I did a deep dive with AI last night and asked it: if we extrapolate the level of industrialization vs the rate of job loss due to AI, what year does it become cheaper to live off-grid in an independent community?
The AI's answer? Between 2030 and 2035.
Meaning that money will soon require so much productivity to acquire, that it will eventually become easier to produce goods and services independently and provide for ourselves.
The main reason is that currently labor represents 60% of the workforce while owners represent 40%. That is flipping to 45/55, meaning that labor is on the verge of losing its majority stakeholder status and collective bargaining power.
When that happens, we'll only be left with market forces propping up wages. Meaning that AI automation will gradually undermine wages to the point of subsistence.
When that happens, the opportunity cost of exiting the traditional economy drops to 0. Why would anyone work at the behest of an owner when they could be an owner themselves for the same or lesser labor?
Now, we could reject that and pretend that supply and demand curves won't be undermined by a falling cost of production. We could do that, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader who won't hear a word I'm saying anyway.
If we stay rooted in history and extrapolate, we're left with at least these options:
a) Allow free market capitalism to regress into authoritarian neofeudalism and create conditions similar to those of the early 20th century when robber baron industrialization caused widespread wage stagnation, leading to revolution and the seising of industry by displaced workers (communism or more accurately state capitalism like Russia's Bolshevik Revolution in 1917).
b) Raise taxes on the wealthy/capitalists (the owners of the means of production) through increased regulation, and use the proceeds to buy back and nationalize those economic inputs to fund public services and UBI (socialism like China's Second Centenary Goal or 2049 Plan).
c) Embrace the rapidly falling cost of technology to get ahead of widespread unemployment and bring about something like solarpunk, where open source tech like AI and 3D printing allow society to reduce the cost of living to nearly 0, so that people have the leisure time to embrace art, culture and the humanities to finally achieve widespread self-actualization (post-scarcity economics a.k.a. Star Trek when it eradicated poverty, hunger and war around 2113, 50 years after Zefram Cochrane achieved warp drive in 2063 and the Vulcans made first contact, as the story goes).
I'm partial to one of these, and have been putting my efforts into a home economics that can provide for at least one other person so that it can go viral. If we dream big enough, we could finally have what the wealthy and powerful will never have: enough.
[–] neutronicus 2 days ago
[–] zackmorris 2 days ago
If the wealthy and powerful continue buying land at the rate they are, through private equity firms for example, then we could end up in the neofeudalist scenario where us peasants can't acquire the capital to buy the land back (like in England before the Black Death around 1350 broke the nobles who could no longer afford essential workers). Then the only options left to us are taxes/regulation or revolution. Since the capitalists would have captured government by that point, the only option left may be revolution.
I could also see scenarios where we go full vanlife, although more vagrancy laws are being passed, and flock cameras could be used to enforce high registration fees to the point where it's no cheaper to live in one's car than to rent.
Admittedly those scenarios are pretty out there. Probably what will happen is something outside of what we expect. For example, the "rabble" may end up being the blue collar workers that we used to think of as the conservatives. They don't take any crap, so would probably requisition land to feed their families and guard it with firearms. If the authorities tried to take it back, armed conflict could very quickly squander any remaining goodwill held towards the capitalists.
We could play all this out with game theory, but I suspect that most scenarios end in revolution. That's probably why billionaires don't talk about the bunkers they're building. If they truly don't see a way out of the end times, then I don't know why they persist in doing what they're doing. At some point it would simply be in their financial best interest to raise their own taxes, or face the wrath of the people they formerly employed.