Transcription
Imagine a factory that never sleeps. Never has to stop. Robots build the cars, robots inspect the cars, robots load the cars onto trucks, and those trucks drive themselves. No workers in sight, and no wages, either.
Now, who's buying those cars? If the robots take everybody's jobs, they also take everybody's wages. No wages means no money, and no money means no customers.
Walter Reuther was the head of the United Auto Workers Union. He was being shown around a new Ford plant in Cleveland, United States. And the company official was very excited showing him around all the automation, the robots, the machinery, etc. And at some point, the official turns to Reuther and says, "Walter, how are you going to get those machines to pay your union dues?" And Reuther said, "How are you going to get them to buy your cars?"
So, here's the first big idea. A machine that produces everything is useless if nobody can afford to buy anything.
Imagine a fully automated world a few years from now. Every field of wheat, corn, barley planted and harvested by GPS-guided tractors that drive themselves, stored in warehouses run by robots and powered by solar panels, delivered by self-driving trucks to stores with no staff, just shelves, just stock, and then dropped at your door. Or, let's be honest about where this tends to go, your cell.
Now, the technology is coming regardless. The real question is, who owns it? Who controls it? Who decides who gets fed and who doesn't?
Well, there are only two roads here, and both end up in the same place. People get scared, and they hand the keys over. They let one giant organization to take control of it all, the farms, the factories, the trucks, the food, and that organization, the state, makes them a promise. "Don't worry, we will keep our population safe. That's our role. We will feed you and your family. You will never have to worry again." And sounds reasonable if you're desperate enough.
But, look at the trade. Nobody owns tools. There's one source of supply, and if it fails or makes a error, or decides you have misbehaved, there's no alternative, no backup, no way out. Nassim Taleb has a word for systems like this. He calls them fragile. A system that looks efficient and neat on the surface, but shatters completely if anything goes wrong. The opposite is what he calls antifragile. Systems that actually get stronger under pressure because they have redundancies, alternatives, multiple paths. A centralized, single-source food system is the most fragile thing imaginable.
Also, there's a group of people that already gets exactly this deal. Free shelter, free food, free clothes, heating, time to read, to exercise, no bills, free healthcare as well, total security. I'm obviously talking about prisoners. And look, some people would take that deal willingly. Eric Fromm wrote a whole book about why. He called it Escape from Freedom. Freedom is heavy. It means making choices, carrying risk, tolerating uncertainty. And a lot of people faced with that weight, they would trade it for safety.
And maybe you're thinking, "Okay, but no one's actually going to vote for state-run food. Nobody's falling for that." Hmm, let me show you path number two.
Path two looks like the world we already live in. A handful of giant corporations own the robots, the farms, the factories, the distribution networks, and normal people are somehow permanently broke, unable to buy the tools, unable to copy the machines, unable to compete.
But wait, remember the first rule of the whole video. A machine that produces everything is useless if nobody can afford to buy anything. If nobody can afford to buy anything. So, how do the giant companies stay afloat if the customers do not have money? By our own logic, the whole thing should collapse. People can't buy, companies cannot sell, the machine has to stop. Unless somebody keeps handing the broke people money. But just enough to keep spending.
Well, this mechanism already exists, and it's been running for decades. Once you see what it actually is, you cannot stop seeing it. You walk into a bank to buy a house. The bank agrees to lend you 300,000 pounds. But this is the insane part. The bank does not have those 300,000 pounds sitting in a vault. It has a fraction of that and it types the rest into existence at the moment of your signature. Most of your mortgage money did not exist until you promised to work 40 plus years to pay it back. This has a name, fractional reserve banking, but the name doesn't matter. Our attention span is limited and I understand this is quite boring, but the important thing is banks are legally allowed to lend you money they don't actually have.
Now, think about what that does to the price of houses. That 300,000 pound house is worth that because some people are capable of offering that money and most of them can only offer it because a bank conjured the money for them. You take that conjured money out of the equation and all of a sudden what people are actually able of offering drops. Prices have to follow. The housing problem is not just not enough houses. It's mostly a fake money problem. So, without the ability to create money out of nothing, the math doesn't hold.
A small group of companies cannot own everything while their potential customers stay permanently broke because they need those people to have real money to spend. Fake money is the only thing that keeps monopolies stable and the only thing that keeps prices that high, which brings me to the topic you've been waiting for, the billionaires, the people that in theory are going to own everything.
Have you noticed something? Some of the richest people in the world, the ones that are building the robots, the ones whose companies are leading on automation, are also the loudest when it comes to saying that everyone should get free money somehow. Elon Musk, for example, has publicly announced that he would be for a universal income, a regular check from the government to every citizen as the best response for unemployment caused by artificial intelligence. Sam Altman, the man running OpenAI, ChatGPT, has proposed universal basic income and more recently something called universal basic compute, a share of AI productivity distributed to every American. Very socialist from these capitalist men. Doesn't that seem odd? The people whose technology is going to displace the most workers are the ones that more enthusiastically are saying that government should send those workers money. Looks too generous. Both the government and the tech companies being considered of us. Really? I think we are allowed to be suspicious.
Here is why they want it. Go back to the paradox. If the robots take all the jobs and therefore all the wages, the companies' customers go broke. Broke customers don't buy products. They wouldn't have anyone to sell to unless someone keeps the customers topped up with just enough money to keep spending. Does that ring a bell? Did you notice that we are more and more subscribed to everything? The government using money it creates or borrows into existence sends regular payments to a population that can no longer support itself through wages. That population spends those payments on the products and subscriptions and services of the very companies whose automation displaced them in the first place. The money flows in a circle from the government through people's hands directly back into the company. The state members also get benefited through taxation, weapons and war industry, and also surveillance services provided by those very corporations. I don't have to say the names. You're forced into being a permanent customer with no agency or independence.
This is what most people don't understand. State socialism, where the government owns the factories, runs the food supply, distributes everything, and what we might call technocracy or techno-socialism, where the corporations own the factories, run the food supply chain, distribute everything, are structurally the same thing. The difference is quite subtle. In one version, the Soviet version, the factories and industries, instead of being run by Elon Musk, for example, or Bezos, or some Altman, are run by ministers and officials. In the other version, CEOs run those. In both cases, the structure makes the population depend on them in every aspect of their lives.
The biggest fear of both the states and the corporations is an actual free market, where people can find their own means, can copy other people's products and ideas. They can improve them or make them cheaper for everyone and there are always multiple options available. Competition means alternatives and alternatives means you don't depend.
But let's try to find some hope. Imagine money that cannot be faked. Money that's actually limited like gold or some decentralized currency that no government and no bank can print at will. That would keep its value over time and because of that people would tend to gravitate towards it to keep its value. In that world, what happens to those giant companies? The only way to keep selling is to make things cheap enough that people with real finite money can actually afford to buy them. So, what do they do? They use the robots to make things cheaper and cheaper and cheaper still because that's their only way to grow their market. And even robots become cheaper to produce and sell. And without state-enforced laws of intellectual property, which is an intellectual mistake and a really bad misunderstanding of property, anyone could copy those robots and start their own little production.
What I'm trying to say is that there's no excuse anymore for scarcity and high prices. There's simply not. Often, the plaque preventing prices from actually going down is state-enforced privileges. Behind every high price, there's an artificial scarcity enabled by coercion and state intervention. The robots in this version are not a threat. They're actually a mechanism for abundance. A machine that produces wheat costs almost nothing to run. And so wheat gets cheaper for everyone. The machine that builds phones, for example, costs almost nothing to run. So phones get cheaper. The ceiling drops, the floor rises.
So where's the scarcity going to come from when everyone can have their own robots or AIs or their own little factories? Or when they can have their own 3D printers at home, for example, just like everyone else has their own regular printers or phones. What if everyone has access to means of production of their own and then it's way more difficult for these big corporations to compete with these decentralized, more local, efficient, sustainable, flexible producers.
So, the question goes from will the machine replace me to who will own the machine that is going to replace me? Am I going to own the machine that is going to replace me? Do I have that option? Will I have anything to say about this all?
So, every generation gets told to fear the future. And in every generation the fear gets aimed at the machine, the loom, the assembly line, the algorithm, the robot. And in every case, if you look carefully, the machine was not the thing that needed fighting. The good news, and I mean this, is that abundance is not the problem. Solar powered robots producing loads of things for everyone is still a kind of bright situation, isn't it? Maybe we are getting closer to solve poverty and hunger, to solving some ugly types of work. The only thing standing between us and that future is the willingness many, many people have to ask the state and their friends, the very perpetrators of that inequality, for help. Because that's all they know. They've been taught to ask the wolf to take care of the sheep. And that willingness I was mentioning is fear. It's a very human desire to feel safe, to be taken care of, to not have to carry the weight of uncertainty. We then ask powerful people to save us from the risky, dangerous activity of being alive. It is true that the cage keeps the predators away, but it is a cage.