When We All Become an “Unnecessary”
Useless humans. Useless humans. Whatcha gonna do? The QR code is comin’ for you!
From: DAILY KOS
Originally published: Thursday, December 26, 2019; Updated: August 23, 2024
Unnecessary.
What will you do, when the QR Code comes for you?
Unless you are wickedly smart, or hugely creative enough to outpace them, you will become one of the Unnecessary. Well within your lifetime.
Anyone who has worked in a factory, a clerical room, or in a mine knows the pain of being unnecessary.
Two years ago, I wrote, at Daily Kos, about the trendline, which continues.
Once hugely safe, high-paying jobs: Doctors; lawyers; pharmacists; bankers, engineers; IT professionals; nurses; and thousands of other occupations once-vaunted as untouchable? They will become part of history, for the majority of humanity.
There are varying estimates, but, expert studies, from McKinsey to economists at Stanford University, the College de France, and Northwestern University, are among the shocking few to talk about the same staggering numbers:
”As much as one-third of the United States workforce could be out of a job by 2030 thanks to automation, according to new research from McKinsey. The consulting firm now estimates that between 400 million and 800 million individuals globally could be displaced by automation and need to find new work.” — CNBC Report, McKinsey Study
The McKinsey study, designed to cheerlead a more positive future, is vastly over-optimistic, avoids looking at the obvious, in the face of their own trend-lines.
Wonder why the stock market keeps going up, and up? Technology creates an ever-expanding GDP. These days, thanks to the help of computers, human fear has been largely bred out of the AI and algorithm-based investing technology,
Does that help you?
If you’re not rich enough to participate in the stock market, probably not. The wealth gap, already straining society, as the American middle class of high-skill, lower education workers, is being quietly expunged, continues to get worse.
The Trees.
Scan the QR code to get into Amazon GO. Check in. Pick up stuff. Check out. No cashiers. Notice the QR conditioning at Amazon’s Whole Foods units?
Walk into one of Bank of America’s many tellerless offices, under deployment now. These days, even the remaining branch employees have to call, just like you do, to get the central offices to do pretty much anything.
Notice all of the robotic surgery ads on the highway?
See many drivers of inter-airport trains?
What are politicians talking about? Doing?
What is the media talking about? Doing to get you focused on this future, that is every bit as devastating as Global Warming?
(Crickets).
What is academia doing, to prepare you, to prepare your kids, for a future where centuries of Industrial Age equation between your self-worth, and a paycheck, are what give you status as a valued member of society?
The Forest of The Haves
Let’s step up about 10,000 feet, and look at what those who hold the real power in the world, those who command raw materials, like oil, or hegemonic corporate power, see.
Population is booming. 9.7B in 30 years. 11B by 2100.
Resources are dwindling. As world populations develop their own wealth gaps, consumption of basic resources increases, while projections of food supplies, from the farm, to the ocean, already strained by climate change, and pollution, are spiraling out of control.
Fossil fuel barons, those with the greatest wealth, accelerate these forces.
So, let’s make YOU a multi-billionaire. A Mohammed bin Salman. A Putin oligarch. A fossil-fuel-based billionaire, like the Koch brothers.
People who thrive in the desert can use technology to outlast the heat, and feed themselves.
People who live in the permafrost of the landmass of Russia will add huge value to their lands as the equatorial countries of the Earth cook to the point that mass migration out of daily 55°c / 130°F temperatures become a norm.
The bottom line: The richest people of the Earth do not need you. Do not want you. If you cannot work, you do not bring any value of interest to them.
Getting You To Die, Without Protest
Global economic interconnectivity best leverages the world’s resources. It allows the Haves, who already have a lot, to have even more.
Political interconnectivity, however, does not. Global warming, and social justice movements, as well as increased migration that waters down sociopolitical ignorance, the wellspring of fear-soaked nationalist movements, along with the real exercise of democracy, are a threat to power of the Haves.
Having is a-political. Thus thee common cause, amongst political bedfellows, from Communists to Conservatives, is for the haves to push the have-nots into a place where they have:
No ability to leverage political power;
No voice;
No control of their own destinies.
Political actions always have their base in economics:
Wars, beyond those “herd thinning” exercises of the political powers in lesser developed nations that keep them warring, and lesser developed, are a costly waste of resources that negatively impact the haves.
It’s much easier to buy power, and to create chaos.
The corrosion of world democracies in favor of authoritarians. It is far easier to systemically dismantle democracies, from within, whose peoples have the power to bring the ultra-rich and powerful to heel, are being undermined by exploiting corrupt politicians, while encouraging the fears of nationalist, or ultra-religious political constituencies, in each nation, to do their bidding.
The US’ fifty year march out of democracy into authoritarian government: Imprison, disenfranchise, and remove both healthcare and a social safety net, from the majority;
The meddling in world democracies, and the rise of nationalist movements: Dozens of once politically-stable countries, from the United Kingdom, to Sweden, to Chile, to Germany, to Israel, all struggling with nationalist, and authoritarian, political movements defiantly demolishing democratic norms.
Baldfaced repression, or genocide, in oligarchies, like China, or Russia. It is far easier to use simple repression, and/or extermination, of peoples who have access to needed resources that might give their political aspirations power.
Uighurs extermination in China: Oil and mineral reserves;
Russia’s domination of the Chechen people: Oil;
Strangling democracy in Hong Kong: Banking, Exports
Annexation of Crimea by Russia: Exports; Limited access to sea ports.
Time and again, over the last fifty years, in particular, those with power have been able to leverage position, control of media, and the fostered complacency of the masses of the world population, to either set the stage for their own self-destruction, or, where no one stands in their way, to outright kill those who stand in their way.
Their Billions. Your vote, and voice.
While it would seem that the odds are very much stacked in the favor of those who, with their AIs, and robotics, would be far happier using the machines, and seeing you gone, these rich, and powerful people do still fear you.
Sewing confusion, fear, and doubt has not eliminated democracy. It has just distracted it.
You have a vote. You have a voice. Therefore, you have power… maybe. If you aren’t fooled into giving it away, or slitting your own throat.
Use it? They lose it.
A Post-Puritan America. Human 2.0
For the United States, we need to start having big discussions about the future. Just as John F. Kennedy focused us on Space to beat back Russian aggression of his day, we need a president who is going to return us to a public policy that honors all of the Americans in our nation.
More importantly, they need to establish a national dialogue, which hopefully will extend to a global discussion about the dignity, and worth of humanity, beyond the old Puritan world-view that a job/career is a human’s only purpose, point of self-worth, or dignity.
We need a new understanding that a job, in a world where AI, and robotics, can do so many useful things to improve our lives, is not the definition of who we are, or of our value in society.
To those economists, with their heads up their ass, who think that somehow we can magically migrate all of the people from their current professions to some “safe job” that a robot won’t take, you are dead-bang wrong.
We need a fundamental rethink of who WE are. What’s important to us.
An AI may be able to write a contract, but it writes a lousy poem, and can’t express the beauty of a sunrise over Mount Cook, New Zealand, after thirty days of fog-shrouded mystery.
A robot can repair a car, or build a house, but it can’t: Teach a kid how to play soccer, or swim; dance with passion in a ballet; write a play, or a movie, or a song, that moves other human beings.
Your Choice
We can keep on the road that we’ve been on, to the Bladerunner-like, dystopian society that benefits the very rich, and gets rid of us as the inconvenient sheeple that we are to them, OR;
We can use our vote to choose a bolder path to a more “Star Trek” like humanity, where the machines, and software, aren’t our enemies, but the enablers of a humanity, freed from the shackles of subsistence existence.
What will that world look like? Should everyone, as Andrew Yang continues to remind us, have some basic value to society that is worthy of support? Should we change the way that we think about work? Do we separate employment from GDP in a world where we aren’t really needed to create wealth? What is the new wealth, beyond money?
Time with family?
Personal development, and fulfillment?
Inspiring others?
Creating something of benefit to humanity?
Solving a major problem?
Educating/socializing other humans?
If there isn’t a dialogue about this going on around you, start one. With your friends, both around you, and in social media.
We don’t need to wait for Fox News, or MSNBC, or our politicians, to talk about what we want out of the future. We have the platforms to do that on our own.
The truth is that you are only as needed as you make yourself.
Be necessary!
Change starts with you.
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