@Biomech, I fully agree with you about usefulness of the technology. Again, I am not a Luddite as someone may falsely think.
The problem is in the currently-dominant political system and redistribution mechanisms. Robots and automation can open new era of greatest prosperity for everyone if properly used!
Well, on this we agree. I've refrained from heckling and mocking because you seem an intelligent person. You've now given me a basis for both agreement and argumentation.
I fully agree with your statement:
The problem is in the currently-dominant political system and redistribution mechanisms.
However, you seem to be directly attacking capitalism, which is
not a political system. It is rather an economic system, and it operates both in and out of the existing political paradigms. The harsh truth that most do not wish to acknowledge is that the modern system, even in nominally communist countries, is a form of corporatism. That was the name that Mussolini gave to his system, even though the party was called "fascist". We associate fascism with rampant nationalism and deliberate institutionalized hatred of a specific group. While that was how it was implemented in Nazi germany, these are not the central facets of that system.
I'll elucidate, and try to construct a logical argument as to why I think that such systems are coming to an end long before technology renders US obsolete, as it has already rendered fascism obsolete. It's just that it's a stubborn beast and hasn't finished dying.
caveat to you and those following. This is going to be long, and tl;dr is impossibleTo start, I have to lay down my axioms. If not, too many of the terms I use can be misconstrued. This is necessary due to both "drift" in the vernacular and deliberate obfuscation by many hostile and interested parties.
So. Capitalism is an
economic system in which property and the means of production are held by private individuals and growth is fueled by investment of capital.
Capital is tangible goods, securities against tangible goods, and currency. This can be expanded upon, but that is good enough for now.
In modern parlance, capitalism has come to be associated with
corporatism and
fascism. While both have capitalistic elements, they do not tolerate a great deal of free markets, which is where capitalism really shines.
I am an
agorist for the most part, and I believe Bitcoin and its derivatives to be one of the coolest counter economic forces ever conceived.
The modern world is absolutely dominated by Coporatism, whereby the state allows private business, but heavily regulates it in order to foster both patronage and dependence. The modern mega corporation is entirely a creature of the state right down to being considered a 'person' at matters of law. Without the State, the mega corporation could not exist, for the state provides it with protection. Without the mega corporations, particularly banks, the modern State could not exist for it would be limited in power by how much ACTUAL capital it could obtain.
While the modern state does not, for the most part, go for the openly totalitarian route of the early 20th century, it does intrude on every aspect of human life, and it does so for totalitarian reasons. For purely political reasons, it tries to appear to be at arms length in the most intimate of our affairs. But it retains the "right" and definitely the ability, to intrude upon everything.
One of it's prime features, in varying degrees, is that it constantly foments fear of "the others". This is a fascistic element, but they have refined it from the crude "Juden Verbotten" of Hitler. He played primarily on jealousy and hatred. Those are powerful emotions, but the more modern state has figured out the most important emotion for manipulation: Fear. Fear motivates people, but it also short circuits analysis. This allows the State, and by extension it's corporate patrons, to exploit people in such a way that they beg for more. The United State Of America (that's not a typo) is the current master of this dark art, going so far as to declare perpetual war on an emotion.
Another constant feature of such rulership is to constantly pit one group against another to create internal strife, with each group crying out to the rulers to ameliorate their grievance. Which it never does, but it constructs so-called laws to make it APPEAR to do so. Every one of these laws creates more problems, deliberately in most cases, than it was supposed to solve. So then they build on that. This is a time consuming process. A thing that most people fail to grasp is that those who seek to rule do not think in terms of today and tomorrow, they think in terms of generations. While nominally, my country of birth does not have an hereditary ruling class, the truth is other than this. The same few families have dominated the political process for generations. Oh, sure, from time to time an outsider learns the game well enough to get inside, but he is either quickly marginalized (e.g. Ron Paul) or becomes captured by the system and willingly or unwittingly helps to expand it. The One Rule for those who would rule is simply this: The Rules do not apply to the Rulers. In my youth I was heavily involved in the political process, and I found one overwhelming truth: A politician wants power the way a drowning man wants air. He will do anything, no matter how vile, to get it. His only principle is the aggregation of power. It matters not to him how he gets it, what lies, frauds, or murders he must commit, who he betrays, nothing. He only cooperates with others vying for absolute power to the extent that he must to get his piece of it. The only positive thing about this is that while most of them are clever, most aren't very intellectual. They have no inkling of the world outside of their bubble, since who cares what the cattle do as long as they don't rebel.
But this long view has some serious weaknesses, and so does the lust for power. They simply cannot conceive of a world in which there are not central rulers. It is unthinkable to them. Not merely an abomination to their religion, but an anomaly. The Thing That Should Not Be. Thus the technology that they use is not something they feel the need to understand. Regulate, yes, but not understand.
In the 19th and early 20th century, this did not greatly affect them. They had sufficient sway and the technology was sufficiently crude that they could still do the thing most important to rulers in maintaining their power: Control the flow of information. A few inventions put paid to that, though most have yet to figure it out. The first was the telegraph, as information could be transmitted over long distances nearly instantly. They realized the danger in that, and quickly co-opted it. But the genie was out of the bottle, and not long after, radio came about. They quickly co-opted that, but not quick enough. Ideas started getting spread to the great unwashed. Ideas that were not sanctioned by the state.
Then, unfortunately, came a great boon to the rulers. Television. It was regulated right from the start, and what went out, for the most part, was what they approved. Over time they were able to promote it as something necessary and needed. People became addicted, and programming got more and more sophisticated and more devoid of content. Especially news. Where a newspaper article was likely to be vetted, censored, and defanged, it was still somewhat in-depth. TV news consists of sound bites that don't even make internal sense, yet people depend on it. Or did.
During the time they were perfecting the TV as the perfect propaganda machine, technology marched on. Inventors invent things whether anyone likes it or not. A group of rather smart people in and out of government accidentally created the greatest weapon for freedom ever conceived: Networked computers. By the late '70s, the penetration of D'arpanet by people such as myself was commonplace. So commonplace that about a decade and a half later, they gave up and released the protocol. Shortly thereafter, a guy working at CERN came up with a file retrieval system for their internal documents, and the World Wide Web was born. It is explicitly, if not exactly, what the hackers of my generation were working towards. I think I was in the minority in seeing that. Most of the hackers of my generation were appalled by the internet, because we all thought of capitalism as the system in place, and while we were young and idealistic, most of us weren't real well educated. The Web achieved our dream of nearly free and nearly instantaneous communication of ideas across the globe, and it did it so fucking fast that it caught everyone off guard. Including the rulers. It continues to move at that pace.
Now that we can communicate without the artificial barriers of Nation and Status, we're doing so. This has raised some ugly truths, such as most people really are as complacent and dumb as the rulers hoped for, but it has also put forth the opportunity to deconstruct them. A beautiful truth is that the internets have become absolutely vital for the operation of the modern state. The will fall before the net does. Therein lies the seeds of their destruction, because we can all talk, we can think to the future, and if we adopt their attitude of the long view ALONG WITH the adaptability of the modern marketplace, they will simple become irrelevant in not that long of a time frame.
From where I sit, the next stage in that evolution is already happening. More and more of us are starting our own niche businesses through the medium of the internet. Digital currencies evolved in the marketplace in a haphazard manner prior to Bitcoin, bu the concept was already there. Linden dollars had real world value. Gold from Diablo traded for dollars and goods. Satoshi just raised the level and formalized it. The beauty of this is that even if bitcoin fails, the concept has already been proven, and like the internet, the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. Every day more people get involved with cryptocurrency, and thus at least begin to control their own fate.
This leads to a shadow employment. Not truly a black market, as most of what is done is not illegal. It's just off teh books. It's international in scope, and individual in practice. As more and more people adopt these ideas, the less attractive is the central government ideal of dividing the world into chunks and fighting over them. In 1980, you would never have convinced me that I would be talking to guys around the world on a device made in Taiwan, China, and Vietnam while minting a digital currency on a device made in Bulgaria and assembled in The USA. The technology has brought us together as a species to a greater degree than any time in the previous history of man. The old strategies are no longer working, since the advent of all of these means of both trade and communication.
All that stands in the way of the inevitable collapse of the current political systems is a few generations of BELIEF in the super state. And it is really a short time frame. Prior to the 20th century, huge Empires were an aberration. Most "nations" were small. Even those who weren't didn't have a great reach. The super state probably has its origins in Rome, but its full flowering did not happen until the 20th century. It may have even been a necessary stage in human development. I won't concede that, but I'll concede the possibility. But now, in the early 21st, it is entirely obsolete. And what's more, those in power are fully aware of their obsolescence. They are fighting a desperate holding action against their own subjects. Here in the United State of America, it has become obvious to all but the dense that they are utterly in fear of their "citizens". I am 45 years old, and the difference in the overt use of military force via "police" forces is astounding. When I was a young man, a cop who gunned down a mother for giving him lip would hang. Possibly literally. Now he'll be given a pass and feted as a hero. Yet what he did will likely be on somebody's smartphone, and a few minutes later viewable 'round the world. The stark contrast between what they sell us and what they actually do is everywhere and right in the open. They pretend that they still control the information. Truth is, they cannot.
And this will be their undoing. There will come a point where the subjects realize that they outnumber the rulers AND THEIR ARMIES by such significant numbers that they need not accept the fear. They will have seen through the lenses of the smartphones of their friends, neighbors, and countrymen just exactly what the government really is: A criminal gang with a patina of legitimacy. When that happens in large numbers (not if, it's inevitable), that gang will have two choices: Bow out gracefully or go to war. Being what they are, they will choose the latter. Which likely will seal their fate and doom them to a particularly nasty page of history.
Following that, people will likely break down into smaller self supporting groups. But the 'net and it's attendant ease of commerce and communication will remain. Some groups will be more successful than others, and they will be emulated, but the central government paradigm will have been fragmented.
To get there, we need a lot of education, and a lot of preparation on the part of people who can understand the old writing on the wall "mene, mene, tekel, uparshin!" Because when a large government fails, it usually happens very fast and the majority are caught unawares. This leads to a lot of problems, and they do tend to fairly quickly establish more rulers. There is something in a large number of humans that wants to be dominated.
But I think that when this starts happening (and it already has around the peripheries) that a good number of people will opt out, start their own communities of like minded individuals, and succeed. Those people will not be displaced by robots, though they might make good use of them. And the mega corporations WILL NOT survive the death of the Imperial powers without radical reorganization. The concept of the Juridical Person will be abolished without the "governing authority", and they will have to compete on their own merits. Without the system of debt that is the current system of economics, they will shrink massively if they don't fail altogether.
Another part of this equation that bears mention is the whole open source phenomenon. People are giving away their intellectual prowess, and making a profit on the idea anyway.
In closing, I'm going to quote a gentleman who's name I've forgotten, but his quote will be with me forever.
"I cannot predict the future, but the trends I see indicate 6 billion small businesses".
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