Why Is This Book Different?

This book offers a genuinely new solution to technological unemployment

More articles and books about the looming crisis are appearing all the time. Many offer clear explanations of the threat and why it is so serious. Where they fall short is in providing a solution that can actually work. Their solutions for first-world nations always seem to be:

1. Have faith that new types of jobs will rapidly proliferate, preventing mass unemployment
2. Institute retraining programs for all displaced workers
3. Provide a guaranteed income for all

As discussed in A Celebration Society, while potentially helpful, each of these solutions is inadequate to the need of the time.

New types of jobs will almost certainly proliferate for a while longer. However, there is no certainty of this continuing indefinitely merely because it has been so for centuries. As AI/robot/sensor systems acquire ever more human-equivalent capabilities, employers will continually evaluate the overall cost/benefit ratio of hiring a person vs. a machine. The more that analysis favors the machine, the fewer people will be hired and the more will be fired. Machines are the ultimate form of outsourcing.

Machines do not require vacations, social security, healthcare or much management. They have little downtime, and do not complain. Already, as discussed in the book, many jobs and professions are being rapidly automated and those who believe that any particular type of work is immune are placing their faith in a “line in the sand” that could suddenly be erased as machine capabilities rapidly rise. This has already happened, and is happening more and more rapidly. Investment management, law, medicine and so-called “new economy” jobs are now being automated.

Retraining programs require that someone who is making money pay for them. Major corporations have shown great skill at offshoring their taxable activities, and this becomes easier as their assets become more intellectual than physical. In Western nations, small businesses and their employees are already heavily taxed. The greater the percentage of the population that is technologically unemployed, the greater must be the taxes on the employed or their employers to support those unemployed people. At some point, this will break down—and the consequences may be ugly and socially disruptive.

Also, retraining presumes that people can keep their new jobs for years. Otherwise, they will not invest the resources of time, effort and possibly money that are required—nor should anyone else. However, when an AI/robot/sensor system learns to do something at a human-equivalent competency, other such systems can be quickly programmed with the same competency. The recent development of machine systems that can learn by watching people work, or by simply studying the rules of a system, means that the delay between emergence of a new profession and its automation will continue to shrink.

Importantly, it is not necessary that automation replace all aspects of a profession, which is unrealistic in the short term. It need only carve out more and more pieces of a profession, each time displacing people who will then seek the remaining jobs in that profession, driving wages down and unemployment up. (This effect will cascade to other professions and jobs as well, as displaced people seek to switch to new types of work.)

A guaranteed income for all has been proposed by economists across the political spectrum. Like retraining programs, it requires someone to pay the bill. While some have proposed instituting a special tax that captures the savings from automation and using that, this presumes that such savings can be consistently measured and that clever tax specialists won’t be able to find loopholes. It also presumes that the targeted companies won’t simply relocate to tax-friendlier countries, and that companies that do pay the new tax won’t be undercut by foreign competitors who have no such tax to pay.

If the bill is instead paid by raising existing taxes, it will give major corporations even more incentive to offshore their taxable activities than they already have. So-called “inversions” will accelerate. Keep in mind that every attempt to close loopholes in the byzantine tax systems of first-world nations only results in greater lobbying efforts and new creative solutions from tax specialists. It is a war where the wealthy and the corporations they control have far better resources than the governments seeking to tax them. While some are proposing a worldwide tax treaty to prevent such offshoring, there only need be a handful of non-participating governments to make the treaty ineffective, and the more countries that sign such a treaty, the greater the economic advantage for the remaining nations not to sign it.

Second and third-world nations typically have no social safety nets. They will not suddenly jump from no safety nets to universal training and a guaranteed minimum wage. In many cases, even if the governments see retraining or a guaranteed minimum wage as good ideas, they will have entrenched cultural resistance, bribery and other barriers preventing rapid adoption. So, even if the above “solutions” are somewhat workable for first-world nations, they offer no help to most of humanity.

Something truly new is needed. A Celebration Society offers such a system.