By Jason Souders
The article titled “F**k U-Scan” (April, 2012) was an insightful look into our current employment situation and the state of automated technology. Yet I feel that the focus of the article antagonized technology when the problem lies in the economic system in which that technology resides.
It should not be our plight to create more mindless jobs with low pay, no benefits, and no purpose. I want robots and computers to replace every mundane, repetitive, and soulless task that is currently occupied by a glassy-eyed debt slave that cannot afford to buy breakfast cereal. Those are jobs for machines, not living breathing human beings with souls, imagination, and feelings.
The problem is that our institutions haven’t progressed along with our technology and ability to fulfill human needs. The problem is that our economic system creates disparity, consolidating wealth for a few and poverty for everyone else. The problem is that our economic system creates scarcity where none would exist. The problem is that the economic system sets humans in adversarial positions instead of working together, fighting tooth and nail for every scrap.
Our political system is irretrievably interwoven with an economic system that sees no further than the end of the current quarter. This is profit obsession in a monetary system that is not based on resource availability but an insatiable hunger for never ending growth. With each passing year this system becomes more difficult to maintain. This money thing is over.
Look at where we’re at now: Every nation is in debt to every other nation. Austerity has become a new trend that cannot hope to balance the tables of our now astronomical debt, but takes away services and necessary resources from the world’s poor. Make no mistake, these debts cannot be repaid. There aren’t enough resources left on the planet to repay it all.
Technological unemployment is a natural outcome of technological progress, but this is a reflection of our antiquated social system rather than a problem related to our advanced technological state. There will only continue to be more mass unemployment due to technological advancements in the coming years. The answer is not to stifle that progress, but to allow it to do that which it is capable of doing without the hindrance of an economic system that no longer reflects reality.
In the not too distant future nanotechnology, biotechnology, solar power, Artificial Intelligence, advanced robotics, genetic manipulation, 3-D printing, and lightning fast, cheap DNA sequencing will make scarcity a myth. Our already broken economic system based on work for pay will evaporate in the face of abundance. We will have to make the realization that humanity as a species will have the ability to provide for the species in its entirety regardless of monetary wealth or “jobs” to do. We can simply provide and so we shall. People can actually do things with their time that they’re passionate about unencumbered with the burden of survival.
This perpetuated myth of scarcity is what drives our current system. Meanwhile companies are destroying surpluses of corn, beans, and rice to keep prices inflated. We have enough resources to feed, clothe, and shelter every human being on this planet, but there’s just not enough money to pay for it all. So why not just do it?
Being born as a human being will entitle you to the full heritage of human technological innovation, thousands of years in the making. No one should be excluded because no one individual can claim ownership to the human heritage. In other words, humanity will have to grow up, reconcile itself as a part of nature, and achieve a sustainable balance with it made possible by technology and responsible management of resources.
1 Pingback