Abstract
In the previous chapter, we saw that capitalism itself requires redistribution to maintain capitalism. In this chapter, we will see that redistribution is also required for an important social good: peace.
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Notes
This chapter borrows very substantially from a previously published article: Mark Walker, “BIG and Technological Unemployment: Chicken Little Versus the Economists,” Journal of Evolution &; Technology 24, 1 (2014): 5–25.
Growing a Nation, “Historical Time Line,” 2005, http://www.agclassroom.org/gan/timeline/.
Ira Sager, “Farm Bots and Two-Month-Old Bread: Innovations in Food and Agriculture,” 2013, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013–01–10/farm-bots-and-two-month-old-bread-inno-vations-in-food-and-agriculture. Erik Sofge, “3 New Farm Bots Programmed to Pick, Plant and Drive,” Popular Mechanics, 2009, http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/ robots/4328685 .
Ralph Gonzales et al., “Excessive Antibiotic Use for Acute Respiratory Infections in the United States,” Clinical Infectious Diseases 33, 6 (2001): 757–762.
David Levy, “The Ethics of Robot Prostitutes,” in Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics, ed. Patrick Lin, Keith Abney, and George A Bekey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 223–232.
Raja Roy, “Exploring the Boundary Conditions of Disruption: Large Firms and New Product Introduction with a Potentially Disruptive Technology in the Industrial Robotics Industry,” 2014, http://iee-explore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6578147.
The tendency to underestimate the robotic revolution is apparent even in Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s wonderful book Race Against the Machine (Brynjolfsson and McAfee, Race against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy (Lexington, MA: Digital Frontier Press, 2011)). They men-tion that humans still have a competitive advantage in fine motor skills, and so gardeners and busboys have occupations that are safe, at least for now. However, the Kura chain demonstrates the dispensability of much of the labor of busboys, and robotic lawn motors are busy today replacing the labor of human gardeners. The most detailed and methodologically sound investigation of the issue I know of can be found in Frey and Osborne (2013). They identify 702 distinct occupations in the US work force and have found that “about 47 percent of total US employment is at risk” Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?” Retrieved September 7 (2013). http://assets.careerspot.com.au/files/news/The_Future_of_Employment_OMS_Working_Paper_1.pdf.
Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). This passage is quoted in Brynjolfsson and McAfee, Race against the Machine .
Karl Widerquist and Michael A. Lewis, “A n Efficiency Argument for the Basic Income Guarantee,” International Journal of Environment, Workplace and Employment 2, 1 (2006): 21–43.
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© 2016 Mark Walker
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Walker, M. (2016). Peace, Robots, and Technological Unemployment. In: Free Money for All. Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137471338_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137471338_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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