"We never predicted that capitalism would be eaten by its own son, technology."
- Eric Weinstein, Hedge Fund Manager and Mathematical Physicist
One of the troubling, saddening, and not-so-commonly-known things about our historic place in the arc of human technological advancement and the evolution of capitalism is that the intrinsic value of human labor is diminished.
In public discourse, we often blame the social problem of 'affordability' somewhat accurately: it's inflation, bureaucracy, greed, that make things expensive. This exists alongside the truth that technology makes things cheaper and our lives better. It does. Capitalists in superior competitive positions love technology, because they can leverage it to dominate their industries and competitors, and to amplify their wealth. But at what cost?
I will argue herein that the cost of technological advancement is to our culture and lifestyle, our health and happiness. At the core of growing wealth disparity is an unseen truth: technology replaces skills, thereby diminishing the intrinsic value of human labor, fortifying a techno-feudal caste system of displaced workers, tech workers, and tech owners. There is a ghost in the machine.
To understand this conclusion, let's start with this simple truth: the wealth of a population or organization or ultimately an individual is limited by markets, because people won't buy what they don't want or need. If a technology was invented that allowed Nestle, for instance, to make a trillion dollars worth of chocolate bars with only one employee and dominate the market for chocolate bars, they still would only produce as much as people will buy, because the market for chocolate bars is only so much. Where are they going to store the extra bars? The cost of the excess product would reach a natural asymptotic utility. The owners of Nestle, therefore, will only win the wealth of the market value, and no more.
According to Gemini, the world market value of chocolate bars is $119 billion. Technology can make chocolate bars cheaper by lowering overhead and increasing productivity. Nestle can increase their marketing budget to try and increase demand. But Nestle can't expand the market for chocolate bars past whatever it is in the moment. The total wealth that can exist in a population, therefore, is not based on the potential of what can be produced, but rather by what a business can sell, according to market demand.
This future, where a dominant Nestle is operated by one employee with infinite productivity is not as crazy an analogy as you may think - we are already well on our way there. The implementation of technology and the concomitant increase in individual productivity has been occurring slowly for a long time, slow enough that people have hardly noticed, and worse, they have forgiven it. We are, after all, on the precipice of a wave of technology that will forever transform human culture and lifestyle -- artificial intelligence, humanoid robotics, nanotechnology, quantum computing, etc.
Imagine the autoworker who was first replaced by early robotics decades ago. Most would presume that these people were simply let go to find work elsewhere. In actuality, organizations don't like layoffs unless absolutely necessary -- it's bad press. Often, workers whose jobs are automated are moved into other positions where the intrinsic value of their labor is diminished. They are now working an invented job with the same pay, while producing less value. When the recession comes, and layoffs are trending, now is the time when that employee gets the axe. But the documented reason for the layoff is the recession, not automation, the actual cause. Even the worker doesn't notice that her labor was diminished by the true enemy, technology.
Understanding that technology is both good and evil is a controversial sentiment that is gaining popularity. Even millennials can remember a time when the internet was chat rooms, forums, and blogs, before it succumbed to the pathetic narcissism and false idolatry of social media. But not many realize how the intrinsic value of our labor is ruining our ability to participate with traditional lifestyles like home ownership, parenthood, and self-sufficiency. We hear only what our overlords tell us, while the value of our labor -- and of technology's labor -- funnels up to them and away from the workers themselves in psychopathic disproportion.
