Everything human and economic can be cast into an opportunity cost problem. If one is doing A, one cannot be doing B. If one makes the doing of A more efficient, one can then do B as well in the same time frame. That is the measure we call productivity, the number of tasks one can fit into a given time frame. These are human concepts. Remove the human and the sense of each vanishes.
We are hurtling towards the economic dispossession of a huge number of human beings, a number large enough to define a general condition, by AI driven robots in arrays I term the Autonomous Machine Economy. The reductio ad absurdum of those two concepts, opportunity cost and productivity, will easily be accomplished by those robots building and maintaining robots and that will be the end of economic determinism in human affairs.
Economics will resolve as a question of raw materials and it will be a question for the AME, not us directly. We will no longer be defined by what we do, with the sole exception of AI managers. This is going to be serious trauma. The glue that holds human society together is separation anxiety. It drives us our whole, cradle to grave, lives. If one is economically defined and is stripped of that raison d'etre then the anxiety will reach a fever pitch. It will result in alienation and confusion, a nonreferent state.
We appear to be in the grip of an epidemic of narcissism. It could easily mark a bad reaction to having no place economically on the planet. That's the winning case for a basic income and a winning case for taxing the bots to fund it. There will be bad reactions to a tech transformation of this magnitude and we must manage and mitigate them with a logical, value neutral, revenue stream from the bots themselves.
Equilibrium is the name of the game and such a licensing fee would right an economic vessel at risk of capsizing. The time for spiteful raids on the bank accounts of the fortunate is long past. We must move with wisdom and deliberation.
Do Well and Be Well.
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