ForthIndustiralAge |
Edit |
Created: 20200715133815301
[1st-SteamPowered] Labor went from being seasonal and sporadic to being regular and needing a reliable concentration of workers continuously. This became the rise of the wage economy, because those workers needed to be housed, clothed, fed and kept at least moderately motivated to stay.
The 2nd industrial age came with the harnessing of oil, rather than coal.
AI
Almost all AIs work on this kind of feedback loop — Resolve, Analyze, Classify, Store, Act. The key here is that as the AI classifies and stores, it also changes its model.In other words, AIs learn.
It is this facet which makes AIs so powerful. AIs can learn to recognize patterns, and having learned them, can take more complex actions without needing to be explicitly programmed
Automation
Automation is fundamentally deflationary. You are producing more goods in less time, which means that eventually you end up creating excess goods. As things get smarter we have less waste.
Basic Living Income
Education and health would be out side this. A certain amount of money would also be available as "taxes" that you could choose to fund.
Finally, on top of that, you have private, government and crowd-sourced jobs. People can create corporations to fill a certain need and can solicit crowd-sourced funds to fund these. Profits go to the participants (which means that if you want to make money from a company, you would have to provide some sweat equity into it as well). You can be a broker, but brokerages are taxed. Corporations are also taxed, in proportion to the overall profits that are made, and are taxed on their own waste production.
Skills
That’s the price for admission to fourth industrial era jobs. Expecting that the skills you learned from thirty years ago will see you through the rest of your life is unrealistic at the best of times, and is even more true now. It also may mean relocating to where the jobs are. This is a harder barrier to cross, and it is one that many currently in the fourth economy know well.
Environment
I believe, though, that we need to look beyond the definition of jobs, especially once those get decoupled from the need to get beyond the basics, and concentrate on the fact that the fourth industrial age is far less destructive over all than the third.