How Machine Labor Could Change the Future of Work
A Short Personal Reflection on the Subject
In my Rosella Tolfree’s future world, America has adopted universal basic income (UBI). By her time, while UBI isn’t income taxed, the government taxes it to support the various universal programs, like healthcare.
Rosella’s U.S. UBI plan involves the Federal Reserve doing the payments to people as a way of controlling the economy and inflation. Instead of the federal government paying for it out of its budget.
So instead of money being printed and given to banks, it’s directly given to the people. Then taxed to help pay for universal support programs.
What’s the reason behind constructing such a system? Well, to be honest, in Rosella’s fictional world, machines dominate labor. So much so, a new American political party, the Sandford Party, has risen to try to reinstate human slavery to ensure lifelong corporate labor. Yeah, I know slavery is evil… but its dystopian fiction and desperate people do desperate things. And not everyone is for the idea of re-instituting human slavery (again it’s generally a bad idea), which is why the party has had trouble getting the Modified Corwin Amendment passed. Besides, Star Trek even mentions slavery as a cultural norm on planets from time to time. And the Federation does nothing about it because of the Prime Directive.
Now Rosella’s world is fiction, but recently there was an article online with the Economist entitled, “If it can be designed on a computer, it can be built by robots” where it goes into depth how computer systems can design products then send it over to a robotic assembly floor.
We’ve been doing this for a long while. But with more sophisticated generative A.I. and machine learning, we are staring at the real possibility that the need for human labor economically will diminish.
If that’s true, then politically I can make a few observations:
1. A curb on national immigration. We don’t need immigrant labor to control wage growth or to do work because machines will do this work.
2. There’s problems with funding social welfare and old age entitlement programs. Is the U.S. going to do a production tax on machine-made products and services to pay for these programs? This is like how human labor is taxed to fund such programs. Rosella’s world uses taxed UBI payments.
3. Socially, there will be a greater emphasis on overpopulation and some people will push for greater population control measures.
At a minimum, we are talking about a smaller populated America tax funded by machine production.
But what concerns me is who’s buying all these machine-produced products and services? With fewer people working, there’s overall a lower amount of dollars in the economy. Unless everyone is fully invested in Wall Street (assuming it keeps going up).
All I see is a UBI reality from the Federal Reserve continually funding the consumer economy. It’s one way to maintain an economy where machines dominate labor. Which is close to a Star Trek world, but with free money that’s regulated to avoid inflation.
As I see it, Gene Roddenberry’s utopian economics of Star Trek could require the abolition of corporations, money, and energy cost for the replicators.
If this happens, governments only organize the flow of resources and no longer tax people. Policing efforts would still be necessary, but the lack of money and having replicators would reduce crime to things like serial killings and political riots. It’s no wonder humans left Earth and fought the Gorn. It was the only challenge to life.
