Automated Society

What strategies could eliminate extreme poverty?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What are the most promising innovations or strategies today that could sustainably eliminate extreme poverty within the next generation?”

Thank you for the A2A, Faux-Bill. It is well beyond obvious that you are not the OG Bill Gates but a pretender. Whatever motivates you to disguise yourself as him and pose questions that he never would in such a forum is rationalized as a strategy for gaining attention that you believe you would not otherwise get.

I don’t believe questions like these require the kind of “celebrity boost” you’ve attached to them because I’m sure many people are thinking about these issues. Many politicians sadly believe people’s thoughts on these issues are irrelevant to their societal role. Nothing could be further from the truth because most of the world’s citizens sincerely desire an end to unnecessary strife across the globe.

Only the most psychologically scarred members of society wish harm to people on the other side of the globe or in the dingiest parts of their cities.

Even though people know this is a fake profile and that many would overlook this question based on precisely that, some people will still step forward and offer their views. Their answers support what I just said about people wanting to see change for the better, particularly when it is within our means to eliminate extreme poverty today.

Sadly, many politicians fail to comprehend that we are in this together, and that together means all of humanity must work toward common goals, such as eliminating poverty for it to happen. Even worse is that success requires our politicians to play the role of leader in society in earnest rather than as a performative lark to disguise their motivations for personal gain.

Far too few view their role beyond the boundaries of gamesmanship within the local jurisdiction of interpersonal dynamics of cliques, such as those commonly found in high school environments. They perform for each other and to the public at large. At the same time, their functional contributions are limited to shuffling game pieces in a subsection of the larger gameboard of their political community. Forget about communities elsewhere. That would constitute effort in thinking about and doing something about something elsewhere that isn’t directly connected to the influential factors governing their daily lives. Indirect connections don’t factor into their minds.

Here’s an obvious example of the complexity of dynamics that not enough people consider in their thoughts about how to improve our world and address issues like extreme poverty on the other side of the globe:

In this simple description of consequences, ten interconnected steps are outlined to arrive at the fundamental message that closing a door to a trading partner out of spite hurts oneself more than it hurts the trading partner.

China’s economy will contract briefly as it adjusts to a new reality. Americans, however, will suffer more in the long term because this attitude of bullying one’s partners closes off many doors of opportunity.

The same is true with the global tariff tirade and betraying a long-standing alliance with a supportive partner. Isolationism hurts the isolationists more than it hurts anyone they reject, and that’s where we’re at when considering issues of extreme poverty on the other side of the globe.

It is, unfortunately, too easy to rationalize how those problems “over there” are not one’s concerns here, but the reality is that poverty exists here as well. It’s just an arguable point about which is the easiest to ignore.

As you can see from the variety of answers given to this question and the variety of questions similar to this one, along with all the many other answers given to those questions, people want to solve this problem.

This brings us to the core problem at the heart of why the problem identified within this question persists.

The sad reality is that the core problem is YOU, Bill.

You and the existence of centibillionaires in today’s world are the reason why extreme poverty persists.

I understand how easy it is to rationalize your business successes as justification for having superior insights that can function like a paternalistic entity that can guide the little children of humanity toward a brighter future. I understand your rationale for the sheer capitalization required to provide the world with ecologically superior toilets. Still, you already know how you managed to distribute millions of life-saving nets in underdeveloped environments only through synergy. You relied on many people to rally behind your cause and donate whatever small amounts they could to solve a serious problem affecting millions of lives.

You made that happen, not with your capitalization but by leveraging some of your resources, connections, and celebrity status to mobilize people worldwide to provide a simple solution to a destructive problem.

Suppose you and the rest of the world sincerely desire an end to extreme poverty. In that case, there is only one solution, which begins with triage to stem the bleeding of resources that could collectively resolve the problem instead of exacerbating it, as has been the case due to extreme economic disparity.

The most successful way we have been in eliminating poverty worldwide as a society and a species has been through the massive growth of the middle class, as we experienced following the Second World War, FDR’s New Deal, and the development of unions.

By empowering the middle class with disposable income, we boosted economic performance along many vectors that were also boosted by force multipliers, which spread outward in orders of magnitude beyond what is possible today with coalesced wealth.

The existence of centibillionaires has made the goal of eliminating poverty impossible because this historically destructive concentration of wealth creates poverty through a contraction of available economic resources once wielded by hundreds of millions of people.

You know this. At least, the real Bill Gates does… as does every billionaire around the globe.

You cannot become a billionaire and be oblivious to how your concentrated wealth is a deprivation of wealth for others.

None of you is blind to this.

Since it’s taken decades of erosion of the gains that took a capitalist system decades of growth to achieve the highest level of poverty elimination, reversing that damage would mean decades of effort we don’t have the luxury of taking without experiencing a system-wide collapse.

We need bold efforts and fundamental changes to the economy and structure to meet a rapidly changing employment dynamic. We have no choice but to retool our economy before an increasingly rapid transformation toward fully automated societies where most production is performed in dark factories.

Suppose we don’t institute bold changes today. In that case, the transition will result in massive numbers of collateral damage that will be responded to with system-wide chaos because people will not shut up and die quietly as they find themselves starving for food and made homeless. When people have nothing left to live for after having their means of survival stripped from them, they become radicalized to such a degree that they are like cornered animals and will bring much destruction to the world before they exit it.

We need to reverse course on the corrosion done to our economies through the problem of wealth disparity yesterday. This should not be a debate today; if you were the real Bill Gates, you know this.

There isn’t a single billionaire who doesn’t understand this. You are all also hedging your bets while, like every cowardly politician who doesn’t want to risk their comfortable positions, none of you want to be the first to acknowledge what needs to be done. Your reticence is understandable because your community is primarily dominated by sociopathic thinking. It would behoove you to remind your peers that each passing day this nightmare of disparity remains unaddressed is a day closer to the massive unrest that brings out the guillotines.

This brings us to the core concern driving this question.

Which strategy is the most effective resource to invest your attention?

What singular and most expediently implemented solution can effectively stave off and resolve the growing pressure leading to widespread chaos?

That’s easy, and you already know the answer… if you were the real Bill Gates.

Reset capitalism like a Monopoly board.

There’s been enough testing to know this is THE solution to restore economic justice and dramatically impact poverty worldwide.

You already know this.

The only real issue at stake is the best means of implementing it.

Here’s a link introducing the various issues to consider with costing strategies that can be discussed earnestly. These are just details to work out. The result, however, is a stable economy that can eliminate poverty worldwide while eventually making performative forms of altruism moot.

However, every one-percenter should champion this solution in principle in earnest today, particularly if they want to avoid the chaos that risks them losing everything.

How to Calculate the Cost of Universal Basic Income (Hint: It’s Not As Easy As You Might Think)

Update:

What effects do you think AI will have on society?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What effects do you think AI will have on society? Realistically, are people overreacting who say they’ll take all the jobs and run the world?”

Realistically, machines can’t “take jobs away” from people. Organizations and the capitalists who fund them while demanding optimal revenue generation at the lowest cost possible are choosing automated solutions to the labour cost.

This trend, of course, does displace workers as technologies have always done. Unlike previous generations of technological advancement, however, the displacement is not limited to specialized functions.

For example, armies of people sawing logs by hand were not entirely displaced by the introduction of sawmills. Labour was reallocated and redefined. Instead of pushing a saw back and forth, labour became a process of pushing buttons.

Of course, fewer people needed to produce the same volume of lumber, but there was also enough demand to scale production and create employment opportunities further up the production line.

At the height of the technological transition to a digital age, we saw many jobs displaced, but new categories of employment at much higher levels of complexity emerged. Secretaries who transcribed letters were replaced by administrative assistants who functioned in a data entry capacity. At the same time, executives eventually learned it was more efficient and pleasurable to directly type their thoughts into word processors rather than proofread changes multiple times over in an often frustratingly long process.

Network technicians, web designers, database developers, and an entire class of Information Technology workers sprung up almost overnight — by contrast to how the labour demographic had evolved since the dawn of the Industrial Age.

That’s no longer the case in today’s dynamic.

The AI revolution will not spawn demand for new labour beyond the minimal replacement of armies of people pushing saws with one person pushing buttons.

Before this current stage of technological evolution, it was easily argued that displacement versus the creation of new jobs approximated a one-to-one exchange. The hundreds of thousands of trucking jobs replaced by self-driving vehicles will not result in new jobs created to transport goods globally. Self-navigating cargo vessels will not create 15 to 30 new jobs per ship when intelligent robots replace workers.

Hundreds of millions of jobs worldwide will be transitioned to an automation model.

This brutal inevitability ignores issues used as political footballs and bypasses all the fearmongering over demanding higher wages. Automation will displace jobs, but not because automation “takes those jobs.” Technological innovation has always been and always will be a more efficient way of doing business.

Although the transition to an automated society is often viewed as a technological transformation, it is primarily a social transformation. People are going to have to stop thinking about “getting jobs” and starting about how to generate revenue for themselves by leveraging services as independent entrepreneurs. This view of capitalism has always been at the heart of the capitalist vision, and it was cemented in our psychology when business was granted personhood status.

The primary challenge within this transition is to provide the means to pursue one’s independent revenue-generating efforts with the necessary resources to succeed as an independent business owner.

We are inundated with exposure to the results of resources transforming our world by creating new classes of the wealthy whose net worth far exceeds previous generations — even after accounting for inflation. Henry Ford, for example, was a highly successful industrialist, but his net worth and reach don’t come close to Elon Musk’s status as a centibillionaire. It can be argued, of course, that such a disparity is a consequence of a corrupted tax burden. Still, those factors don’t fully explain the difference in dollar value between Ford’s millions and Musk’s centibillions.

The profit potential has never been more significant simply because the markets that once comprised a few million consumers now stretch across the globe, with a population approaching eight billion potential consumers. This global reach is why it is often argued that it’s easier today to become wealthy than before.

The reality, however, is that just like yesteryear, resources are required as seed funding to support the creation of tomorrow’s industry giants.

We cannot continue to rely on dynasties to dominate the innovation engine because they are not naturally innovative. They are conservative and often repressive by nature because they are risk-avoidant.

The heart of capitalism beats to the tune of innovation. There is no more significant potential for innovation than the eight billion people mostly trying to carve out a living while engaged in activities they value. The handful of billionaires and centibillionaires cannot compete with that innovative potential. By allowing our species to be directed by such a small number of individuals, we are limiting our potential as a species while granting too much power to people who are so grossly corrupted by it that they have become a threat to our future survival.

We must level the playing field and empower the little people who can put to great shame the illusion that the powerful in society are so far above the rest of us that we can’t survive without their direction.

Not only can we survive without them, but we can prosper in ways currently impossible under their thumbs.

We need UBI to release humanity from the yoke of our oppressors and fully embrace our creative potential through the innovative possibilities unlocked to us all through a fully automated society.

Will money and economies still exist if all jobs are automated?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Will money and economies still exist, if all jobs get automated? If all jobs are automated, what will people work to earn money? If all jobs are automated, will people receive everything they want and need, for free, without having to work?”

Within a fully automated society, people will have their needs taken care of.

Wants are an entirely different beast.

If you want money to travel around the globe, you’ll still need to earn money to afford that.

If you want to buy a sportscar instead of using public transit, you’ll still need to earn money to afford that.

How you make money will be more a choice for you rather than a necessity made of compromise by a perpetual lowering of your expectations.

You won’t be forced to take a job you hate because you’re afraid of being made homeless. You’ll be able to hold out until you find a vocation you like and that brings meaning to you and your life.

You’ll have many more options for being self-employed than now in ways only emerging today as viable systems to help you bring your imagination to life.

I’ve recently discovered an entirely new concept for doing just that. Check it out:

The site is called “Makeship.” What makes it unique is that you can design your character, and if your design is accepted, it will be made into a plush toy that you can sell for a profit. They handle all the “heavy lifting” from converting your design into a 3D plush toy, its production process, and, to a large extent, a lot of your marketing through crowd-funded campaigns.

Makeship

Many new initiatives are sprouting up everywhere that approach manufacturing, sales, and distribution from a service-oriented perspective.

You’ve probably already heard about dropshipping, where you can essentially choose products from a distribution catalogue and assemble them in a store where you handle all the sales for those products. They handle all the packaging and shipping for you.

This is just the beginning of the new world of automation.

Large entities will capitalize on individual ingenuity, innovation, and effort by empowering the little people to go out and carve their niches in the commercial world.

With the assistance of AI, we’ll be able to produce full-scale movies for distribution simply by the prompts and tweaks we make to flesh out our creative visions in ways that others would want to consume.

Life won’t cater to people without ambition or desire to work, but it will become a panoply of options and opportunities everyone can exploit.

With these tools at our disposal, we’ll finally enter an age where merit is not lip service disguising favouritism. Whatever you imagine will stand or fall on the strength of your effort without being buffeted about by the day’s politics.

Instead of fearing automation, we should be learning to embrace it and leaning into it to begin pushing our governments to adapt to a new world without waiting for widespread suffering through the transition process to compel them to solve problems that can be avoided.

UBI will save millions of lives if we begin implementing it now. If we wait until millions of jobs are lost, then we will lose a lot more than millions of lives, and we’ll end up coping with the daily chaos of ongoing riots and widespread destruction of property.