Abstract
This chapter indicates main themes of the book: the causes of and the responsibility for growing unemployment and social inequality. The author, a technologist, admits that a part of the causes belongs to technology, but most causes result from the capitalist system. This system includes a mechanism of capital replacing labour (actually, investments in technology replacing labour), and this mechanism contains a positive feedback, accelerating such replacement (the more a capitalist earns by such replacement, the more similar investments follow). Such investments occur today at unprecedented scope and speed and this is the main cause of resulting social troubles. The chapter includes also a short review of related literature.
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- 1.
Lem envisaged a society without work, but did not specify precisely how the problems of distribution and redistribution will be solved in this society. Before Lem , two writers addressed seriously the social consequences of automation: Wiener (1948) and Pollock (1957). Both of them, however, hoped that future society will find new employment ways. The same I hoped even in 2000, when I wrote on the megatrends of information society (Wierzbicki 2000), with one megatrend motivating the change of professions. However, I observe today that automation occurs simply too fast and people would have to change professions too many times during lifetime.
- 2.
The cost of producing the last additional specimen of a product that, according to the classical economic theory, should define the price on a free market. However, in knowledge-based economy these costs strongly decrease, and prices on high technology markets have lost any dependence on marginal production costs (see Chap. 3). This was noted already by Labini (1962) who has shown that prices on oligopoly markets do not depend on marginal production costs.
- 3.
The most simple example of a process with positive feedback is snow avalanche: the more snow it gathers in the beginning, the more it can gather later—until it hits the opposite hillside, which I call here “hitting the ceiling”. Another example is a nuclear bomb: the more particles (e.g., of uranium) are destroyed, the more other particles can be destroyed next, until the bomb runs short of particles. In a nuclear power plant the same process occurs, but it is limited by a restrictive negative feedback: if the intensity of nuclear reaction grows too much, the rods controlling this intensity should be inserted deeper; however, if such automatic control system is switched off (e.g. for experimental reasons, as it happened in Chernobyl), a catastrophe will follow.
- 4.
By neoliberalism we understand here not a variant of liberalism (a noble belief that the modern society is founded on respect for individual freedom), but its extreme economic interpretation, a belief that it is sufficient to provide market freedom, and free market will solve every problem. Such belief is evidently propaganda in favour of main market players, since market efficiently solves only the problems that can be easily translated into money, but not those related to higher values: healthy natural environment, justice, objectivity.
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Wierzbicki, A.P. (2016). Introduction. In: The Future of Work in Information Society. SpringerBriefs in Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33909-2_1
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