Capitalism is relatively new and still evolving on the human timeline – going back no further than the Medici of Florence and then modernizing in the Netherlands of the 18th century before reaching full early bloom in London and then in the 19th and 20th centuries in New York – the mantra of capitalism has always been a combination of higher productivity + lower material and labor costs + increased demand = greater profits. It’s no coincidence that material and labor go together. Our work is lumped in with the raw materials because human labor is a raw material. You (or me) are of value to the capitalist in one of three ways – a raw material, a consumer, or a lender. The third may come as a surprise, but the debt that we incur is actually an asset to the lender. Let’s assume that robots suddenly provide all the labor including extraction, manufacture, delivery, and retrieval (trash collection, recycling, etc). Artificial intelligence is also handing marketing, merchandising, stocking, and quality control. The robot/AI work also includes making robots and new A.I. – Okay, so all of us are out of a job. Does that stop capitalism? No way. We are still consumers and at this point, in order to consume the productt produced by the AI/Robot factories – we will need to be borrowers (consumers of loans) and lenders (purchasers of debt to companies and nations through stocks which are loans to corporations and bonds which are loans to governments. Since we will be bored – we will probably be consuming more – just like when you sit in front of your computer for too long, you sometimes end up buying something – usually on credit. So, in the robot/AI society the capitalist gets higher productivity + lower material and labor costs + increased demand which as I mentioned before lead to higher profits which are doled out to the corporate shareholders who buy more shares and presumably diversify their investments with holdings in government bonds which allow the government to dole out to welfare programs which would seem likely to be the largest consumer (as a sort of collective patron of the needy), meanwhile the corporations are consolidated into larger corporations which eventually are all owned by the largest banks which leads to the conundrum which I can’t get my head around – I need help with this. At some point, there starts to exist a closed feedback loop between the banks and the government. The government buys from the banks with money the banks have lent to the government and the government pays the banks with money borrowed from the citizens, the citizens borrow from the banks to purchase the products the banks produce, the banks would seem to eventually swallow the government and the citizen so that we have corporate citizen banks which determine who eats and who starves, who lives in peace and who suffers war, and as we’ve seen in the philosophy and writings of others – at some point – the majority of citizen consumers are no longer a valuable resource but instead become a drain on the scaled up economy – at that point – it would seem – the banks are left with the option of 1) transforming into an altruistic welfare state or 2) genocide machine – It seems to me that a perfect capitalist machine looks a lot like genocide in its final days. As I look at our society undergoing rapid transformation – I can’t help but think that genocide on a global scale is not very far away.
