In 2017 I wrote: (Update at the bottom)
As I write this the GOP is about to vote to give some of the biggest tax breaks to the wealthy that history in America has seen. Fred and Barney are going to lose their jobs, their homes, their semi-prehistoric beaked record player and Mr. Slate is about to get a windfall of rocks on which to build a bigger throne. They are going to do this despite the fact that it is more than likely going to blow up the deficit, which is something they say they are loathe to do (see all of American history) and that its going to throw millions of Americans off of health care.
And I think they might be correct to do it.
The reason I say this, as a lifelong Democrat liberal unionist, is perhaps the most cynical and depressing series of neural connections that I have had ever experienced. In fact, I haven’t had a thought this crazy and conspiratorial since the last time I got high and swore off marijuana for it’s paranoiac delusions.
The reason the Republicans are right and the Democrats are just in the way is…oh, god, this is too difficult to write down.
Ugh.
People need to die.
Sorry, I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.
Bloomberg reports that in the next 12-13 years robots will replace some 400,000,000 to 800,000,000 jobs in the world.
I write that out.
Almost ONE BILLION jobs will disappear in the next decade and a half.
I think that’s a conservative estimate.
When you order your next meal from the touch screen and you use your phone to pay for it, imagine it being assembled by a multi-armed robot in the back and delivered down a chute with your number on it.
When you hear about self driving electric cars think about all the money that your city, town, municipality will lose.
Between insurance, gas and sticker price, tally up how much your car costs you. You’ll be shocked. At least $300-$500 a month over the life of that car. What if I told you that you could order an automated car for every drive, every errand, every vacation trip and, over the same amount of time, it would cost you half of that? You’d jump on board.
No more insurance cuz that would fall on the owner of the car and that’s not you anymore, that’s Tesla, Uber, Lyft, Waymo.
No more speeding tickets since they all obey the laws of the road.
No more parking fees because, once you are dropped off that car zips off to it’s next errand.
No more accidents, no more drunk drivers, no more killed cyclists.
It’s utopia in a way. We won’t own THINGS, we will have experiences.
The list goes on.
Your groceries are going to be delivered by these robot cars or drones.
Think of a product that was once manufactured by hand or on an assembly line by humans and imagine that it has disappeared into the arms of a robot.
Robot soldiers. (We have drones and backflipping droids, are soldiers really a stretch?)
The impact of all of these examples are huge. We will become a safer society. And a bored one. Which is why entertainment will be the most important industry in the next two decades, but I digress.
The FINANCIAL impact will be devastating because along with all the cost savings of auto-Ubers there will be NO JOBS.
Which is why think tanks and cities are beginning to flirt with the idea of living stipends. If there are no jobs (I heard a recent estimate from a coding professor that we could have 30% unemployment due to automation in the next 15 years. The unemployment percentage of the Great Depression was roughly 24%) what do you do with all the people? We certainly don’t want 30% of the population to be homeless, walking around with shopping carts, living on streets, begging for handouts. It’s inhumane, not to mention a potential hazard due to the fact that desperate people do desperate things and, in large number desperate mobs do…um…what’s the word…anarchy.
If you are a society of people of means, not wealth, not superrich, but just enough to live a good and prosperous life and everyone around you start to fall into despair and need, that’s what a social safety net is for, right? But any net can only hold so much. At some point the pillars to which the net is tied will buckle. When that does the entire foundation comes down. Everything crumbles. It all falls apart. Society…ends.
Republicans know this. They have always played the long game. They may have had their worldview formed by some Randian philosophy of bootstrap self-determined independence but, coincidentally, technology has crossed paths with John Galt and his train.
In simple words, Republicans watched the Baby Boom and are now not just living through a Baby Bust but hoping to hasten it.
For society to survive, most of us need to die.
Boy, did it suck to write that. And I’m not sure I agree with it 100%. But I see the philosophy now. I understand the thought process. It will never be spoken because most of us will scream at the top of our lungs and it would be misconstrued as some form of eugenics, and maybe it is, but, if those pillars are going to survive the coming onslaught of automation, well, Fred and Barney gotta go.
Now that I have read The End of Reality by Jonathan Taplin I am more sure than ever that I was correct. We are in The Conscience of the King episode of Star Trek, TOS. Or, for the new generation: Thanos.
But it’s a weird crossroads because as much as I think they want people to die they are also forcing births because they also know that, as humans die, the white people will be replaced by the brown people and they can’t have that. Because they know that, if the brown people outnumber the white people they will band together and overthrow the white people and they can’t have that, either.
Ultimately, I just think the the GOP doesn’t care about people. They want their numbers to stay high enough so they can continue to stay in power but if you get cancer and lose your house, that’s fine, they’ll buy your house.
As I write this the Trump administration is gutting all that we have come to grow comfortable with, from parks to health care to bodily autonomy to all sorts of safety nets. Planes fall out of the sky but it’s not THEIR planes. It’s all so horrible, it’s hard to give our kids reasons to keep living.
Side Note: This is harsh but what should be overwhelmingly apparent is that the idea of a “work ethic” was a gaslight that duped the entire, cubicle dwelling working class from the 40s to recent times. If you have a “good work ethic” you are a good worker and a good consumer and you stay quiet and you do your job and you live (or subsist) and then you die and if you have no one to bequeath your shit to then it gets absorbed into the government owned stuff.
There are two kinds of people left in America. It’s really haves vs have-nots. Get on the hamster wheel. Buy low. Don’t sell. S&P 500. Hold hold hold until you die and give that to your kids. They’re gonna need it.
