Sunday story 9: Minimum wage, robots, and the future of humanity

Never before has humanity existed in such a time of uncertainty. With the infinite promise of robotics and all they can do for humanity, it’s time to look at our society and prepare for an adjustment to dealing with the promise of limitless well trained, free, ethically clean labor. For the past 4 centuries, humanity has been based around the economic ideology of capitalism. Currency can be exchanged for both products and services. Money is made by providing services, and is spent by acquiring products. The money spent acquiring products then go back toward the people that made the product-a type of service that can be performed. This closed system is efficient in both ensuring that people work frequently, and are provided with all the resources they need to survive. However, the advent of the cheap robot can change all of this. With a worker that requires no payment, and only needs to be maintained and charged, the cost of labor becomes incredibly small. Robots will be cheaper than a human workforce can ever be, leading to an important dilemma: When all the jobs are inevitably taken by robots, what allows the lower class to continue to live?

With no way of competing with the robot workforce, most blue collar workers (with the exception of maintenance technicians, engineers, and programmers) will be out of a job. Jobs that require complex thinking with no obvious solution: Politicians, CEO’S, Lawyers and Scientists will all remain useful, but the vast majority of the people on planet earth have jobs that can be automated. In this future, we must fundamentally change the way we prioritize who gets access to products. Capitalism will cease to function in a way that benefits the 99%. This future could lead to a utopian society the likes of which Star Trek describes, in which people will remain comfortably provide for, regardless of what they do with their lives. Alternatively, we could end in a world of supreme poverty, with the majority of the world scraping out a living on the scraps of the upper class. Either way, the current system will not continue to function. Change must occur.