Chris Gardiner
Sep 2, 2018 · 2 min read

What is required is for economics to catch up with technology.

The foundation of economics is more for less. Fundamentally governments come along and skim the surplus of the more and spend it on keeping the system safe. Police, defence, health and social security.
But the latest problem for businesses is selling. Making is easy.
Factories have become smaller and retail outlets larger.
Most significantly there are more sellers than makers. Further still selling is becoming automated. The railways do not need guards and more fundamentally they do not need drivers either. Cashiers are dissapearing from supermarkets. Shelf stacking can be sorted.
In care work for the elderly automated body washing machines would be far less embarrassing than having humans.
Camera communication cameras can automate watching the safety of the elderly in their own homes. Motion sensors can pick up on lack of movement.
A single human can work full time making contact via Video and directing the right human contact for those who want it.
Now here is a huge issue. People screaming that they do not want to enter into a twilight of old age being surrounded by robots.

But the creep of technology is one step at a time and slowly gettig acceptance towards a brighter future.
Today railway unions are on strike because the train operators no longer require guards. The unions have every right to be on strike. The guards have been trained for a life which is being snatched away from them. Their education and training has equipped them to do that for life. The transport minister has not got an answer and will not even discuss it. But the reality is that the trains do not need drivers either. Sending signals down wires to a lamp for a driver to respond to is pathetic.

If the trains did not have drivers they could be laid up off peak and save load of energy.

A more difficult task is automating lorry driving.
At the route of all this is an out of date economic system.
The present system is not geared to reducing consumption.
Advertising can alert people to better things. It can also just persuade people to want excess.
The fundamental importance of changing this is most obvious at elections.
No more taxes scream the politicians, and voters accept that.
Governments have to print money in order to overcome this impass.
What needs examining is the reason for printing.
There needs to be an automated way of printing money when it feeds into reducing consumption.
So the redundant guards should be bought out. Instead of Chris Grayling hiding in his cabinet he should come out and give the guards an index linked pension for life.
Within a lifetime the whole rail network would be transformed. Any employer will tell you that it makes more sense economically to pay some people to stay at home.

We could end up with a huge proportion of society not working at all and the country being better off for it.
This article is not arguing for that. It is arguing for an economic system that works. What results is up to society.

    Chris Gardiner

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