Engineering tasks such as programming will be automated away, just as legal secretarial staff preparing form documents, medical diagnostics with expert systems, and accounting will be. And even journalism.
These systems won’t initially be creative. They’ll just reuse snippets of code, follow complex fuzzy-logic rules, and conform to legal standards and practices. It will engender uniformity and stifle creativity. But so too will it integrate in with corporate systems. Much like a universal SAP.
I think you’re misguided if you believe teaching engineering to a populace trained to fry burgers is the solution to a societal upheaval greater and more sweeping than the industrial revolution.
The problem is not technology. The problem is a collapsing economic system, built on the ideologies of Smith, Ricardo and Taylor, continuing to attempt the extraction of ever greater labor efficiencies in per-unit output, by metrics that automation and AI make meaningless.
The solution is not Luddism. Nobody wants to drive a horse and buggy like the Amish when an electric car does it much better.
But so too is it not a universal basic income. Which would merely put everyone on the dole, dependent on a patron class, and thereby at the mercy of those few who own everything. It would ensconce an old economic system and all its inequality in place. And leave the general ‘useless’ population utterly helpless. It would make us all serfs.
These solutions are a capitulation liberal economics designed around the expectation of large scale capital formation to build industrial plants hire labor or hiring labor for services. All of which will be done by cheap robots.
We are trapped by an ideology framed around Intellectual Property rights which walls off and privatizes that which used to be intellectual commons. Such as food production. It fosters indefinite monopolies. And is antithetical to the organization of human labor to meet human needs.
The solution is in decentralizing production where possible. Revamping corporate charters so companies are no longer considered legal persons and can no longer own copyrights or patents or trademarks. To charter companies for specific purposes to attract labor as co-owners for specific projects, and then close them when complete, thereby spreading profits and dividends to the people that made its success possible — instead of consolidating all gains to a fraction of one percent of the populace.
Continued financialization of the economy according to the Wall Street Way of consolidation and monopolization of all production, in a time of falling production costs and ever reducing employment, will lead to a mass starvation worse than ever conceived of by Mao during the Great Leap Forward or Lysenko under Stalin.
We’re doing progress wrong. About the only job left in a future down this path will be soldiering. Until robots do that too.
