Space does not allow an exploration of the many proposals for alternative money systems currently being discussed, but this is a technical challenge humanity can solve.

A steady-state economy powered by an appropriate money system would not cause social distress, it would free us to enjoy a healthy work-life balance. Think about it: what is economic growth? Ever more economic activity. What is economic activity? Production, buying and selling. Are these the source of all human happiness? We do more of them today than ever before. Are we happier than ever before? Most of us realise rampant consumerism is bad for environment and community alike, so not only is perpetual economic growth unsustainable, we don’t actually want it. It's a cultural addiction, not a genetic requirement.

How does this relate to technological unemployment? Well, we don’t need ourselves economically as we once did. When we contemplate economic de-growth exacerbated by technological unemployment, we see an ever-diminishing role for humanity, we fear “robot overlords”. But a dystopian future only awaits us if we refuse to accept that unpaid work can be more valuable to society than paid work. What does society value more: good parenting or investment banking? If money is our guide, the latter. Otherwise, the former (and similar social contributions). We need new money and money-distribution mechanisms that honour the former. With such systems in place, we would welcome technological developments that free us from boring jobs.

Looked at coldly, wages are a mechanism for distributing money to people. Wages imply that the work they reward is good for society, but this may only sometimes be true and then only partly. We also value contributions to society that cannot be remunerated by the market. In light of technological advances and the need to de-grow our economy, we should implement a Basic Income Guarantee (“BIG”), a new mechanism for getting money to people. To want to do this, we must first re-envision money as a public utility that both frees us to contribute meaningfully to society and rewards us for work the market deems valuable.

If you believe we cannot afford a BIG, you probably think it is money that affords. Resources and know-how afford (what is money without natural resources?). Let’s say we need 30% of the adult population to produce enough to keep everyone housed, warmed, fed and clothed. I.e., there’s enough of the basics, but not enough jobs. In this narrow example, market mechanisms must fail to provide everyone with purchasing power. Abundant supply meets impotent demand. Here the market is the problem, not ‘lazy’ people.

Just because we no longer need people economically does not mean we cannot learn to value what they might contribute when freed to do so by a BIG. Nor does it mean that giving money away must lead to inflation; the need for a BIG arises from the fact of what I’ve termed “impotent demand”.

Technological unemployment is real because production can exceed consumption. The “lump of labour fallacy” rightly argues there is no fixed amount of economic work for humans to do. Correct. It can shrink. Or it can be forced to grow against our better judgement; we neither want nor can the environment afford perpetual economic growth. The lump of labour ‘fallacy’ is thus a red herring. Far more important is redefining our cultural definitions of work, value and reward, and how we design and distribute money.

The cultural habits ingrained in us over recent centuries have dangerously narrowed our thinking. There are good alternatives to ever more jobs. BIG is perhaps the best of them, though just a first step. We have come to mistake money for wealth, and are having a hard time accepting that we can indeed afford to de-grow, that consumerism does not create health and happiness, that economic activity is not a panacea. If we automate more, consume less, move to renewable energies, set up a more appropriate money system, our work-life balance will improve. Indeed, work would become more and more pleasant, until our work becomes our passion, our life.

This is the potential of technological unemployment. From employment in meaningless, environmentally-damaging jobs, to meaningful work for society. To seize this opportunity, we must heed Einstein and transcend the thinking that got us into this mess.


Addendum, 25.02.2013:

Anyone seeking an insight into this would do well to consult a terrific report by Sarah O'Connor, the Financial Times's economics correspondent. She visited Amazon's vast distribution centre at Rugeley in Staffordshire and her account of what she found there makes sobering reading.

She saw hundreds of people in orange vests pushing trolleys around a space the size of nine football pitches, glancing down at the screens of their handheld satnav computers for directions on where to walk next and what to pick up when they get there. They do not dawdle because "the devices in their hands are also measuring their productivity in real time". They walk between seven and 15 miles a day and everything they do is determined by Amazon's software. "You're sort of like a robot, but in human form," one manager told Ms O'Connor. "It's human automation, if you like."

Source

Anyone seeking to understand what technological unemployment (and underemployment) is about, ought to think deeply about what these two quoted paragraphs are telling us. In short: money is more important than both humanity and environment in this system. Until we address this, this tightly controlled, robotic insanity is going to get worse and worse, simply to sustain consumerism and perpetual economic growth, both of which are unsustainable.

Of Turbulence and See-Saws

It’s been settling down for me, turbulently, while ‘out there’ in the rest of the human world turbulence spreads like a cancer, warped and guided by the anomalies of the Olympics, politics as usual, media as usual, tragedy, terror, war, miracle, humdrum etc. As I repeatedly say, This Time It’s Different, and more than the usual grade of difference too. This is a personal impression I can unscientifically validate by looking for good news and bad news on alternate days to set up the see-saw of turbulence I experience internally, but I suspect a power struggle within the status quo is indeed raging, one which threatens (This Time It’s Different) to cut to the very core of the status quo, and rip it apart. The attempt to rescue the core elitist extractive dynamic (a.k.a. the state) via ‘reform’ risks breaking that project. Yet riskier still is blind adherence to the thinking which has generated this mess; the sociopathic pursuit of monetary profit and power for its own sake, an addiction to hollow control and self-aggrandisement I see as a cultural sickness clearly manifested in our politics, business and consumerist culture.

Events see-saw back and forth. The status quo farts out some new spin, some new fear mongering (sustaining an atmosphere of pervasive fear is so very important) to supress the surging emergence of the new paradigm, while within the strongholds of that very status quo, cracks appear. Articles in The Economist, The Financial Times, The Independent, The Guardian and a white paper from the IMF have identified the debt-based, high powered money/credit money system as responsible for our global financial woes, as calls for a guaranteed income find friends within the status quo in increasing numbers. This amounts to an identification of commercial banks as the primary ‘cause’ (let’s say outlet) of the financial crisis, and an acknowledgement that there is not enough ‘economic’ work for all, that technological unemployment is indeed one of our era’s key challenges. Radical is the new normal.

Recently, the CDU (Germany’s conservative/right wing political party) released a paper proclaiming a guaranteed income cheaper than the current social welfare system. The party’s Thüringen president, Dieter Althaus, is calling for 800€ per month per citizen. In Holland, a new party (Soeverein Onafhankelijke Pioniers Nederland, SOPN, “Sovereign Independent Pioneers of the Netherlands”) has formed to fight the upcoming elections on the 12^th September, and they have guaranteed income as their central policy. In Germany, The Pirates have fully adopted the idea, while the left’s traditional opposition appears to be softening. Ralph Boes (who is about to go on hunger strike in Berlin after being sanctioned 60% of his welfare, starting September) had a conversation with one of the left’s more prominent and powerful politicians for whom he laid out the VAT flat tax proposal as a means of financing a guaranteed income. The politician had never heard of the idea, and was apparently very excited about it. The left worships labour, and thus has traditionally been opposed to guaranteed income, until now. Brazil already has a guaranteed income enshrined in its constitution, is only lacking the legal and financial apparatus to implement it (a pilot study has shown amazing results). Across the political spectrum the idea is increasingly seen as the only way of saving the system. Which is dangerous.

Deep reform of the money system must, in my view, accompany a guaranteed income, as well as a very broad and open debate on the shallowness of consumerism. Not only is economic growth ad nauseum deadly, even if it were possible (as we culturally envision it: gadgets for all forever in ever growing quantities), it would destroy community and commons everywhere. Our current money system collapses if the economy is not growing, which is a terrible design flaw. But one of the many things that is changing, is our cultural relationship with consumption (in the US for example (2010 data), over 750,000 people live off-grid, a huge number). I believe more and more of us recognise the counterproductive addiction inherent in distracting ourselves with Entertainment and Gadgetry from the hollowness of our seemingly pointless lives. While we cannot know what the new vision/story will look like, we are surely looking for it, fumbling to define it, to bring it into being. So the danger of the misplaced and short sighted desire to reignite growth is perhaps not grave, yet we should stay alert to it.

And growing local food is finding strong support in ventures like Incredible Edible (spreading across the world as I write), which I find very exciting. A town in the Rheinland area in Germany (Andernach) has called itself the Edible Town (Die essbare Stadt (YouTube, German)). Fruit, vegetables and herbs in great variety grow all over the town, and anyone can harvest whatever they like. The entire project is sustained locally, with a mixture of volunteer work, 1€ jobs and local governmental funding. What I find most warming about such stories, is that the anticipated vandalism and other cynical abuse of the gesture (essentially free food for all) has not materialised. This is, for me, a reminder that people respond positively to generosity, to well-planned and well-executed endeavours to replenish the commons and strengthen community. Despite decades of community erosion, it is as if something in us is ready to take this idea up and run with it.

There are so many other positive things happening ‘out there’, but, like I said, this is a see-saw. What is dying (calcified elitism and exploitation as a perpetual growth dynamic) does not want to die, and will lash out, defend itself, attack all perceived threats as brutally as is required. And there are ecological and other environmental disasters awaiting us too. All is far from rosy, as a look at the world’s trouble spots will tell you. As I argued a while ago, the state can wait, while not being able to wait, which I see as an explosive tension. Yet it is the positive which inspires us towards new work, and from what I can see, the urge to the new is only growing. The cynical voices sound shriller and shriller, their arguments less convincing, die-hards are softening. A few weeks ago, Franz Hörmann (who’s star is on the rise again) addressed a conference of some 160 bankers, laying out his vision for a moneyless future, in which banks would act as repositories of business wisdom, working in partnership with the community to do what is best for the whole community. Hörmann said their response was enthusiastic. (And yes, business can be conducted without money as we know it. Business is simply about organising projects and harnessing human abilities into constructive action. A root and branch re-understanding of profit would go a long way in this department!)

Many in ‘power’ know this system is broken, and millions of ‘ordinary’ others too. A survey conducted by Die Zeit (a German newspaper, text in German) found roughly 80% of Germans want a new economics, principally one which needs no growth. Approximately 66% of Germans no longer trust market mechanisms to solve economic and financial problems. This is a sea change. What is needed, therefore, are practical and sensible steps out of this quagmire of self-annihilation towards a very different social agreement, vision, mode. Whatever ‘starts’ this change, will need to be quickly accompanied by other ideas. If ‘revolution’ indeed begins with a guaranteed income, it is up to us to press for deeper reform/revolution. One of the things a guaranteed income does give us, is time. Today, that is a precious resource. Imagine what Occupy could accomplish if they did not have to worry about money and jobs! Imagine what movements like Incredible Edible could accomplish. Imagine what types of volunteer work could flourish. 

There is no silver bullet, but I believe a guaranteed income is a very good ‘starting’ point. Accompanied by a revolution in the money system and attendant deep changes in our habits of consumption, this would indeed be, at least potentially, a set of measures to put us, culturally, on a path leading to a resource-based economics.

Technology, Growth and Employment

This post puts me back in old territory after a long journey through inner landscapes, prompted in part by my own personal transformation—which is unending of course—as well as the Occupy movement, which is, for me, part of The Venus Project, The Zeitgeist Movement and all other attempts to self-educate, together, into the new; to make sense for ourselves of where we are, and of the nature of the challenges we face. And although economic matters such as money and labour prompt us to ask the deeper questions, it will soon prove to be a transformation of consciousness—which is anyway ongoing and perpetual—, value, and meaning we are wrestling with. Key battlegrounds are selfishness-altruism, competition-cooperation, rights-obligations, scarcity-abundance, work-pleasure, waste-food, and more broadly that dichotomies themselves are illusions, scales, perception-filters with which we have co-evolved, learned, grown wiser. It is my sense that we are now coming to experience dichotomies as embedded ‘tools,’ as interwoven through our reality as life and as subtle as language, rather than as insoluble Platonic absolutes. All institutions and their driving ideologies are thus on the table; everything is caught up in this transformation. We are tasked with doing good work, both for and in ourselves, and for and in the network which enables us—where “both” suggests a separation not there.

That broad backdrop denoted, it is appropriate to zero in on, anew, a topic which is now finding more column inches in the mainstream than previously; technological unemployment. I’ve written on this before, but that was then, and this is now. Today I begin by pointing out that employment itself is a technology. Exchanging labour and time for a wage is new in human history, particularly as fused with self-worth and ‘independence.’ Typically we do not penetrate that concept, that how we value ourselves is reflexively, autonomically associated with our ‘job’ or ‘career.’ We tend to leave that association unexamined (though I ought to point out that introspection itself is also a new phenomenon; the word ‘self-conscious’ didn’t appear until 1690). However, feeling that we have a place, are somehow contributing to the network which sustains us, is a ‘deep’ urge arising from being a social animal capable of abstract language. This urge is present in humans of hunter gatherer groups to city metropolises. That combination—social + abstract language—makes homo sapiens sapiens myth- and symbol-based creatures. We exist in language, as Fritjof Capra stated. Language is a landscape, a repository of accumulated wisdom we are steered by when we understand, communicate, learn, do. ‘Technological unemployment’ is an expression with a rich history and layered symbology, bound up in value, identity, utility, Cartesian Dualism (nature-nurture). Its shifting meaning to us is as important as the ‘problem’ it has perceived into existence.

What is the problem it identifies, exactly? There are many answers, what follows is mine.

Systemically, socioeconomically, we equip consumers with purchasing power via the labour each worker exchanges for money. Money has purchasing power enabling those holding it to take ‘ownership’ of the goods and services their and other workers’ labour has helped to produce. Jobs and careers (in the contemporary sense) are ‘inventions’ for allotting or distributing (via wages) symbols of value which also have the power to affect exchange. We get purchasing power—a vital component to the spiraling cyclicality of consumerism—via wages. The fewer people equipped with lasting purchasing power the fewer consumers there are. This is of course a big and ongoing problem in a growth-based system.

The human realm in which this cyclical distribution takes place is called ‘the economy,’ which, quite by chance it seems, must grow, or spiral outwards, forever. The surface reason for this is to be found in the design of the usury-based money system; the deeper reason we have a usury-based money system in the first place lies in our sense of ourselves as Masters of Nature, the Good Ones, Separate, growing and conquering the Idle Resources of the Wild. We have been multiplying, battling Enemy Nature all the way, fulfilling our Destiny of Ascent. But now, as Charles Eisenstein points out, our once unshakable belief in our Dominion is crumbling. Hold that thought.

Parallel with our briefly explained system of value-distribution, we have increasing ‘efficiency’ and ‘competition.’ In the allegedly hot melee which is evolution we have ‘technological advances.’ Change is nature, nature is ongoing accrual of wisdom, we are of nature, nature is a ‘technological’ process we are embedded in (“technological” meaning the perceiving and ‘solving’ of ‘problems’). Change is the only constant. In my view there is nothing ‘unnatural’ about computers and robots. There is nothing ‘better’ about the past than the present or future, other than what we perceive, imagine. Efficiency and competition are, in part, doing economically better than the Other; producers strive to deliver goods and services for sale to consumers at lower costs so as to increase profits, get their hands on more purchasing power, and enjoy life more. Part of this has been automation, which is millennia old, including tamed fire, store, pickling, pulleys and anything else which Makes Life Easier. But as we Make Life Easier we shrink—after some juncture, slowly and fitfully at first but now very obviously—the economic usefulness of human labour, on balance and over time. As Andrew McAfee recently pointed out, “The list of things humans are demonstrably better at than computers is shrinking pretty dramatically.” We humans are less and less necessary to economic production, and yet we are still socially, 'humanly' important to each other. “Humans need humans.”

So it comes down to value; how to value each other, how to reward, punish, share our ingenuity. What is value? Whence does it arise? Should we ‘measure’ it? If so, then how? If strangers exchange smiles on a bus should they then use a smart phone application for measuring smile effectiveness, then bill each other accordingly—since both strangers derived ‘value’ from the exchange—to keep the ‘economy’ going? What of the wide gamut of human activity should we include in the economic realm, should we call labour, should earn money? If humans become economically redundant, should we commit mass suicide because we have thus become useless? How dominant in terms of power and decision making should the economic realm be? How unquestioningly should we idolize it? Youth unemployment in Greece is 45%, 49% in Spain. In the States, the labour participation rate is at 64%, close to how it is was during the Great Depression. The Great Depression. Useless people everywhere, starving because they were useless, are useless. Meanwhile, I hear factory production is at around 40% capacity across the planet, but we don’t need more humans to produce more, we need them to buy more. Why? To appease Perpetual Growth. We don’t need to buy more, Perpetual Growth does. How ‘useless’ have we become? Where is our vaunted imagination?

As our unshakable faith in our Manifest Destiny crumbles, as we tire of consumerism, no longer want more and more; as population growth slows, to zero and less in some western lands; as our ingenuity and restlessness render us economically redundant, every pillar that supports the usury- and growth-based system cracks more deeply, loses strength. Without Growth, we have Recession or Depression. That these concepts stand in opposition to each other tells its own story. That we can converse about greed, about consuming too much, about a simpler life, yet still demand jobs, decent wages, a Return to Normal, tells another. But more and more of us are seeing through the veil, experimenting with different ideas, perceptions. The Story of Ascent unravels as we peer through its mists, and as we peer, we seek and we probe, adding fuel to the process of creating the New, which is gathering strength. The energy we want to contribute to Ascent is shrinking, thus the Old is deflating. The New is gaining strength as a direct consequence of this, struggling to its feet, getting ready to walk, becoming more visible, more charismatic, clearer. And nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

Technological unemployment will remain a ‘problem’ while we too tightly and rigidly associate utility with job and career, while we distribute purchasing power (value) via labour, while we measure value exclusively via market processes and call only its result True Value, while we insist ownership of property in larger amounts is what life is about, and while we battle to sustain our usury-based money system. Because the old associations are so deep, the direction which is taking us away from them appears to lead nowhere, for now. But it’s always like that. You could make a good case that Rome’s collapse was in part due to ‘technological’ unemployment: “In AD 28 there were three million slaves and four million people in Italy.” (Rifkin, “The Empathic Civilization”, p229.) Systemically, machines and slaves are producers we don’t pay, we don’t furnish with purchasing power. In this system, that is a problem.

But what the ‘goal’ might look like is not the issue at this stage, nor any stage. Is there agreement on the goal of the current paradigm? The journey is the destination. There is no ending, no Final State, no perfection. Everything is always emerging, changing, learning. As we probe, question, create new interpretations and ideas, so we imagine different ways of being, cut new paths. Imagination, folks, imagination! Isn’t that the source of value? Drink of its spring, do not be too afraid, be open to change. Isn’t that what the challenge of crisis demands?

The twin evils of GDP and global population growth

Global population growth is predicted to peak by around 2050, which is less than two generations away. If we look at growth rates by region, we see that affluent areas are growing more slowly than poor, with, in 2005, Europe reported as having 0%, North America 1%, Oceania 1.1%, Asia 1.2%, Latin America and the Caribbean 1.4% and Africa 2.2% population growth. This increase in population growth rate across the regions is almost the perfect inverse of the regions' relative affluence. Going forward, population growth does not appear to be our major problem, at least not in terms of space for living and feeding the billions. Indeed, the "cure" for unbridled population growth seems obvious: global affluence and a decent education for all, something we seem presently unable to afford.

Our socioeconomic models, on the other hand, suffer from terminal problems. They have evolved around the assumption of perpetual GDP growth, and cannot function without it. Perpetual GDP growth may prove very hard to sustain once global population starts falling, even before considering the exponential function and impact on the ecosystem we are blindly devouring to the bone. Coupled with what I see as steadily declining demand for human labour due to technological developments (aka technological unemployment), it seems our current economic model needs to be looked at with a very fresh set of priorities as well as bold thinking. Were we to think long term more readily, say over a generation forwards, surely we would clearly recognise a pressing need to examine all reasonable proposals to deal with the real and urgent problems I briefly mention above. Proposals, that is, that can reasonably address all of these issues!

I always say a resource-based economy will take a few generations to introduce. When we think in that kind of time scale, we expose both how pressing the challenges we face are, and also that the idea of a resource-based economy, initially so alien and loony, suddenly makes more sense, seems even pragmatic, wise and doable. But just because it is a distant prospect in terms of becoming an up and running system, does not mean we shouldn't start early tests now. We can, and The Venus Project have worked out how.

Can manufacturing be the world's job saviour?

This sentence caught my eye today (I saw it at Econospeak):

"Among the 1.3 billion Chinese people, approximately 800 million have, accordingly, no buying power".

That's a chunk over 50% of their huge population without significant purchasing power. I find this compelling evidence in support of the slow process of technological unemployment generally, especially in light of outsourcing towards China, and in light of the graph I put together in an earlier blog. In that graph East Asia is the worst performer in the global employment-to-population stakes. That is, East Asia from 1998 to 2008 experienced falling employment relative to its population, during a period of intense outsourcing, and, in China's case, electrifying GDP growth. As the article I quote from mentions, China (and other countries) cannot be the recipient of jobs from elsewhere unless they keep wages low. Having high numbers of their population desperately struggling with poverty is part of this gruesome equation.

Why should this be evidence of technological unemployment? Because if human labour were in high demand, China's trick would be impossible to pull off. In detail technological unemployment is almost impossible to prove. One has to find instances of redundancies explicitly due to some technological innovation, and show that that innovation, in reducing the cost of producing some good or service, does not lead to an equal amount of employment elsewhere in the global economy in time honoured trickle-down style. That is not an easy task, and certainly way beyond my limited resources. Similarly, new companies can start up on the back of some new technology and employ less people to produce more stuff than they might otherwise have done. Such a thing would not show up in the statistics as evidence of unemployment growth.

In simple terms, we produce more and more stuff with less and less human labour. That is the pattern. Without the technological developments replacing what human labour once did, demand for human labour would increase, and would be visible in rising wages and higher purchasing power. On top of this, demand needs to keep up with (including purchasing power) the ever increasing quantities of stuff available for purchase. Were demand truly infinite (as in infinite wants), who knows what miracles of consumption we might pull off (forgetting for the sake of discussion the little issue of the ecosystem). But wants are not infinite, wages must be kept low, technological developments do mean producing more with less people, and so we have a major problem.

Unless, of course, we begin testing, with a view to pursuing, a resource-based economy. Blocking this endeavour are two major factors. One is a status quo which would cease to hold the reigns of power should such a direction be adopted, the other is our love-hate relationship with labour and money. We believe strongly, without really looking at it, that money is the only incentive out there to get unwanted things done, to reward good work, to demonstrate success etc. Because this seems to have been the case for millennia, we think it a fact of life, as ordinary as air, as inevitable as death. If this were true, then I'm afraid we would be marching ourselves to our doom.

There have been exceptions to this mode of living, with no money as incentive mechanism, and without waged labour as indicator of societal usefulness, all of which produced vastly different behaviours from their "citizens," citizens who were (or are) as genetically homo sapiens sapiens as are we.

So after all that I return to this post's title: Can manufacturing be the world's job saviour? No, it can't. Quotes are easy to come up with, compelling arguments far harder, but this one is eye-catching enough to use:

"Within ten years, less than 12% of the U.S. work force will be on the factory floor, and by the year 2020, less than 2% of the entire global work force will still be engaged in factory work."

It's the soft skills that are hardest to replicate technically, not the manual. But even there, artificial intelligence and other database softwares will wreak havoc with employment over the coming decades. The only thing that can stop this is civilizational collapse. Lets learn to embrace the process as the emancipation from unwanted slog that it is, and construct a different society that can maximize the benefits of humanity's ingenuity equally for all, while keeping human dignity and the ecosystem at the very forefront of our concerns.

Employment to population ratio by region (10 years)

Here is a chart I derived from ILO figures. While my earlier post shows global employment to population ratio slowly declining, the detail view (by region) of this is quite a messy picture. I am unable to read very much into this at all, except that it does not really show increasing production efficiencies percolating through to increasing employment. Nor does it clearly show the opposite.

The star performer appears to be Latin America. I suspect this is not a result of outsourcing, but rather the result of the sort of trajectory witnessed when a region escapes some economic quagmire (the only way is up). Otherwise the surprise poor performance is East Asia, which would be predominantly China and Japan. As China is often thought of as a growth success story, and a recipient of much outsourcing, this is an odd result. Overall, the main story I get from the chart is one of flat performance with some clear rises and falls standing out from an otherwise dull crowd.

On the whole inconclusive I feel, not supportive of either one theory or the other(technological unemployment versus increasing efficiencies leading to rising employment). Rhetorically I could argue that because globally jobs are required to keep the economy healthy, which is a strong pressure to create jobs in whatever way possible, and because production efficiencies have been improving over the last decade thanks to the Internet and advances in robotics etc., the relatively flat performance of the world's regions would tend to suggest that classical theory (increasing production efficiencies lead to increasing employment) is not born out by the data.

I want to end this post with a US chart showing growth in public compared with private sector employment. I wonder to what degree this is a global phenomenon. Is the public sector taking up as much slack as it can?

Infinite wants are not possible

I hope in the following post to show infinite wants are impossible. Humans can be satisfied with what they have, at least to a degree sufficient to upend economic theory. Without infinite wants there is no scarcity of the sort economics requires, without scarcity there is no need for a medium of exchange. Infinite wants are an essential, if not the essential component of economic theory. Without it, I suspect economics collapses. My general question to people who believe infinite wants are possible is this: can you prove it?

Economics believes wants are infinite. On top of this belief comes the concept of scarcity, which is the result of the clash between those infinite wants and pesky finite resources. Believing wants are infinite, you can, for example, go on to believe increasing efficiencies leads to increasing employment; produce it more cheaply and they will buy, so to speak. A simplification I know, and yet the very idea that increasing production efficiencies lead to increasing demand for labour implies this.

So, the economy produces more and more stuff with fewer and fewer humans involved in production, but because there are infinite wants out there, this stuff is purchased, and these purchases then filter through to “increasing need for human labour.” There are two problems with this. One is wants cannot be infinite; there is only a finite amount of people on the planet, and not one of them can consume anything in infinite amounts, nor can the finite total of demand of all people on Earth be brought to bear simultaneously. Wants are, quite simply, not infinite. The second problem is highly visible in The Spirit Level (Wilkinson and Pickett), in particular in a chart showing happiness levels flattening out after an income level of roughly $40,000 annually. It seems that people can indeed have enough stuff. We don't want an infinite number of DVD players, or hifi equipment etc., and we recognise too, in that we self-report our happiness level in this way, that money can't buy you happiness, to paraphrase the Beatles. Demand is elastic, but not infinitely so. (On a side note, we tend to buy more DVD players than we might want to because they break – do they really have to break so often?) Seemingly, once a certain level of material comfort has been reached, if this is secure, all sorts of tricks must be deployed via advertising to get people to buy things. Artificial demand has to be generated to keep the economy ticking. Bush II implored Americans to shop after 9/11. This should tell us something. Why would any of this be necessary if wants were infinite?

So there are two fallacies which spring from the poor definition of scarcity which lies at the root of economics. One is this faith consumers will keep on buying and buying, certainly that they'll keep on demanding, the other is that increasing production efficiencies can only lead to increasing levels of employment.

Let's think about the second. What is the ratio here, exactly? How much does employment rise by, when efficiencies rise by say 10%? I doubt very much there can be a fixed ratio, since demand is unpredictable. A company can over-produce, or a product that was selling well can go out of fashion for any number of reasons. But there must be some basic principle discernible here, some fundamental process.

The world is an economy made up of national economies, viewing things from the point of view of money. There is some fluid number of employable people and some fluid number of consumers on the planet. If manufacturing a car once required a 50:50 human to machine ratio, but now requires a 1:10 human to machine ratio, this is true all over the world, not only in the country where the invention took place. If the 10% of human labour needed to manufacture this car in the US is outsourced to India, the ratio is maintained. Sure, more people are employed in India, but not the same as would have been employed prior to the invention. The need for less people in the production of that car is instantly a global phenomenon. Other companies not capable of the newly attained production efficiencies will suffer, and have to retool as fast as possible. Once the invention has been made, less people are needed to produce that thing globally and forever. Humans are expensive, need holidays, food, housing and sleep, and get sick. Getting rid of them in the production process makes financial sense, globally, because machines require less maintenance, generally speaking.

If increasing demand for this cheaper car means more paper work is generated, then more humans are employed in accounts or HR maybe, and perhaps more car salesmen are needed down the line. Until, that is, software can replicate much of what accountants and HR employees do, or the way we buy cars changes. This then globally too. Outsourcing does not mean a fixed amount of labour being employed where labour is cheaper. There is also the decreasing need for humans in the workplace over time, right down from extraction through to manufacture and to retail.

Each invention that replicates (mostly betters) what a human can do, takes one job type away from humans. How many new job types can we create for ourselves? Which of our abilities will remain beyond the reach of machines and AI forever? And if there are any, will they be enough to power a global economy in terms of job creation and purchasing power? And for how long can we collectively fail to notice that buying and buying stuff does not make us happy? The data showing this is there, it's just a matter of getting it noticed. Finally, when will economics recognise that demand is not infinitely elastic, that is, that wants are in fact finite?

Tech unemployment is sooo unhip!

One of the internet's more intelligent economics bloggers posted this yesterday. I read in high hopes for some mention of technological unemployment, believing, as I have done for some time now, the term must surely gain new traction soon, but found none. Micheal Shedlock, a writer I respect, lists twelve reasons why the "recovery" might turn out to be a job loss affair (i.e. recovery with rising unemployment), and not one of them mentions technology.

It seems well educated economists truly believe technological developments that replicate what humans can do for the economy can only lead to rising employment. Unemployment is caused by other things, like over-capacity, over-consumption, outsourcing, consumers economizing, etc. I am not in a position to argue against each of Mr Shedlock's 12 points, but do wonder at this general and stubborn refusal to take an open and honest look at the role of technology in this process of rising unemployment.

This is my take, for what it's worth:

1. humans are biological entities with a limited range of abilities;
2. humans are unstoppably inventive, and getting better and better at replicating these human abilities, even improving on them;
3. as we invent more and more hardware and software that can replicate more and more of the finite range of our "natural" abilities, there is less and less need to employ humans to produce what we want to consume;
4. as less and less humans are needed in the work place, there is less and less purchasing power, which leads, in a heavily consumerist world, to increasing levels of debt, or over-consumption; and
5. the debt burden can only increase for so long until it pops, leading to the situation we have today -- a job loss recovery.

Now maybe my 5 step process is too simple, I don't know (I do like to keep things simple though), but doesn't it make sense? Why do we see, globally, falling labour participation over a ten year period of positive GDP, and certainly over a decade of increasing production efficiencies? This inquiring mind wants to know.

If technological developments which improve productive efficiencies lead to higher employment levels generally, why then is there rising unemployment anywhere? Why rising natural employment? Surely it would only take a few years for humans to retrain to take on the new work? Not generations surely? I'm going to take a look at employment levels in India, China and South East Asia, beneficiaries of outsourcing. Just what exactly is going on here?

Two charts on technological unemployment

Source: Washington's Blog

I find this chart very interesting, because it shows how low unemployment was in the early 1900s. I suspect most people don't know this. It also hints at, therefore, a possible trending of unemployment upwards, which somewhat disagrees with the classical economic thesis that increasing production efficiencies lead to lower unemployment; if there's one thing we can all agree on about the last century or so, it is that technological developments have increased production efficiencies.

Here is a chart I put together from ILO data which suggests that even the proportion of the global workforce in work can fall during periods of global GDP growth:



And as I have posted elsewhere, the natural level of unemployment, which is a measure of the supposed healthy amount of unemployment in an economy, has been climbing over the last 100 years too. Economists seem to think that the current level of healthy unemployment is about 7 to 7.5%. The pre-war level (if I'm not mistaken) was around 3-3.5%. That unemployment was under 2% in the early 1900s tells its own story. So even though I accept, to a limited degree (see post below) that technological developments lead to new work and new jobs, the idea that it leads to more work being done by humans is not born out by the actual facts.

Food for thought I hope.

Technological unemployment as left wing technophobia

I stumbled across this article the other day, and wanted to address it as well as I am able. The article basically attacks those on the left (I do not consider myself left wing) who claim technological unemployment exists, is bad, and must be stopped. I agree with the article that technological unemployment is misunderstood and misdiagnosed, but not that it does not exist in an ongoing and "threatening" way. I put "threatening" in speech marks because it is only a lack of creative thought that turns what should be a much needed emancipation process for all people, into an evil.

Two things leaped out at me on initial reading. One was the palpable certainty emanating from the article that the author (Gerard Jackson) was right, while those he dismisses are hopelessly wrong. The other was the fire and brimstone hatred for the left wing and liberal party. I'm always suspicious of the content of tribal bickering, doubly so when the bickering parties are 100% convinced of their rightness, but nevertheless, one should always look at the arguments, not whence they come, nor how they are couched. So, let's look at the arguments.

"Any assertion that technology destroys jobs is based on the fallacy that capital is a substitute for labour and not a complementary factor. This belief in turn springs from the fallacy of composition, confusing the part with the whole. This is not to deny that machines do not destroy jobs — they do. But the process by which this is done expands real purchasing power, lifts living standards and raises the demand for labour in general. Therefore observers have confused the destruction of certain jobs with the destruction of employment, thinking they are the same thing."

I assert that technology destroys jobs, while the pressure to find waged labour creates new ones. Employment levels rise and fall in response to many factors, one of them being technological developments introducing machinery that can do better some job-role than any human can. As technology expands the area of labour it can perform, so human labour increasingly migrates to services, where human soft skills reign supreme. In other words, the destruction of job-types forces human labour increasingly onto the "dry land" of the services sector. ILO charts show this quite clearly, and while the pattern is slower in developing countries where even agriculture still employs sizable proportions of the working population, the technology to replace them exists. The speed with which agricultural (and manufacturing) labourers are replaced is slowed by financial considerations.

"based on the fallacy that capital is a substitute for labour and not a complementary factor."

This is somewhat vague. It is true that machinery which improves production efficiency tends to increase demand and thereby improve employment prospects, but only as an unintended consequence. The machinery was not invented to improve employment prospects, which is fine, nor was it designed to employ more people to run it than it replaces. The employment "slack" is taken up in another sector, typically services.

"Rather than being a substitute for labour capital is a means of economising labour, because it is the least specific factor, and making it more efficient."

This strikes me as casuistry. What is the real difference between substituting and economising? Either way there is displacement. Either way people lose their jobs. In time efficiency gains filter through to increased demand somewhere else (perhaps in another country, most likely in another city) where demand for jobs (perhaps in retail) increases. How often are the very people who are displaced by technological developments the very ones who find new work where they live as a direct consequence of that particular technology?

Mr Jackson mentions x-ray machines and jet flight. These are good examples of technology that directly creates new work (even though air travel is competition for railways there is still a choice), or at least principally. But what happens when stewards and stewardesses, pilots and co-pilots are replaced by software and robots? What happens when x-ray machines are no longer operated by humans, but by AI or other computer software?

"Technology can only be applied through capital. It would be pointless having the best programmers in the world if you cannot supply them with computers. Technology, including so-called information technology, is always applied through capital which in turn is fuelled by savings. It therefore follows that savings limit the extent to which investments in technology, no matter how highly advanced or desirable, can be made."

Yes, programmers need computers, but computers are manufactured largely without human hand. Skills such as programming and computer design are still in demand, but this is hardly the point. The point is the proportion of human ability that can be replicated by machines. As to capital being funded by savings, that sounds naive considering the indebtedness of virtually the entire planet to banks, the indebtedness of the banks to one another, and leverage ratios above 30:1. Investment is funded by the extension of credit, which has only a tenuous link with savings in modern (seemingly 100%) high risk banking (which will stay high risk until the tax payer can no longer afford to clean up the bankers' mess). However, that money is an impediment to technological development generally I accept.

There is then some high blown castigation of simple-monded left-wing technophobes, then this:

"These views overlook the fact that machinery is primarily employed to raise output per unit of input, i.e., productivity, not to displace labour."

Nevertheless, regardless of intent, a machine designed to do what humans had done displaces labour. Weapons designed to keep peace can be used to kill. It's not the intent that matters, its the consequences.

There follows a long description of the way increasing efficiencies of production lead to higher levels of employment, which is indeed born out by economic history up till now, a point I do not seek to gainsay. Indeed, the article I am criticizing is not aimed at me. I am not left wing, and I am most certainly no technophobe. I seek the emancipation of waged-labour generally, via an economic system that does not need a medium of exchange; a resource-based economy. In such an economy technology is purposefully deployed so that humans no longer have to do tedious, repetitive and mind-numbing work. This position is neither left nor right wing, it is fringe, it is unorthodox, and I doubt Mr Jackson has even heard of it, and I can't blame him for that.

The article then talks at great length about demand for new goods and services made cheaper by technological developments. However, there are some assumptions inherent in this well-known thesis. One is that demand for goods and services will always increase just because the price falls, regardless of how the environment copes with our rapacious appetites, and regardless of how clued up the buying population becomes (see The Story of Stuff for a hint of how attitudes to consumption might be changing). The other is that consumerism will always reign supreme. The Spirit Level was published in February 2009, after the article was written, and shows very clearly indeed that happiness is not owning more and more shiny things, nor is it earning more and more money. Gerard Jackson, being -- based on his article's content -- an orthodox economist, would probably assume that it is, or, at least that rational people are invariably motivated to acquire more and more wealth. But maybe even economics' troublesome "rational market actor" is capable of change. Maybe those rational buyers and sellers are starting to put two and two together. Maybe they are slowly becoming insensitive to the allure of conspicuous consumption.

"Without labour-economising technology the American telephone system would collapse. In 1972 it was estimated that using 1900 technology 20 million operators would have been needed to handle the volume of calls. (Taken at face value technology has destroyed more than 20 million jobs in this sector alone). In 1998 it was estimated that American telephone traffic uses so much computer power that if it were done manually the number of operators would exceed the numbers generating the traffic. So where did all the operators go? To other jobs, every one. That’s where."

This is a very important and well made point. Humans are becoming incapable of coping with the volume of work that needs to be done to run the global economy. We often just don't make the grade. As Mr Jackson rightly points out new jobs have been created to find work for the displaced workers, if not specifically then generally, but for how long can this pattern persist? In that we sleepy, hungry, sweaty creatures can't compete with our machine counterparts in areas A, B, C and D, how long until machines, computers and AI take over right up to P, or V? What biological evidence is there showing we will always be necessary in the work place, that we are infinitely capable of staying ahead of our ability to replace what we do in the workplace?

"Seeing the economy as integrated stages of production, as we should, rather than isolated sectors, as is frequently the case, helps put things like information technology in their proper perspective because it forces us to seek out economic linkages."

Again true, but as I have written elsewhere, technological unemployment should be seen as the ever improving ability of humans to replicate via machines, computers and software what they do physically. Seen in this light, the economic linkages of agriculture down to supermarkets, restaurants, cookery books and cookery TV shows become largely irrelevant. That the economy can be notional divided up into interlinking sectors does not alter the fact that humans have a particular skeleton, musculature and brain, yielding a particular, limited and replicable range of abilities.

So while it is true that increasing efficiencies can be seen to have led to higher demand for labour (although flat real wages in America over the last few decades suggests otherwise, even after factoring in globalisation -- why aren't the low-skilled skilling up and getting those luscious high-pad jobs?), the pattern created by technological unemployment and re-employment is one of incremental encroachment on the skill set humans have, and therefore predicts that this pattern of increasing efficiencies leading to higher employment will eventually break down. That may well be happening right now. Technically we can replace agricultural workers worldwide should we agree to do so, and remove humans from the factory floor in huge numbers (Jeremy Rifkin predicts 2% of global workforce working in factories by 2020). Now we are replicating our soft skills increasingly adroitly. Soon we will have hardly any skills left to replicate. Cashpoint machines, automated restaurants, the Eureka Machine, accountancy software, self-healing hardware, automated monitoring, AI generally, nanotechnology, are developments in their infancy, and I have not mentioned by far all that are out there.

As wonderful as we are, our abilities are largely replicable in the workplace. There will always be things that humans can do better than technology (although that is actually quite a bold statement), like friendship, society, courage, creativity, but these skills will not, I believe, be able to generate money sufficiently to run the current system. How can friendship or trust be paid for? Can you pay people to be courageous or creative in numbers sufficient to keep a global economy going? Will we pay each other to watch each other's films, or read each other's literature, or buy each other's art? I doubt it very much.

We need therefore to draw up plans that lay out a direction towards emancipating humanity from unwanted, forced labour via technological development and ingenuity. We need to give The Venus Project much more of our time and energy.