With the increasing growth and exploitation of Artificial Intelligence, which is taking over from human labour in the workplace, the underlying assumption is that without work, humans are obsolete. The problem here is a ridiculous binary argument, that the only way humans can survive is through work in the modern post industrial world.
The question we need to ask is, are work and money a natural occurring marriage that is absolute and insoluble? The answer is, of course, no, it’s a purely ideological construct which is increasingly becoming meaningless, but what is entirely lacking is the will and the desire to share the wealth that industry creates amongst ordinary people.
The historically imposed and accepted bond between work and money is breaking, so the next question is, why are we so concerned to remain in that bondage when it is clearly no longer required?
It isn’t people who are becoming obsolete, it is work. The notion that people will become obsolete is a complete and utter absurdity, we have always been greater than being mere workers, but what should be self evident, is being wilfully ignored. Are we really willing to allow life to remain subservient to a work and money model that is becoming obsolete? How narrow is our vision and who is dominating this discourse (or lack of) over the value of our lives, because it certainly isn’t you and me. Speaking personally, it’s an insult to my intelligence, my creativity, my dreams, hopes and desires, and above all, to my life and being.
Is this really about thinking the unthinkable or are we just being prevented from seeing the huge elephant in the room that those who control the money and us don’t want us to talk about? There is no shortage of money, only our ‘traditional’ means of access to it, which has always been subject to the strictest controls.
It has recently been revealed that a private Facebook group of Conservatives called The Ultras are calling for the return of workhouses which Conservative Housing Minister Dominic Raab hastily left when it was revealed he was a member, yet he co-wrote a book, Britannia Unchained, calling Britons “the worst idlers in the world”.
Not only are Conservatives incapable of thinking outside the box, they earnestly desire to beat us ever further down into the suffocating box of their dystopian world view.
One has to wonder why they are so resistant to us rising into their privileged world where unearned income predominates, not least as a return for the labour which ordinary working people have obediently invested their lives in and yet have seen none of the profits?
Astonishingly, they are furiously angry with us, this again from Britannia Unchained, “Too many people in Britain prefer a lie-in to hard work.” Woo, damn right, I’ve pulled enough sickies in my life to know that, though not nearly as many as I would have liked to.
The awful fact is, they just do not like the idea that we might get above ourselves. Just look at the brutality of the DWP, incentivising people into work by depriving them of the means of survival. Jacob Rees-Mogg, current pretender to the Conservative throne, claimed food banks showed ‘a “rather uplifting” picture of a compassionate country’. Our compassion, but not his.
Meanwhile the wealth of the worlds richest 500 people saw their wealth increase by $1 trillion in 2017, a record high.
AI is taking over the world of work and one of two things will happen, either we will continue down the road of eugenics and the genocide of ordinary people who are no longer of any use or value to the global elites, or we accept that we have the fight of our lives, for our lives, on our hands for a fair and decent share of global wealth for all. It will be brutal and we are already seeing just how brutal and dirty the right wing imperialists fight, all media outlets are polarising with the main stream media broadly backing the rule of wealth, and independent media, which Theresa May wants to close down, fighting against the rise and rise of extreme right wing fascism and greed.
They don’t know how to share, they don’t want to share and they care nothing about our lives and our mounting dead in a world where there is more than enough for all. Well, they have nailed their colours to the mast and so must we, but bear this thought in mind, they don’t know how to fight without us, who, after all, fights all their wars and who laboured to make their fortunes? More than that, though, they are cowards who, just like Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt, do not even have the decency to be honest and who run and hide when the going gets tough. Right now they expect their privilege to protect them, in their cosseted lives, but that is breaking down daily as increasing numbers of ordinary people rise to challenge them.
Just for the record, this is not a new or unforeseen problem, the problem is the how the vicious brutes in power are choosing to deal with it. I shall leave the last word to Buckminster Fuller who, in 1970 said the following: “We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
KOG.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/tory-minister-member-private-facebook-12032252
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-19300051
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/sep/14/jacob-rees-mogg-increased-use-food-banks-rather-uplifting
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/19/robots-could-take-4m-private-sector-jobs-within-10-years
https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/dec/27/worlds-richest-500-see-increased-their-wealth-by-1tn-this-year
https://demetrius13.wordpress.com/2016/07/25/buckminster-fuller-quote-from-1970-we-should-do-away-with-the-absolutely-specious-notion-that-everybody-has-to-earn-a-living/
