Duality of the Human Employee III

I was just talking to someone the other day that said "ya people used to think that machines would replace jobs and what actually happened was creation of new jobs". But will this always be so.

I had heard of a resource based economy before. The ideas somewhat overlap with "Peoples Capitalism

Her is the article link and below are the interesting parts of the article related to this post:
Peoples’ Capitalism: A Pathway to Abundance


Science and Technology Enablers
There is little doubt that the science and technology to achieve abundance exists — or at least could exist given the right investment decisions by government and industry. Over the next few decades there will be rapid advances in materials and manufacturing processes. There will be advances in nanotechnology and microelectronic circuitry, advances in medicine and health care, advances in computational hardware and software, and advances in communications and networking. Perhaps the most significant advance will be the development of intelligent machines with perceptual and cognitive capabilities equivalent to those of the human brain and mind.

There is little doubt that the science and technology to achieve abundance exists — or at least could exist given the right investment decisions by government and industry.
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We are approaching the Kurzweil Singularity. Human-level machine intelligence is only a decade or three away (depending on funding levels.) There are good reasons to believe it will soon be possible to reverse-engineer the human brain. Advances in neuroscience are revealing how the brain works. Advances in computer science and robotics are revealing how to build intelligent systems. Computational power is approaching that of the human brain. Estimates of the computational power of the human brain range from 1013 to 1016 flops. Current supercomputers can already achieve 1015 flops. In two to three decades, this power will be available on desktop machines.

The implications are enormous. Human level perception, reasoning, decision-making, planning and control on a laptop will change everything. It will enable an explosion of productivity that will improve quality of products and services, reduce costs, and increase profits in every sector: manufacturing, transportation, construction, mining, health care, education, national defense, and environmental restoration.


Jobs, Jobs, Jobs
The flip side of productivity is that it reduces the need for human workers. As productivity rises, the need for human workers falls. The conventional wisdom is that new jobs will be created as old jobs disappear. While this has been true in the past, there is no fundamental reason why it must continue to be true in the future. If production of wealth requires fewer and fewer human workers, while the number of humans entering the labor force grows exponentially as world population increases, it seems inevitable that intelligent machines will increasingly compete with human workers for jobs. As the supply of human workers grows, and the demand for human workers falls, the inevitable result will be to put downward pressure on wages and salaries. It is thus not surprising that advanced machine intelligence is widely perceived as a threat to jobs.

In order for rapid productivity growth to benefit everyone and threaten no one, we will need to devise a new form of capitalism that provides an alternative to jobs as the primary source of income. We need a new social contract that guarantees ordinary people a share in the wealth generated by advanced technology. We need to shift the primary source of income from wages and salaries to ownership of capital assets. In that way, everyone can benefit from advanced machine intelligence, not only from lower costs and higher quality, but also from rising income from ownership of capital assets.

This is what Peoples’ Capitalism would do. It would enable everyone to become a capitalist. Everyone would have a substantial income from ownership of capital assets. This income would gradually rise to equal, and eventually to exceed, income from wages and salaries. This would allow an increased rate of investment to improve productivity and produce rapid economic growth that benefits everyone. It would usher in Abundance before 2050, and lead eventually to an every-person’s Aristocracy based on robot labor.