What Kind Of World Do You Want?

This is not a world of corporations or governments or things. It’s a world of living, breathing creatures, including all of us.

I have been thinking a lot about this for the past couple of years, and one of the things that I have concluded is that even though we are all created equal, as people, the philosophical catch-all 80/20 Rule applies here.

In this case, it states that 80% of the people, very much appear to be led by 20% of the people. These days that percentage skews more strongly to the 80% making it about 95 or so. Which means that only about 5% of the people are actually leading. The rest are either following or have gotten out of the way.

Most people, especially in free industrialized societies, build bubbles around themselves. They fiercely protect their jobs, their families, maybe their friends and their homes. But outside of that, they are kind of apathetic.

And who can really blame them? It’s a hell of a lot of work protecting all the shit you have to protect in your life and still salvage a little free time to goof off or have a hobby or whatever.

The 5% who have the power and make all the decisions know that the 95% are up to their eyeballs in day to day living and, for some strange and incomprehensible reason, keep trying to make life more difficult for them.

I read a lot of crime fiction, which, if you read the right writers, tells you a lot about society while at the same time giving you a good mystery to puzzle over.

Right now I’m reading a book by one of my favourite authors, David Baldacci. His character, Amos Decker, in the novel, The Fallen, is in a small town in Pennsylvania investigating, among other things, the death of a man who was crushed by a robotic arm in a massive fulfillment center.

During the course of the conversation with the manager of the facility, I read this snippet which really gets to the heart of a lot of what is wrong in our world.

Manager: Businesses don’t give a crap about creating jobs. They care about making money. With robots you’ll just need some tech guys to maintain and repair them.

Decker: But if the people don’t have jobs to make money, who is gonna buy all the stuff on those shelves?

Manager: I don’t think the rich guys have not thought that one through. Probably leaving it for the government to figure out. God help us if that’s the case.

What Mr Baldacci is describing is the true downside of all the AI technology that more and more people are getting rich inventing and selling to businesses.

But this is, IMHO, a reductio ad absurdum situation. The ever growing onslaught of technology, robotic now, but even scarier later, as it all becomes more intuitive, has already begun displacing people in great numbers.

And the simple argument that sustaining a viable market for almost any product becomes impossible when you reduce the purchasing people of the customer holds truer than ever these days.

Pretty soon, the whole fucking thing falls apart. And then there is chaos as the world is reduced to a sad “Lord Of The Flies” place where people are no longer fighting for success, but for survival on a primal level.

What Needs To Change

You can laugh if you like and think, this is one paranoid dude. But there are lots of things that need to change. Most importantly:

A) The growth of the tech industry needs to be controlled and the utility of each product needs to be weighed against the amount of human displacement its implementation will produce.

B) Market capitalism, which is the main driver of tech growth needs to be regulated to a much greater degree in this area, and many others for that matter.

C) People in working in areas that are vulnerable to tech displacement need to be retrained to develop the level of skills needed to work in the new economy that all of this emerging tech is creating.

I’m not an economist. But I am a pretty logical person who has worked in and for corporations of all kinds and this is what I see happening out there.

And you can see, just by looking around a little that I am far from the only one who sees this imbalance and fears for the future of our society as a result of just how little all this new AI technology factors human beings into its implementation.

Granted there is a good deal of technology, especially in the area of medicine, that is providing great benefit. But that is more than offset by the displacement it has created, and will continue to create, in many other areas, especially in manufacturing, warehousing and distribution channels.

So my own answer to the title question is simple. I want a world that does not leave people behind in any way. What kind of world do you want?

Jim is a communication strategist, writer, art director, broadcast producer, mildly opinionated op/ed blogger & beBee Brand Ambassador.

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