This is the future. It doesn't include jobs for humans.

[phantom power]

This is real, and it is happening. A lot of people on both sides of the aisle don't want to believe it's true, for their own ideological reasons. The Right has a vested interest in unregulated capitalism continuing to provide a stable basis for economic life and magically "creating" jobs from nowhere. Much of the Left has a vested interest in organizing around labor--with very good reason, of course. But the idea that human dignity and self-identity and worth has to come from having a "job" is going to be an antiquated notion within our lifetimes, and increasingly problematic just within the next couple of decades.

The future will belong to the political faction that can anticipate and deal with the inevitability of this transition. Libertarianism certainly doesn't have any answers for it. Will Democrats take the initiative to put the needed policies in place? That's an open question--and it depends largely on people like you and me to get involved on the inside and make that happen.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2014/08/this-is-future-it-doesnt-include-jobs.html

[blkmusclmachine]

1. ,

,

[KamaAina]

2. Vonnegut called this decades ago

in "Player Piano".

[Nay]

77. Except in "Player Piano," the citizenry got houses, food, medical care, and

didn't have to go in to any workplace. Sounds like a good deal when you consider that the Masters of the Universe now don't even want you to have water if you can't pay for it. They want us to go away and die somewhere and stop messing up the planet.

[n2doc]

3. Well at some point they will have to make jobs for people

or make people go away. One or the other. I suspect the latter.

[leftstreet]

4. Or just share the profits n/t

[n2doc]

8. Heaven's no!

[NutmegYankee]

14. I think with that kind of unemplyment, society will tear itself apart.

I'm somewhat fortunate as engineers are very hard to replace with machines. Creativity and thought are key to engineering.

[n2doc]

15. That's what I mean

High levels of permanent unemployment will mean permanent unrest.

[Louisiana1976]

31. Exactly. With a great deal of permanently-unemployed people they could riot, loot, etc.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

34. There's a third option.....

A guaranteed minimum salary just for existing.

But that would require actually admitting that human life has value.

I mean, besides as organ farms.

[n2doc]

38. There are lots of good options

Like making sure there are meaningful jobs for all (as a goal, rather than the replacement of jobs with nothing), and valuing all work. But I doubt that is where we are headed.

[DireStrike]

41. What is with this fetish for unnecessary labor?

If human labor is not necessary to produce the necessities for life, and even some luxuries, who cares if anyone has a job, meaningful or otherwise? Why force people to do busywork? Just distribute society's output fairly.

[phantom power]

43. The depressing thing is, we could already do some of that. But we don't.

It doesn't auger well for the future.

[DireStrike]

48. True enough.

Right now we could end material want for food and water, clothing, and maybe even shelter, for every human on the planet. Wouldn't cost that much, either... especially not compared to war.

But truly mass unemployment in a market based economy tends to cause radical changes really fast. Things will almost definitely get violent, but I think most of humanity has a great chance to win.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

46. Star Trek predicts a future without money....

I can't imagine an advanced civilization uses tokens or even has a concept of wealth,...much less letting the one who has that stuff influence the representatives of the rest of the species.

[RKP5637]

52. Exactly! We certainly are not even close, but that's what it will be ... the road getting there

I sadly think will be littered with endless causalities. The currently system is woefully obsolete.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

55. Here's three almost forgotten words guaranteed to drive the right winger in your life insane...

It's Only Money.

[Recursion]

71. People forget why it was windmills Quixote charged

That was the first step of this -- no need to hire threshers when you have a windmill. While I agree with your argument, it's been on the losing side for centuries now.

[DireStrike]

74. A century is not a particularly important length of time.

Unless you are a human, of course.

I think maybe the naysayers will be comforted to know that there will still be problems, once we solve this whole labor thing. There are other aspects of nature that are more esoteric and perhaps impossible to conquer.

[Delphinus]

73. Is it the

Calvinist culture we, the US, live in?

[roamer65]

50. That will be the purpose of World War III.

Orwell had it just about nailed. Oligarchical collectivism is nearly here.

[hifiguy]

5. Libertarians do have an answer.

Ever heard of Soylent Green?

[former9thward]

26. I think that was more along what Stalin and Mao did.

I am unaware of any libertarian death camps but there have been plenty operated by followers of Marx.

[DireStrike]

42. Nice sound bite.

Too bad it doesn't actually explain what happened, or give more than a sly wink to historical events.

It does have the convenient feature of leaving out modern capitalism's death count, which can be laid at the feet of market based ideology, libertarian or otherwise.

[former9thward]

45. Nice Marxist sound bite

Which is fine if you follow that philosophy but I don't.

[hifiguy]

58. The Randites would go more for

Mass starvation of what they think of as "surplus eaters." Mass murder by neglect. No nasty government involvement that way.

[former9thward]

59. Stalin lives again.

Exactly the position he took.

[redruddyred]

82. that's already happening tho.

ask anyone living on public assistance.

[djean111]

6. As I listen, the voice also seems computer-generated......

and the GOP certainly does NOT want to generate jobs, the GOP wants fewer "useless eaters", as Kissinger called the poor.
The thing abut robots - they are useless in unanticipated and emergency conditions. As a programmer, I am familiar with the huge decision trees that make up artificial intelligence. They are fine unless there is something that a human has not thought of, or a wildly external event happens.

[Glassunion]

23. a wildly external event happens

[djean111]

24. Bwahahaha! Yes! The robots NEVER expect the Spanish Inquisition!

Thanks for the laugh!

[hifiguy]

60. Excellent!!

[GliderGuider]

7. So much for Karl Marx and his "labor theory of value"... nt

[JackRiddler]

39. You haven't read Marx, obviously.

[GliderGuider]

63. You can start here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

The labor theory of value (LTV) is a heterodox economic theory of value that argues that the economic value of a good or service is determined by the total amount of labor required to produce it. At present this concept is usually associated with Marxian economics, although it is also used in the theories of earlier classical economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo and later also in anarchist economics.

When speaking in terms of a labor theory of value, value, without any qualifying adjective should theoretically refer to the amount of labor necessary to the production of a marketable commodity, including the labor necessary to the development of any real capital employed in the production. Both David Ricardo and Karl Marx attempted to quantify and embody all labor components in order to set the real price, or natural price of a commodity.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Marxism.html

The labor theory of value is a major pillar of traditional Marxian economics, which is evident in Marx’s masterpiece, Capital (1867). The theory’s basic claim is simple: the value of a commodity can be objectively measured by the average number of labor hours required to produce that commodity.

If a pair of shoes usually takes twice as long to produce as a pair of pants, for example, then shoes are twice as valuable as pants. In the long run, the competitive price of shoes will be twice the price of pants, regardless of the value of the physical inputs.

Although the labor theory of value is demonstrably false, it prevailed among classical economists through the midnineteenth century. Adam Smith, for instance, flirted with a labor theory of value in his classic defense of capitalism, The Wealth of Nations (1776), and David Ricardo later systematized it in his Principles of Political Economy (1817), a text studied by generations of free-market economists.

Which is why I said "so much for...".

[JackRiddler]

64. Oh no, a libertarian attack site dislikes Marx.

Marx was absolutely obsessed with technological advancement as a means for reducing the amount of labor. It's found throughout Capital and hence it's ridiculous to say he didn't focus on this. His theory was of labor time as the element producing *surplus* value over cost inputs, an important distinction; as is the fact that labor time is conducted under differing arrangements of the productive forces. What produces an eventual price is related to many other factors including such that we would call "the market." Efficiency and reduction of required labor time contributes to the tendency of profit rates to fall over time, and thus to crises. The libertarian "Econlib" site's summary of Marx is a laughably false and simple caricature unrelated to his actual theorizing. Hardly the place to "start," any more than is Wikipedia. (Capital and many other Marxian works are online in full, I believe.) From the sound of it you may have once turned every page in a copy of Capital, but it doesn't mean you really "read" it outside your choice of an ideological framework.

[GliderGuider]

67. Very few of us "really read" outside our choice of ideological frameworks very often.

Or at the very least we interpret what we read in terms of our personal worldview. The nature of belief makes it difficult to impossible to do otherwise. It's one reason people disagree so much.

"A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest."

On edit:

If you wish to read outside your ideological framework in economics, you might try this paper. It pretty well defines my view of the driving forces of world economics:

Long-run evolution of the global economy: 1. Physical basis

Abstract

Climate change is a two-way street during the Anthropocene: civilization depends upon a favorable climate at the same time that it modifies it. Yet studies that forecast economic growth employ fundamentally different equations and assumptions than those used to model Earth's physical, chemical, and biological processes. In the interest of establishing a common theoretical framework, this article treats humanity like any other physical process; that is, as an open, nonequilibrium thermodynamic system that sustains existing circulations and furthers its material growth through the consumption and dissipation of energy. The link of physical to economic quantities comes from a prior result that establishes a fixed relationship between rates of global energy consumption and a historical accumulation of global economic wealth.

What follows are nonequilibrium prognostic expressions for how wealth, energy consumption, and the Gross World Product (GWP) grow with time. This paper shows that the key components that determine whether civilization “innovates” itself toward faster economic growth include energy reserve discovery, improvements to human and infrastructure longevity, and reductions in the amount of energy required to extract raw materials. Growth slows due to a combination of prior growth, energy reserve depletion, and a “fraying” of civilization networks due to natural disasters. Theoretical and numerical arguments suggest that when growth rates approach zero, civilization becomes fragile to such externalities as natural disasters, and the risk is for an accelerating collapse.

[JackRiddler]

68. I'm very interested.

This fits right into work I'm doing at school, I've saved it to disk and it's on my list. I don't want to ignore this perspective. Is this you, by the way? (Your sig line implies it also.) I read the abstract, scanned the rest and came across this at a rather late point:

It was argued that wealth does not rest in inert “physical capital”, as in traditional treatments. Rather, wealth can be interpreted to include all aspects of civilization, even the purely social.

That's the kind of thing I'd be opening with: What is wealth? But I don't see it treated after that. It requires a discussion of values, and what people are or want to be. It implies absolute energy consumption need not be the defining factor. (I missed if there was accounting for efficiency gains, not to mention value changes, in the thesis of absolute consumption as the driving force of growth, at least with "growth" and "wealth" as defined therein.)

I will go back to this systematically at some point in the next year. Thank you.

[GliderGuider]

72. No, I'm not Tim Garrett. However,

For the last year and a half I've been developing a framework for understanding collective human behavior and social evolution based on a combination of nonequilibrium thermodynamics, self-organizing systems, cybernetics and evolutionary psychology. I ran across Garrett when I was researching those topics.

"Wealth" is a slippery term. In his various papers Garrett takes a shortcut by using cumulative GWP as a rough-and-ready proxy.

He has published a series of papers that established the background, and a set of web pages that go into it here:

http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Economics/Economics.html

[ck4829]

9. Will it be completely problematic?

If machines could do all or almost all of the work, then what would we do?

Maybe we should look at it as 'What SHOULDN'T we do?'

Just because we don't have work, it doesn't mean we can't do things. It may spark a revival in the arts, in exploration, learning things because you want to learn about them rather than needing to learn them for a minimum wage job, volunteering, working for pleasure instead of going from paycheck to paycheck.

I take a glass half full look at this, hopefully this is what will happen.

[phantom power]

16. That depends on what kinds of choices we humans make. For now.

As the narrator says, the basic trend is inevitable. What kind of place we humans choose to make for ourselves in an economy that runs without human labor is an open question.

Considering human history, and current events, it leaves me skeptical.

[Louisiana1976]

33. Yes, but can we afford to survive as we learn, explore, volunteer, etc.?

[ck4829]

61. We would need a lot of things people consider 'socialism'

It seems that the consensus is that total automation is coming, when it comes, if we still have 'every man for himself' as a mindset then we could have a problem. I think this is something we need to work on, say it's not an acceptable way to go about the world, especially not in a place where we already have the means to help everyone out.

[Orsino]

10. The people inside the dome who own the robots will not hear our cries. n/t

[antigop]

11. so the answer is....invest in robotics firms! nt

[djean111]

12. Seems to me that the more jobless people, the fewer consumers there will be.

I would think there would be a tipping point - why have robot baristas if fewer and fewer people can buy the overpriced drinks?
With the current model of having to give shareholders increased profits on a quarterly basis, eventually there may be more stuff than the people who still have jobs can buy. We see tons of rotting food thrown away already. Maybe someone can have robots deliver it to starving people.

[phantom power]

17. That is one possible outcome

although it is a product of failing to think in a post-automation paradigm. It presumes the current model where humans have to work to earn resources.

Since we humans are generally piss-poor at adopting new paradigms, I'd say there will almost certainly be a phase where that's how it goes. Whether we recover is maybe the real question.

[djean111]

20. I understand about a model where humans do not have to work to earn resources.

But I don't think the Corporatists will allow it. Not voluntarily. And if people are not working and paying taxes, and corporations refuse to pay taxes, with the compliance of the government, it gets trickier unless there literally is a revolution.

[DireStrike]

47. It may be that we can engineer a guerilla-automated-capital-production campaign.

With a small amount of resources and the plans for self-producing, or self-engineering, productive capital, all it would take is freedom of information to prevent the owners from owning anything significant. Doesn't matter how many robots they have if there are enough "free" bots to feed everyone.

[LuvNewcastle]

13. It seems to me that the only way to correct for this problem is to

have a Guaranteed National Income (GNI) for those whose skill sets will become obsolete. We could start a GNI for those already dependent upon the government for income, and gradually add more people to the program as the need arises.

A good partner for the GNI would be free or very cheap college educations. While people are receiving their GNI, they could use their free time to study for a new career in which people are needed. But I suppose that's probably too much to ask from our government. They'll pass some little piecemeal solution to the problem as a temporary fix and never update it. That's how our system has worked for the past 30+ years, and I don't see things changing much.

[Louisiana1976]

35. I think a GNI would be an excellent idea--but agree that it would be diffiicult, if not impossible,

to get that from our government. There would have to be a revolution.

[Liberal MRA]

81. It's not going to come to a revolution.

It will be apparent to all that there must be a basic guaranteed income for every person. This could happen in 10 years. It could happen sooner, but it will happen. Even the libertarians will realize it's in everyone's best interest.

[Trillo]

18. If government can take the banksters and corporations out of the equation,

give the corporate welfare money instead to the people directly, then the problem is solved. Good luck on that though.

Sorry, was unable to watch video, unknown technical issues.

[Capt. Obvious]

19. There will always be jobs for human benders

[L0oniX]

21. Do real Democrats even use the label Democrats anymore?

[wickerwoman]

22. Only made it about four minutes in

because the mechanical voice was giving me a migraine but it seems to me that this theory is based on an assumption of infinite energy and resources to build all of these robots and keep them functioning.

I agree that we're kidding ourselves that we're going to be able to keep finding 40 hours of work a week for 1.5 billion people. We should have gone down to a 30 hour work week at the same wages 20 years ago.

But I don't think we're going to ever be able to replace all work with machines given the limits we have on precious metals for example if we wanted to build solar panels to power all of them.

[DireStrike]

49. Pretty much every "thing" is already manufactured in a factory, which takes energy.

Taking humans out of the manufacturing equation doesn't change the net energy by that much.

Creative and engineering bots don't take that much more energy than modern computers.

Service bots may indeed require a lot of energy, because almost 100% of that is physical labor currently done by humans. That might actually be the last sector of the human economy to go away.

The materials and energy are a chicken and egg problem. You can make clean energy using rare earth materials, in order to extract more materials which are increasingly energy-expensive to extract! We still may have some nice options though, like sea floor mining and asteroid mining. As for the energy, as long as we have room in space to construct solar panels, we should be ok...

[wickerwoman]

57. It's not so much the energy as the materials to construct the robots

If they require any kind on non-renewable metals, for example, combined with the demand for rare materials to make the solar panels to powers them, we could quickly start hitting the upper ceiling on what our planet can support.

Mining asteroids would also be extremely resource intensive.

I'm not saying this can't all be worked out somehow, but I doubt that it's going to be resolved in the next 10-20 years to the point where 99% of us can kick our feet up and relax while the robots do all the work.

What I hope is that we gradually all decrease the number of hours we work, the benefits of new technology are spread equally and we prioritise how we use our remaining primary resources (more solar panels, fewer beer helmets, etc). Not holding my breath for that level of international coordination or sense of fair play though.

[DireStrike]

62. Oh I agree on your timescale.

This is a problem for the next century or 2, nor the next decade or 2. Unfortunately, you and I will probably work until we drop, whether it's needed or not.

[ErikJ]

25. Republicans will be lost now that they wont be able to say. Get a JOB you lazy bum!

[Louisiana1976]

36. And that's the truth.

[Auggie]

27. Over-the-top fear mongering IMO

[JackRiddler]

29. Why is the liberation from labor "fear mongering"?!

The question is how it will be done, because it can be a liberation, or a nightmare. Under the capitalist system of private ownership of the means of production, it is heading toward the nightmare of making humans increasingly superfluous, the majority of them to be viewed as enemies to the all-powerful and divine dictates of the "economy."

The first step toward liberation is to see that a collective effort produces everything, that the amount of labor-time an individual puts in does not and cannot directly translate into production and rewards for participation, and that it doesn't matter: We could all work less, or do work we love, and live better. We have the means for a guaranteed income to all, in a better and happier place.

Which shall we choose?

[phantom power]

40. Its more like a public service announcement

Like the guy said, the automation technology that works today can displace one out of four jobs. I've worked in machine vision and A.I. What he's predicting is going to happen.

As others have already mentioned, that doesn't actually have to be a bad thing.

But... if our society continues to operate on the principle that only people with jobs can have access to quality of life, then yes we should very definitely be afraid of that.

[Logical]

54. Really? You don't think robots can at some point do everything? nt

[Spitfire of ATJ]

28. The promise of tech was to free humans from labor....

Now that there is no labor for humans the Right wants to claim we're lazy.

[JackRiddler]

30. Koch said people should be willing to be street-sweepers.

Where are all these paying street-sweeper jobs that all the lazies don't want to take?

[Spitfire of ATJ]

32. Someone needs to tell him there are machines that do that....

I guess he got that from looking out the window and seeing his Mexican gardeners clear his driveway.

[lpbk2713]

37. It won't be pretty.

And it won't be over in just a few years either.

[phantom power]

44. That chart at the end was very very interesting

where he listed the histogram of job types, and projected how many of those could go away just with automated transport bot technology that google is already running in traffic every day.

My prediction is shit is going to get real when the first doctor and lawyer (and eventually engineer and programmer) jobs start getting replaced by A.I. That will really start to knee-cap the old "get a better education" meme.

[RKP5637]

51. We saw this coming decades ago. In some of my economics classes we discussed a jobless society.

Now, it's almost here. Any not seeing this really have blinders on ... but some want to keep the wheels turning while they scrape off what more $$$$$ can be made from the current system.

The notion of jobs in a society, the carrot and the stick, etc. are totally obsolete. Economists know this ... problem is, with the multitude of rat holes in the US, who and how is this going to come about, a plan for the future and moving forward. To me, that is a most frightening scenario. I think there will be incredible chaos ...

[Uncle Joe]

53. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, phantom power.

[Mojorabbit]

56. k and r nt

[lunatica]

65. In my job they aren't replacing us with robots...

but they are doing their best to turn us into robots.

As soon as they figure out how to stop paying us too then they won't need to even replace us.

I am not kidding. This is really happening in UC Berkeley to the staff.

[ZX86]

66. Perhaps human purpose and the human experience

is not to struggle for survival and subsistence living. For the life of me why people think mundane and tedious work that is done better by machines is somehow noble is beyond me. I know, I know, we toil here and get our reward in heaven. I have an idea, lets adopt the economic system they have for distributing wealth in heaven and let the machines do the toiling here. That way we can devote human experience to things machines can't do like science, art, spending time with family, playing fetch with dog, enjoying sunsets, etc.

Isn't what we should be working for as a race is to get to point where we don't have to work anyway? I am so sick of this Western religion based philosophy that suffering is somehow noble and righteous. Suffering for a good cause is noble. Suffering to enrich oligarchs at the expense of every other living thing on the planet is nonsense. I really don't think as a race our goal should be to live the lives of plow mules for perpetuity.

[snooper2]

69. This guy isn't as bright as he thinks he is LOL

[JackRiddler]

70. BUCKMINSTER FULLER said it better!

[Delphinus]

75. I've never read that quote before,

but I can't tell you how many times I've realized I do the volunteer work that I do as a way to justify my existence!

[NYC_SKP]

78. Bucky Fuller. Trim Tab.

I had not read this before. Thank you!

[Hippo_Tron]

76. Do we have adequate resources to power all these machines?

Assuming the answer is yes, then the Star Trek model of society should be pretty feasible.

[Silent3]

79. I think this is coming, but the effect so far is not enough to explain current employment problems

We all know that our roads and bridges are in bad shape, and that there are other infrastructure problems, like needing a major upgrade of our power grid, that could be employing many people directly and indirectly. That's just one example off the top of my head where employment could be increased in ways where robots and automation aren't going to greatly replace people all that soon, not in the next ten years, or even twenty perhaps.

In the short term, with different political priorities, we could be doing quite a bit better in the here and now, with our current level of technology, employing more people at better paying jobs and supplying a better safety net for those who would still remain out of work.

In the long term, however, I agree that we will have to come to grips with a whole new way of thinking about how wealth and prosperity and awarded and distributed. One nightmare scenario is one where a largely automated economy is producing vast material wealth, but where inequality is even more greatly magnified rather than raising everyone's standard of living. That's where right wing thinking will take us.

[johnlucas]

80. The only reason for the very existence of most of us is that the Elite need labor grunts

The Greedy Elite want the world as their playground but are forced to have us around to do the dirty work they won't do.
Ultimately it comes down to this:
All People Are Selfish.

One Man or One Woman wants to have it ALL to himself/herself.
But one is weak on its own so the one makes deals with others to have the second best deal: MOST.
One can't physically beat One Million so the One manipulates the One Million to serve the interest of the One.
There might another One who wants it all to himself/herself too.
That's a threat to the original One but they make deal & begin to work in parallel.
They split the MOST amongst each other. That is where an Elite comes from.
Elite means Few.

This tag team of Ones all work together & make a series of deals with members of the One Million.
That's where the Enforcer Class comes from (protection), the Messenger Class comes from (clergy, media), & so on & so forth.
Enforcers provide a protective ring around the Ones as the Ones give a Little of the MOST to them in exchange.
They're easy to buy off & they get a boost pushing around the rest of the One Million.
They might not have the best resource power but they get pretty good positional power.
Messengers are there as another buffer to soothe & cool off the One Million.
They plant ideas in the heads of the One Million that cause the One Million to either calm down or at least split on themselves.
Anything to keep them from coming for the Ones' MOST.
They get a Little of the MOST in exchange for this service.
Might not have the best resource power but they get pretty good positional power.

For the rest of the One Million, we're here to do the dirty work for Ones' benefit.
The rest of the One Million get Fractions of Littles, Tinies, Crumbs.
The Ones want all of the rewards without all of the struggles.
The bigger the society, the more complex the hierarchy, the more elaborate the rings.

But the Ones get tired of sharing those Littles, those Tinies, those Crumbs.
In fact they even hate sharing the MOST among each other.
They want it ALL to themselves & are constantly trying to figure out how to MORE of it back.
If they had their way, they would reduce the One Million to Thousands to Hundreds to have just enough to do the dirty work but keep MOST to themselves.
If they could get it down to Tens and even Ones, that would be even better.
One still can't beat Seventy but that's better odds than going against One Million.
Even better odds going against Seven.
THAT way they can have virtually ALL but a few Littles, a few Tinies, a few Crumbs.

Technological advancement was done to stave off revolutions AND to eventually eliminate the need for the proverbial One Million.
The short term goal makes it easier for their protectors & messengers to block out the rest of the One Million.
The long term goal gets rid of protectors, messengers, & others of the One Million altogether.

LUCKILY THOUGH, Power Is Liquid.

Sometimes those of the One Million come together & scare even the Enforcers & Messengers not to mention the Ones.
So they have to share a little more of that MOST with the One Million.
Sometimes the Enforcers get tired of Enforcing & rejoin the One Million like we saw with Smedley Butler.
Sometimes the Messengers plants a Message that UNITES & fires up that One Million against the Ones.
Entertainers are especially good at this.

It's physics man!
Ones are Few. Elite are Few.
Their existence is flimsy & fragile. They're weak.
They only stand on top of us because we let them.
We don't use our power correctly.
The base of pyramid holds up the peak of the pyramid.
When the pyramid collapses that peak will be DEAD IN THE CENTER of that base.

It's all a mind game.
Technological advancement is useful but its ultimate goal is to make most of humanity redundant & obsolete.
And the elites WILL try to kill us either actively or passively.
Subverting their game either by detangling our existence from labor & having universal funds for all of us, or by keeping the technology from ever getting too good to replace us, we will live in that playground they want only for themselves.

All People Are Selfish but ALSO All People Are Weak.
That's the check that keeps these elites in balance.
You can do so much for yourself BY yourself. One can only go but so far.
You gotta team up & honor that social contract.

Some from the protective rings around those elites throw us a few bones.
Stuff like this Internet & its World Wide Web designed to track us & spy on us can ALSO be used to pass that necessary message of Unity.
Double-edged sword like everything else in life.
Just learn how to use your edge.

John Lucas