Stephen Hawking Says We Should Really Be Scared Of Capitalism, Not Robots

[dreamnightwind]

19. The plan is to let them (us) die off

The ownership class in no way cares about the worker class. They will work to expedite automation, simultaneously removing any and all social safety nets for the rapidly increasing jobless, and let nature take its course. From their perspective, the worker class has value only as workers, not as humans, and any value they have as workers will soon disappear with automation. Add to the equation things like needing less resources by eliminating the 99%, leaving a sustainable path to life on this planet when we are newly aligned with the human carrying capacity of Earth, and you have their plan.

Too cynical? Probably not. Obviously such a generalization is not universal, but for that future to manifest it needn't be universal, merely dominant in the views of the few truly powerful. If we don't want to accept it, and we mustn't, it's going to take wresting control from the ownership class.

Hard to imagine that actually happening, but possible paths to getting there are direct democracy rather than representative (this would have to be accompanied by democratizing information, breaking up the media conglomerates, if a few corporations are informing the masses then direct democracy will still be informed by the propaganda of the wealthy), or perhaps an enlightened representative democracy could work if we completely decouple money from political campaigns. Another path of course is for all hell to break loose in violent revolution, destroying industrial society entirely, I suppose this is the path of the jihadis (I don't know enough of their vision to really say so), anyway this is a path that would perhaps postpone climate disaster but whose results would be only slightly more desirable than the meltdown we are rushing towards by default, as its main features would be violent death and death by starvation and lack of disease control.

Sanders wants to democratize the workplace, which is an excellent place to start towards a positive solution. When businesses represent the interests of their employees rather than the interests of a small group of owners and shareholders, labor savings from automatizing could conceivably be distributed equitably. It's not enough (businesses also need to represent the interest of society as a whole, not just maximize their value to the marketplace) but it is an achievable first step.

I find the idea that "the smartest people in the room" (paraphrasing a ridiculous post upthread) will get together and work this out to everyone's benefit to be absurd. Our current trajectory is the let-us-die-when-our-labor-is-not-needed path, it's how capitalists see the world, and they don't much like us common folk around to remind them of the failures of their economic system anyway. Not to mention the annoying problem that we're rapidly passing climate change tipping points that will eventually, if not already, lock us in to a path for extinction, and one way of addressing that is depopulation.

That's why these are not normal times, and business as usual is suicidal. We either very quickly find a way to live sustainably, or we face the unthinkable. It's way too important a decision to leave in the hands of a few smart elites, who really aren't that into us.