Dem Robots Ain't Gonna Buy Your Crap

OR WILL THEY?

"Dem Robots Ain't Gonna Buy Your Crap"

benjamin harubin 2016

electronic collage

"...more than half of humanity as yet exists in miserable poverty, prematurely doomed, unless we alter our comprehensive physical circumstances. It is certainly no solution to evict the poor, replacing their squalid housing with much more expensive buildings which the original tenants can’t afford to reoccupy. Our society adopts many such superficial palliatives. Because yesterday’s negatives are moved out of sight from their familiar locations many persons are willing to pretend to themselves that the problems have been solved. I feel that one of the reasons why we are struggling inadequately today is that we reckon our costs on too shortsighted a basis and are later overwhelmed with the unexpected costs brought about by our shortsightedness."
     -R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth


Worldwide commonwealth credit is both needed and achievable to provide mass-produced sustainable housing for all. That in turn frees up the five billion poor to create “infinite wealth” by combining their intellect with infinite free energy to advance civilization.
     -REVIEW: Buckminster Fuller’s 1928 Ideas & Integrities

That’s because you forgot that your workers are also consumers. As you’ve pushed wages downward, you’ve also squeezed your customers so tight they can hardly afford to buy what you have to sell.

      -Robert Reich, An Open Letter to the Republican Establishment

Lord Turner argues that countries facing the predicament of onerous debts, low interest rates, and slow growth should consider a radical but alluringly simple option: create more money and hand it out to people.
       -John Cassidy, the New Yorker


Bandar thinks that a digitally preoccupied society will come to appreciate the pure and distinct pleasure of making things you can touch. “I’ve always wanted to usher in a new era of technology where robots do our bidding,” Bandar said. “If you have better batteries, better robotics, more dexterous manipulation, then it’s not a far stretch to say robots do most of the work. So what do we do? Play? Draw? Actually talk to each other again?”       -A World Without Work, DEREK THOMPSON

Rapid technological improvements have created unforeseen societal chaos and this change is just starting to pick up speed. Our economic operating system—the “program” at the heart of Capitalism itself—is deliriously out of control. The economy no longer serves the human race, just a tiny elite sliver of it. The rest of us, whether we realize it or not, to a certain extent toil on their behalf.

      -CAPITALISM’S OPERATING SYSTEM HAS GONE OFF THE RAILS: AN INTERVIEW WITH DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF

This time it’s Karl Marx, not Groucho, who comes to mind with the idea of giving people a universal basic income (UBI). This is raised as a possible remedy to any misery caused by rising unemployment from job automation.

       -What to do when machines take our jobs? Give everyone free money for doing nothing