Class Robots

It takes two for capitalism to dance - capitalists and workers. In the 1980s capitalists were nearly eradicated, but neoliberalism rescued them from extinction. From that time wages gave up following productivity - workers were held on the subsistence minimum of modern society and capitalism blossomed once more.

Since then automation and robotics have arrived from the wonderful world of technology. Now capitalists no longer need to keep workers squeezed, they can simply drop them altogether and put in robots instead. We already have examples of complete factory floors with only robots at work - happily producing 24/7 (solar cells in Korea).

So capitalism seems to be headed for an economy without workers.

But now the interesting part: why only worker-robots?

The next step will be to robotize the capitalists themselves. After all - what do the capitalists do? Owning and managing wealth for investment, profit and thus economic growth. With AI there is no need to have humans struggling and sweating with such hard intellectual work and social networking - this is an easy field for robotic automation - 24/7 - with increased profitability and productivity at hand.

So capitalism will be headed for an economy only with robots - no capitalists, no workers - the tango will be danced by robots only: capitalist-robots and worker-robots.

Affluence achieved

Now - who will own the robots? The owner-robot¹ - who has outperformed all human capitalists.

What are humans going to do? Relax and consume -we have reached affluence.

Have we soon reached Marx’s vision? Hunting in the morning, dancing in the evening!

But why should the robots produce for human consumption - after all that is only a drain on the robotic capital accumulation. Better get rid of humans altogether as they cannot feed themselves without robots. So just turn off the feeder robots or let warrior robots do the job.

Mission completed

So the brave new world will be fine without humans: Robots produce robots that produce more robots … untill the globe is filled up. Then the robots will go on to Mars and disappear in the star dust beyond the Milky Way.

It’s just the logic of capitalism playing out.

No need to wait for the Sun’s final expansion. As always - capitalism fixed it on its own.