The Robot Economy and the Crisis of Capitalism: Why We Need Universal Basic Income

The success of capitalism depends on technology as well as markets (and social norms and state institutions). Markets enhance the efficiency of a society's allocation of resources, such as labour, between competing projects so that we spend them where they will create the most total value. In factories for example rather than in tiny subsistence farms. But there is a limit to the gains from better logistics. If that were all there was to capitalism then economic growth would have ended long ago - as the classical economists feared.

What saves us from a dead-end economy in which anyone's gain is someone else's loss (the kind of economy that some benighted environmentalists dream of) is technology. Technological innovations, from electricity to computing don't merely rearrange the resources we have, they multiply the value we can get out of them, the productivity of our economy. Thus, for example, from a black goop of compressed zooplankton we created a fuel source that transformed the cost-structure of transportation and made the horse redundant. And it doesn't end there. Recent developments in lithium battery technology and artificial intelligence are once again transforming the price of moving from A to B, making the human driver redundant.

In 1930 the famous economist JM Keynes made a prophecy about the Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren: Within 100 years the relentless trend of rising productivity would solve the ‘economic problem', the struggle to overcome scarcity that has characterised the human condition since our beginning. Finally, we would be able to turn as a society to considering what our enormous wealth can do for us, rather than what we must do to get it.

With the birth of the robot economy, Keynes' prophecy is coming true. Yet this is not a time for complacency. Unless we intervene, the same economic system that has produced this astonishing prosperity will return us to the Dickensian world of winners and losers that characterised the beginning of capitalism. Or worse. The problem is this, how will ordinary people earn a claim on the material prosperity of the capitalist economy if that economy doesn't need our labour anymore? 

Love's Labours Lost: How Robots Will Transform Human Intimacy

An elderly nursing home resident with a Paro robot companion 

The robots are coming.

Even though they won't actually think, they will behave enough like they do to take over most of the cognitive labour humans do, just as fossil-fuel powered machines displaced human muscle power in the 19th and 20th centuries. I've written elsewhere about the kind of changes this new industrial revolution implies for our political and moral economies if we are to master its utopian possibilities and head off its dystopian threats. But robots won't merely be set to work out in the world. They will also move into our homes, with consequences for human intimacy as we now know it. Robots will not only be able to do our household chores but also care work, performing the labours of love without ever loving. 

I see two distinct tendencies at work. First, because robots will allow us to economise on love, inter-human intimacy may become attenuated as we have less need of each other. Second, because robots will perform care better than we can, robots may become objectively more attractive than humans as intimate companions. 

Seizing the Utopian Possibilities of our Robot Future

Baxter is coming for your job

According to increasingly credible accounts (eg, eg, eg), the robot economy is on its way. Perhaps by as early as 2040 robots will be smart and dexterous enough to do pretty much everything humans call work as well as or better than us, and at a lower cost. If this scenario comes about, human societies and indeed the human condition will be radically changed. But will this future be utopian or dystopian? At least two dystopian threats must be actively addressed: inequality and meaninglessness.