Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Climate visionaries explaining why a green universal income will help head off a violent armed uprising by economically redundant workers, who can no longer find a job in the age of automation.
Future tech requires regulations and balanced ties to creation, author says
May 8, 2021
by Sarah Mac DonaldThe dramatic loss of work during the COVID-19 pandemic may be a foretaste of the mass unemployment coming down the line in the near future as millions of jobs are displaced by robots, artificial intelligence or AI, and new technologies, according to Irish eco-theologian Fr. Seán McDonagh.
In his new book, Robots, Ethics and the Future of Jobs, McDonagh, who has written several pioneering works on the environment, predicts that in this emerging world, only 50% of people will have jobs. With increased use of AI and automation, many people will not be able to find paid work in areas such as retailing, caring roles, agriculture and financial services.
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In Robots, Ethics and the Future of Jobs, McDonagh draws on the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic to spotlight how people might react to being out of work on a mass scale. He notes how after a few weeks of economic shutdown at the start of the lockdown, large rallies took place in some U.S. cities, with many of the participants carrying arms and demanding that the economy be opened up to allow them back to work.
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“If there are jobs for only 40 or 50% of the population, what will those unable to get a job do?” he asks.
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“Look at what happened Australia and the attempt to ‘unfriend’ that country — that is how powerful these billion-dollar corporations are,” he added. “They push back against any efforts to curb them, and fines are a drop in the ocean to them. We cannot allow them to drive this on their terms.”
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He believes governments must lead the way in regulating digital monopolies and must introduce a universal basic income to help offset the financial cost to workers replaced by technology. The eco-theologian told EarthBeat he would like to see something like the European Union’s COVID-19 fund to help alleviate the economic impact of coming job losses.
But while jobs will be lost, there will still be plenty of work, and a universal basic income could be linked to people’s participation in projects focused on climate justice and care for the Earth, he suggests.
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Read more: https://www.ncronline.org/news/earthbeat/future-tech-requires-regulations-and-balanced-ties-creation-author-says
The authors don’t explain what happens to formerly proud and independent workers who don’t settle comfortably into their new life as Tolkienesque hobbits, but if they can’t find a job and don’t qualify for universal basic income, perhaps the plan is to simply allow nature to take its course. If you have a problem with this, talk to the terminator.
Nothing ethical about proposed measures that are guaranteed to kill millions and empoverish many more.
Right now there are millions of people who dont want to go back to work, because they get paid same or more then when they worked during the pandemic.
UBI is not only economy destroying, making tax payers pay for millions of loafers. It is people destroying. Free money for doing nothing to 18 year olds will absolutely destroy most of them.
Why look for a job? why start up a small business, just have 4 5 or 6 kids, they’ll bring in a combined fortune when they reach UBI age, your retirement fund 😀
Climate doomers really like UBI, because most climate doomers dont have real jobs, if they have jobs at all, see Extinction rebellion for example, mostly jobless wonders
We had a UBI trial thing here, and lets just say that UBI will not be coming to Finland.
Utterly disgusting that tax payers would have to pay people who wont work, and fund the government too?!
Imagine what UBI would do to tax rates for the middle class. I could also see about at least 1bn people around the world desperate to get into the US also, for that UBI
Ms. Mac Donald and others of her ilk are just recycling old literature. See Kurt Vonnegut’s “Player Piano” and Philip Jose Farmer’s “Riders of the Purple Wage”, to mention just two.
From the article: “He notes how after a few weeks of economic shutdown at the start of the lockdown, large rallies took place in some U.S. cities, with many of the participants carrying arms and demanding that the economy be opened up to allow them back to work.”
I think the author has completely misunderstood this. The riots in U.S. streets were not about a lack of jobs, but about social/political/destroy-the-United States, issues.
Interesting, but not all that far-fetched.
Let’s say you go to the drugstore for some small thing, e.g., cough drops and nose rags – er, tissues! – and you haven’t been around automatons all that much, because you’re a farmer…. but you knew automation at The Store was coming, because if you get groceries, you do your own checkouts like they do NOW at Walmart.
And the pleasant Smiling Young Thing behind the checkout counter engages you with a little light conversation, totals up your purchases, bags them for you, and says pleasantly “Have a nice day.”
She seems nice, doesn’t she? Yeah, but she never leaves the checkout spot, she’s always pleasant (and probably blandly cute, too) and can get anything you couldn’t find on the shelves by punching in a few codes, and woops!! here come the missing cough drops. Shelf hadn’t been restocked.
She’s a robot, and anything below the countertop level is wheels and gears. And she works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, with the only expense being downtime for maintenance and program updates.
Or let’s say that you’re at the local spaceport in Mannheim (in Germany), which used to be an airport, long, long ago, and your guide is another two-legged automaton/robot/whatever (maybe even R2D47A, since R2D2 and R2D3 are busy making movies), and when you post your order for mandarin beef from the Bok Choy booth across the (enormous) space, it’s delivered right by rolling bot to you where you’re waiting for your shuttle flight from Mannheim Spaceport to the Rockford, IL Spaceport.
Two-legged robots are in development now, as are 4-leggers, plenty of videos online for all of these things. I used to think it was sci-fi stuff if some adventuresome space jockey in the comic books got himself a robot horse to put together and ride, but the reality is that this stuff is already coming your way.
“With increased use of AI and automation, many people will not be able to find paid work in areas such as retailing, caring roles, agriculture and financial services.”
Really? An AI is going to help you pick out clothes in a retail environment? Automation is going to help you try on clothes to see if they fit? An AI and automation is going to take care of your elderly mother in a nursing home? And an AI and automation is going to wash the dairy cows off to maintain sanitary conditions before they are let into the milking facility? An AI and automation is going to chase down pigs in a pen and hold them down while the vet castrates them? And an AI and automation is going to decide what investments you should have in your portfolio?
Once again, we see prognostications from a so-called “expert” who actually knows nothing about what they are talking about!
I can’t remember the last time the salesgirl came into the changing room to help me out. 🙂
Amazon and even Big Box retail stores sell a lot of clothes over the internet. I don’t see any problem building something like an automated car wash to handle the cows. I also don’t see any real technical obstacles to automating pig or cow castration.
I thought that day traders, investors, and stockbrokers already depended heavily on computers and programs to help them decide where to move their money.
Clyde,
If you want to buy your clothes online or at a Big Box store then go right ahead. Maybe I’m unique but they hardly ever fit me. Same for ordering over the internet.
A good retail sales clerk can look at your body type and suggest something that *fits*, something you won’t take to Goodwill after wearing it to work once.
Automated cattle washers are like automated car washers, they very seldom do a good job on the undercarriage – which is where the sanitary conditions are the prime concern.
You’ve never had to chase a 100lb pig around a pen and hold it upside down for the vet. You simply can’t automate that, let alone automate reaching into the bag and cutting the testicles out. You don’t want to mangle the darn pig and its not like unscrewing a nut off a bolt, there is no standardized arrangement!
My advisor doesn’t depend on computers other than to track selling prices. She spends a *lot* of time doing company research, sector research, and economic research. From this she can match choices up with my financial goals, she almost interviews me at each meeting like a psychiatrist would in order to determine what I want and need. I invest for the long term. We don’t do short term stuff which is what you typically find day traders and stock brokers doing. The trading fees those people charge eat up any profit you might make pretty darn quickly.
Tim,
You said, “Automated cattle washers are like automated car washers, they very seldom do a good job on the undercarriage – which is where the sanitary conditions are the prime concern.”
But, washing a car is largely about cosmetics. Nobody cares what the underside looks like because nobody ever sees it. On the other hand, washing the cow is about sanitation, and the underside is arguably the most important. That has to go in the design specifications.
BTW, I rarely buy clothes online either, unless fit is unimportant like with a bathrobe, or I’m buying something that is pretty standard like Levis. But even so, with the exception of buying custom-made or tailored clothes, the sales ‘clerkettes’ are rarely of any use in buying mass-produced clothes. So, those jobs can go away.
Then workers had better not price themselves out of work. The problem isn’t automation. It’s that China has locked up the rare earth minerals needed and produce the items cheaper than the West. Germany has lost half of their green jobs to China.
Words fail me, so comforted to know our best and brightest are looking at the future for us all! They have made a deep study of all previous human organizations (actually, they skipped all that boring stuff) and all prior governments that paid basic income for life to all lasted forever. Like the…uh…um……..well, if we just follow what they say, it’ll work. If you don’t agree, you obviously didn’t go to Harvard, and you don’t count.
UBI will be the ‘solution’ to a problem as yet undefined.
Due to unprecidented debasement in ‘reserve currencies’ the global financial system is on life support, it will need another reset (or Great Reset).
By mid decade central banks will be rolling out digital currency (private ledger crypto), to enable this, the old system will have to crash and burn, probably why Time Magazine, on it’s 1988 cover, showed a world currency coin dated 2018 called the Phoenix
https://lonestarwhitehouse.blogspot.com/2014/02/major-global-currency-resetchange-not.html
The Global central bankster class will want to retain their monopoly on printing money from thin air, so they will have a plan to blame the sytem failure on something else, something Klaus Schwab calls a “Cyber pandemic” (they’re actually practicing, see Cyber Polygon).
With the financial systems shut down, the result of the world moving towards a cashless society (in ‘lockstep’) will come to the fore, and rapidly lead to societal breakdown as no cash is available. Don’t worry too much, it won’t last long enough for the castle walls surrounding ivory towers to be breached.
With growing lawlessness, lengthly food lines, and furrowed brows on TV News presenters, a ‘solution’ will be rolled out.
The ‘solution’ will be UBI in new digital currency, the various digital vaccination passport platforms are a turnkey solution for digital wallets already, we’ll need biometic ID to conduct business, or access the internet (for security, can’t have anoymous hackers who can bring down a system roaming the new internet) and to top it off maybe it will come with a social credit score, for then, the foundation for a Totalitarian Technocracy would be complete.
Being spectacularly wrong about the future is a game the whole family can play.