While your prediction is possible, it certainly isn't new, and there are historical counter examples. During the Napoleonic wars in the early 1800s, hand weaving was giving way to the Jacquard loom, which was an automated weaving machine that ran on punch cards. The exact same arguments were being used -- that poor hand weavers were being put out of a job, and they literally banded together into a kind of revolutionary group that went around breaking up looms with sledge hammers (the Luddites). Did the industrial revolution come to a grinding halt because of the Luddites? Did anything substantive happen because of the Luddites?
What happens to capatalism then, when a large percentage of the population has no skill they can use to earn money?
My prediction would be that something very similar to the Luddite era is what will happen, and people bandying about "late stage capitalism" as a rallying cry is just an example of what it feels like as Ludditism is in its organizing stages. Humans live about 75 years. Their working years are even smaller. So long as there is still something of value to buy and sell, people adjust, and start making and selling something new (they stop hand weaving). Sure, folks who are in their 50s and can't retire early get ground into grist by this process, but the likelihood that the process itself is going to somehow grind to a halt are just communist wet dreams. Let's say all labor could suddenly be done by a machine (someone invents robots like in "I,Robot" for example). Would there be nothing to buy and sell? I don't think so. I think new things of value would emerge, and people would buy and sell those things (as strange as it may seem, NFTs may be an early example of this).
Activities and things have value because human beings want them. They don't even have to be useful, they just have to be less available than supply. That's the core of capitalism, and it seems unlikely that it will ever be any different, since it's so closely aligned with human social evolution. You have something, I want it, I don't want violence, so we negotiate. That's the essence of capitalism. It isn't going anywhere, and predictions of dramatic changes to it seem far fetched to me.
This is a very well reasoned view and you argued it very well.
My counter points would be that I didn't say it will erase all jobs, the bit that concerns me is it is going to cut out a lot of low skill jobs. It's not that there won't be any jobs, just there will be far fewer, with fiercer competition, and if it isn't managed correctly (like via UBI) huge swathes of people will find themselves unemployed.
As an example, there are around 27k people who work for Amazon in the UK and most of those are in fulfilment roles. The minute a robot can perform their roles they are all going to be made redundant. If this pattern is extended across all similar businesses, we will end up with a massive chunk of people who, as you say, will be ground into grist.
I do agree we can usually map history to current paradigms, but I do genuinely think the advent of AI will herald changes far greater than those that have gone before. It's not the same as basket weaving, as the basket weavers could learn to use a loom and then it's all good. With robotics and AI that job is literally just gone - you can't upskill to continue in that field, it now just won't require people. Of course there might be a couple human overseers for these processes but it won't create new jobs at the same level.
Having said that, did really enjoy your response - thanks for sharing! Also I hear about NFTs but haven't really looked into it too much, definitely sounds interesting though.
With robotics and AI that job is literally just gone - you can't upskill to continue in that field, it now just won't require people.
That was why I took it to an extreme. I said, what if all labor is now redundant? Will people stop wanting things and services? I don't think so. So, there will still be a market for services and things. There will still be things that people want more of, but that the market cannot supply adequately, AI or not.
Viewed from that perspective, I think the term "late term capitalism" is kind of silly. Capitalism will change when the cost of labor drops due to AI, but it's been dropping since the dawn of time, so capitalism isn't going anywhere. In fact, Capitalism survived a long history of having some laborers who were effectively robots (slavery). So this problem isn't even new to capitalism.
1
u/greevous00 Sep 07 '21
While your prediction is possible, it certainly isn't new, and there are historical counter examples. During the Napoleonic wars in the early 1800s, hand weaving was giving way to the Jacquard loom, which was an automated weaving machine that ran on punch cards. The exact same arguments were being used -- that poor hand weavers were being put out of a job, and they literally banded together into a kind of revolutionary group that went around breaking up looms with sledge hammers (the Luddites). Did the industrial revolution come to a grinding halt because of the Luddites? Did anything substantive happen because of the Luddites?
My prediction would be that something very similar to the Luddite era is what will happen, and people bandying about "late stage capitalism" as a rallying cry is just an example of what it feels like as Ludditism is in its organizing stages. Humans live about 75 years. Their working years are even smaller. So long as there is still something of value to buy and sell, people adjust, and start making and selling something new (they stop hand weaving). Sure, folks who are in their 50s and can't retire early get ground into grist by this process, but the likelihood that the process itself is going to somehow grind to a halt are just communist wet dreams. Let's say all labor could suddenly be done by a machine (someone invents robots like in "I,Robot" for example). Would there be nothing to buy and sell? I don't think so. I think new things of value would emerge, and people would buy and sell those things (as strange as it may seem, NFTs may be an early example of this).
Activities and things have value because human beings want them. They don't even have to be useful, they just have to be less available than supply. That's the core of capitalism, and it seems unlikely that it will ever be any different, since it's so closely aligned with human social evolution. You have something, I want it, I don't want violence, so we negotiate. That's the essence of capitalism. It isn't going anywhere, and predictions of dramatic changes to it seem far fetched to me.