| The elephant in the room is globalization. The same resources have to be shared among many more people. Even if energy is no problem, there is e.g. a limited amount of fish protein that can be fed to life-stock. >I’m betting that a jobless super-automated future will arrive even sooner than experts have been predicting. We already live in that future. If there were only one type of car, one type of trousers and shirts, a limited selection of food and standardized housing, there would be hardly any work for anybody. The end of the article is kind of funny. It could as well be a plea for Capitalism and startup culture: >Drag dreams out into the light of day, show their sources, compare them with fact, transform them to possibilities … a dream … with a sense of the possible.” >He also wrote that the urgent national inflection-point struggle a century ago was “between those who are willing to enter upon an effort for which there is no precedent, and those who aren’t. In a real sense it is an adventure.” It comes down to taxes and investments. The masses can always vote for politics that shift spending power from corporations to politicians or to themselves. They can also pool their money and invest by themselves. For some reasons, unprecedented efforts seem to require free capital. How else but with Capitalism can that be provided? More democratic investments like kickstarter.com look too much like etsy.com to be viable contenders. |
Or maybe the time has come to let people eat that fish instead? Sure, the Western middle class may not be able to eat as much meat then, but as a whole, wouldn’t humanity be better off?