Imagine the following. All artificial intelligences and robots in the world are quietly moved to Antarctica, and the continent becomes a kind of black box for the global economy. Cargo ships arrive with raw materials, rare earths, energy equipment and spare parts; ships leave again loaded with finished products, medical discoveries, translations, software systems, industrial designs and scientific papers. From the outside nobody quite knows what is happening down there. Perhaps it is a continent-sized automated factory. Perhaps human engineers still supervise immense machine systems. Perhaps the whole place has slipped beyond human comprehension altogether. In everyday life, however, that uncertainty hardly matters, because the only visible fact is that goods keep arriving, year after year, cheaper and better than before.
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Category: economics
On Shumer, Citrini and the Question of Stability
You might have read Shumer’s essay Something Big Is Happening and/or the recent Citrini Global Intelligence Crisis report – or perhaps just read about them in the press – and be wondering how they relate to the line of thought I have been developing in the two recent posts, Why Everything Actually Adds Up and Why This Does Not Stabilise.
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Why This Does Not Stabilise
In the previous essay, I argued that several apparently unrelated developments form a single pattern: the quiet erosion of professional value, the absence of visible productivity gains, rising political volatility and a growing dependence on housing wealth to maintain living standards. Together, these point to a slow but profound shift in where value now sits in the economy.
Why Everything Actually Adds Up
A number of things are currently deteriorating in ways that do not seem connected. Many professionals are quietly losing income without being laid off. The AI revolution is supposedly transformative, yet productivity barely moves. House prices in big cities keep rising even as people feel poorer. Voters drift towards authoritarian and anti-system parties.
Looked at separately, each of these developments has a tidy explanation. Looked at together, they tell a single story.
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Soil and Labour
Eight months ago I wrote here about the future of food – from robot foragers bringing wild garlic to your door to decentralised swaps of apples for eggs. That vision was about what ends up on our plates. But behind the cuisine lies the soil, and if the soil fails, so does every other dream.
You Cannot Eat Promises of a Brighter Tomorrow
The Industrial Revolution upended traditional ways of working. In its early stages, farmers and weavers who had once sold their goods locally found themselves undercut by machinery that churned out more at lower prices. With fewer customers and dwindling earnings, these people became part of a restless mass whose livelihoods had been overturned in the pursuit of efficiency. It’s crucial to remember that the new factory jobs which eventually replaced older roles did not appear overnight. Rather, they arrived slowly, in dribs and drabs, while the displaced workers struggled to pay rent or even secure a hot meal. That gap – between the promise of future prosperity and the immediate reality of being unable to make ends meet – created a tinderbox of public anger. Coupled with inadequate social support and a rapidly expanding wealth divide, the situation lit the fuse of protest and, in some instances, revolts. The lesson is that disruption on this scale rarely proceeds without resistance from those bearing its harshest consequences.
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Why AI and Robotics Make a Universal Basic Income Essential
The rapid advancements in artificial intelligence and robotics are transforming the nature of work and the economy. Tasks that once required human labour are now being automated at an accelerating pace, driving down the value of labour and creating profound economic challenges. If we do not adapt, these shifts could lead us to a dystopian society dominated by extreme inequality and neo-feudalism. However, there is a way forward: implementing a universal basic income (UBI) financed by taxing land, resources, and energy. This approach can ensure a fair distribution of wealth in a world where machines handle most of the production.
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