A Proposition To Embrace The Radical In The Face Of Obsolescence
The Race to Zero Labor, and Rethinking The American Way of Life: II
First flight, 120 feet in 12 seconds, 10:35 a.m., by Wright, Wilbur, Orville Wright, and John T Daniels.
Corporate greed and paid-off politicians have pillaged the American working-class of their freedom and socioeconomic mobility, both tightening their grip on everyday life.
Businesses bilk taxpayers for billions in subsidies before outsourcing our jobs in search of cheaper labor elsewhere as teachers pinch their pennies to purchase paper and pencils for their students.
For decades, manufacturing has been the backbone of the American economy. It helped push millions into the middle class, but that path is narrowing. Corporations serve shareholders, and American workers are expensive expendable pawns in a global economy. The prospects of cheaper labor, higher profits, and new and emerging markets are insatiable, and businesses will do what they can to protect their sacred dollars, as Capitalism commands. Amen.
But soon, our country will face a labor crisis on multiple fronts. America is shedding manufacturing jobs, and we will continue to do so. Trade wars and tariffs designed to entice companies back to our shores do not work. Instead, they burden everyday Americans, while corporations continue to rake in profits, lobbying our representatives to lower their tax bill at the expense of our quality of life.
We’re also contending with a new, growing threat from both home and abroad—automation and artificial intelligence.
Touchscreen kiosks are creeping into fast-food restaurants. Autonomous semi trucks are already delivering our freight alongside traditional truckers and traffic.
They’re the genesis for the joblessness that’s coming, and it’s happening around the world. It’s an untenable race that working-class Americans aren’t designed to win.
The last few months have demonstrated that the world is a singular place, no matter what a nation does to close itself off from the rest of the world. Any notion otherwise is no longer possible.
The world is on the cusp of a technological revolution, and the world that’ll follow will be more efficient, clean, and connected. Cars, traffic lights, and road signs will communicate in real-time to streamline commutes, and cargo deliveries. Improvements in computing power will lead to smaller, more powerful processors that’ll connect more everyday objects to the internet, and help put more robots in warehouses and factories. EVs and clean energy will dominate the power grid, and the cars will drive themselves to the service station.
I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.
—John Adams, Letter to Abigail Adams (May 12, 1780)
This connected, processor-powered future has a high human cost that we will be paying for decades to come, a slow, agonizing depletion of the one necessary resource all Americans need to survive—a job—and soon we’re a cooked lobster.
We’re not powerless, though, but the solution would require embracing the coming change, rethinking the structure of American society, and giving corporations the cheapest labor imaginable—no labor at all.
Inherent human progress paired with the endless need to innovate for the sake of capitalism will drive the development of automation and artificial intelligence here and throughout the world, and that’s only been accelerated by the COVID-19 Pandemic.
We can lead this change, or we can have it leave us behind. However, we will need radical ideas now to prove to the world an automated, connected society can still be the beacon of the free world, protecting our liberties from government intrusion and the burgeoning corprofascism/technofascism (more on these later) assault on freedom.
Radical ideas at the dawn of the new technological revolution will help set us truly free, finally realizing our Founders’ belief in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness while creating an equitable and just society.
The cards are stacked against working Americans and the businesses that employ them, but that’s when we do our most amazing work.
More to come.
Democracy requires diligence.
Spread the word!
If you’re new to this newsletter, why not subscribe? Enjoy articles like this and many more for free!
If you enjoyed this newsletter, please help others find this amazing content. Thank you!
Next post publishes on Friday, November 27, 2020.