NRA Recruiting Tactic
I was just reading that Amazon has 30,000 non-human employees, what we proletariat call robots. In 2014 Facebook acquired Whatsapp whose worth was 22 billion dollars. The messaging firm had a total of 55 human employees, not that I think they were profit-sharing with them. Google, whose worth is more than most country’s G.D.P., has 60,000 workers compared to GM (worth a tenth of Google) which has 215,000. And you can bet your 401-K GM is on the forefront of automation.
Trump can talk about bringing back the coal mining jobs til the cows come home again, but if anybody thinks employment is going to go up in the land of the digitized, home of the android, they need to adjust their meds. Go ahead and bring those factories back to America’s fruited plain, but don’t expect them to hire us humans. That dream left with the Industrial Age. The discontent from the folks who watched their jobs outsourced to China, Mexico and the robots, well, that resentment is only going to get worse. And the income inequality too.
This is Future Shock rearing its ugly orange head. This is the future roaring up in our rearview way closer than it appears, ready to roar past, curves or not. The folks who think we can close the barn door and wall off the borders, they either need to stop smoking whacky tobaccy or start. Pulling the covers over our heads isn’t really the brightest color in the crayon box. I know, folks are worried about global warming and immigration issues, minimum wage and Black Lives Matter, transgender rights and gun control, abortion restrictions and prayer in the schools. All worthy causes and reasons for concern, granted. But when half the population is thrown out of work, when the 1% who own the wealth become the overlords who wall themselves in armed compounds and patrol the perimeter with drones to protect their largesse from the peasants who suspect injustice is being done to them and their odds of winning the Lottery are actually worse than they ever dreamed, well, all those other issues will take a backseat to the bonfires that light up the purpled mountains majesty.
Like the song sez, the jobs are gone boyz … and they ain’t comin back. And if you think Trump is scary, get ready for what’s coming when people who aren’t stockholders in those companies worth billions with 55 employees can’t feed their families. You might just change your mind about gun control.
Something about this sounds familiar Skeeter. Let’s go back a few centuries. White people come to America, and through theft of the land from Native Americans, deep-rooted lifestyles became redundant by eliminating an ability to hunt, build shelter, or gather nuts, berries, and fruit. Jobs. (Side note, the word many Native American tribes used to describe themselves translates as “The Humans.” The terms they used for white people were numerous and sundry, such as the Lakota word “wasichu” meaning greedy.)
Now, will history repeat itself when the 1% buy 5% non-human workers, then 10%, until soon 50%+ of the American workforce has been displaced and no longer has the ability to purchase food, or pay rent? Will they be marched off to Redundancy Reservations, where they’ll be provided with a room, basic foodstuffs, and if they’re lucky, a clean blanket? Will the remnants of the middle class be glad to pay for it, because god knows it could have been them? As surely as god knows the 1% won’t pay for the “the humans” when that would cut into the budget needed to expand their ever expanding non-human labor pool?
This time a minority won’t be railroaded into oblivion. First it will be a small majority. Then as the more gilded robots figure out they can manage quite well without the 1%, we’ll all be loaded into driver-less cars and buses, and transported to the singularity.
This notion of Redundancy Reservations might just hit the mark. Guaranteed income (call it a subsidy), an ETB card (don’t call it food stamps), a room in the high rise guaranteed income housing tower, free cable and a big screen TV with all the reruns of the Apprentice looping 24/7.
But … easier yet, the little robots could make a new version smallpox nano-virus that would solve the human glut quite nicely. Has a nice historic ironic ring to it too. You know, if the little A-I’s have a sense of humor.