OK, we get it. We saw the havoc that the financial crisis, the bailouts, QE, and ZRIP wreaked on jobs. We saw the destructiveness on jobs and the general economy of the corporate focus on deploying the nearly free capital to buy back shares and engage in financial engineering and enrich the elite of Wall Street and corporate America, rather than investing in labor and training.
We got that the jobs scenario in America will never be the same again. Things have changed. We moved on. Learned to cope with it. We adjusted the statistics, removed people from the official labor force, and thereby brought the unemployment rate in line where we can feel comfortable with it. Life goes on, as they say.
But now there’s a whole new problem, and an ancient one, one that is getting worse by the day, one that we as society cannot deal with easily by simply removing people from the labor force – though that will likely be part of the solution. The problem isn’t really a problem. It’s a solution to a problem. We’re proud of it. It speaks of the greatness of the human mind and is testament to its true genius: automation.
Automation used to be an effort to build machines to replace inefficient and weak human muscles. But now it’s increasingly becoming a replacement for human brains.
It’s already happening, but no one is ready for it.
Automation is inevitable, the hard-hitting video below points that. It’s a tool to create abundance with little effort – “but that we need to start thinking now as to what to do when large sections of the population become unemployable due to no fault of their own.”
The stock market in many ways is no longer a human endeavor. “It’s mostly bots, that taught themselves to trade stocks, trading stocks with other bots that taught themselves.”
These bots rule. News media carry stories that were written by these bots – or algos, as we like to call them – and they’re read by bots that then trade with other bots and enter and cancel orders in a fraction of a second to drive stocks one way or the other. And other bots can write more stories about bot trading with other bots, and about stories that other bots had written, so that more bots can react to them instantaneously [This Chart Shows How You Get Screwed in the Stock Market].
Which makes me think: Is that why the mainstream media are stumbling so badly? Because humans don’t want to read stories written by bots for bots?