We are midst of a monumental transition unlike anything ever before seen. We are changing roles, from producer/consumer to just consumer. As physical AI, capable, intelligent, and dextrous android robots inherit production lines all over the world our usual accounting routine of taking a cut of the profits as salary for doing work and spending it as aggregate demand no longer makes sense. That is monumental.
Modern mass industrial economics begins with Henry Ford paying his labor enough to buy a Tin Lizzie and never looks back until now. Robots do not naturally consume much and therefore contribute little to aggregate demand. This leaves us with the kind of demand shortfall that destroys economies. We have to step up in our new role as only demand agents.
Demand agents require three basic conditions to thrive...
1. Private property;
The institution of private property is in its genesis and its development a kind of stewardship. This accountability puts the value of consequences and expectations onto private ownership.
2. Markets;
A market is a contract locus of buying and selling which directs the economy in as a humane a fashion as possible and in its arbitrage operations allows unequal reward and concentration of capital.
3. Money;
Money is a value calculus that allows the relative valuations, over space and time, of disparate products enabling opportunity cost calculations and arbitrage.
Money is the key factor. Without the value calculus the whole system grinds to a halt and goes inhumane to various degrees and dies in a chaos of demand shortfalls. We could, according to modern monetary theory, just print it and hand it out but historically that just results in a massive diminishing of its value.
We are going to have to accomplish a massive transfer of wealth from robot labor to human aggregate demand, something no society has done since the slave economies of the Romans and the American Deep South. Robot productivity promises a lot more than bread and circuses. We cannot just stumble into that future. We need to plan for it.
Do Well and Be Well
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