Amazon’s replacement of human workers by robots demonstrates that we are entering an era of utter and profound change. “A whole new generation of smart technologies is taking over jobs that used to be done only by people,” ex-Secretary of Labor Robert Reich wrote recently.
The Boston Consulting Group, an influential think tank, predicts that robots will replace at least one-quarter of all manufacturing workers in just 10 years. An Oxford University study estimates that 47 percent of all U.S. jobs will be gone in just 20 years.
That’s very had to get your head around. But it is extremely important to get your head around.
What’s occurring is a massive earthquake in the social landscape, threatening institutional edifices that seemed as solid as the ground we walk on just a few years ago — our jobs, unions, churches, schools, even our food and our homes, and not just locally, but nationally, and internationally as well.
How we rebuild after the earthquake will determine the quality of life of our children and their children for many generations to come.
This has been a long time coming. Humankind has been developing new tools for more than two million years, each generation standing on the shoulders of the other. The purpose has been to increase the amount we can produce while decreasing the amount of work we have to do.
We are now at the point that our technology makes it possible for all humanity to live decent lives — with ample food, clothing, shelter, education, health care — using very little labor.
But the capitalist economic system that brought us here now bars us from achieving this; and it can’t survive the decline of necessary human labor itself. How can we enjoy all we have created when we have to work in non-existent jobs to get paid? How can the capitalists sell the products if no one has any money?
This is why all the wealth is accumulating at the top. To survive and prosper, we must not simply divide that wealth equally but create the share-and-share-alike economy that we learned at our mother’s knee.
