In a recent article in Nature titled: "where to put the next billion people" it elucidates something just in the title alone. It shows that society determines where people are put, and where people are put determines how people are forced to live. Urbanization is the result of industrialization which required a lot of relatively unskilled human labor to keep society running. Urban society breaks down once robots and other technologies such as AI reduce the necessity for having unskilled human labor. Human laborers might fight it, and even political parties such as "labor parties" will become irrelevant in a world where organized labor becomes less useful.

The role of organized labor

Organized labor is based on certain assumptions such as that the unskilled labor which can organize will always be valuable to society. So taxi drivers may form a union, and demand a minimum amount of money or else they'll go on strike. They might vote for certain politicians who promise to create and raise the minimum wage. The problem here is eventually the self driving taxi makes the human labor based taxi irrelevant and all of that organization in the form of unions may opt to fight the technology, the machines, the robots, and resort to banning or heavily restricting self driving vehicles.

Why the urban environment is set to collapse

Most people think of racial issues in the urban environment but the real issue isn't so much the race of the inhabitants. It is true that certain races such as blacks, jews, and some others, have been put in these environments by force, by redlining and other racist policies in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and even up until the 1980s. In the end the conflict is ultimately between human labor and machine labor, and the particular races of humans who lost their jobs in Detroit is irrelevant. At the same time a place like Detroit becomes a ghetto particularly because the government and society refuses to adapt to changes in technology which make certain functions obsolete. This could be many things, from unions, to public schools, to the political system, to the real estate bubble and artificial scarcities which keep the cost of living high.

The urban environment does not promote self sufficiency or sustainability. It was designed with certain assumptions, where either there must always be job growth which out paces population growth, or where there must always be government programs for people who are less fortunate. The education system is based on a model where factory workers had to be prepared to work, where jobs were plentiful, and where a highschool diploma was good enough to work in a factory. This was true in the 1950s and that is why in that time a highschool diploma was something of utility. In 2016 a highschool diploma isn't going to provide a job opportunity, because almost everyone has one, and most jobs require a college degree with years of experience or no degree or highschool diploma.

The limitation of the urban environment is not just in the expectation of the people who live there which may be a problem going into the future, but also because of the fact that unlike in rural environments there isn't much tolerance for self sufficient living in an urban environment. In a rural environment it is at least possible for a family to live off the grid, hunt for food, grow their own crops, and live almost like an Amish lifestyle. This life style does not require the sort of skills which are taught in highschool or in college, but it does require skills such as how to build a house, how to acquire food, how to survive off the land. Many of these skills are skills which have been forgotten during the process of putting people in urban environments and as a result, options are limited for what to do in the case of an urban economic collapse.

In urban environments there is an expectation that the government would support the people in an economic collapse. That there can be government programs and wealth redistribution to allow people in these situations to sustain themselves. At the same time the government has no long term plan for how people will be able to live sustainable in a long term fashion, without the government programs having to be in place or in times where perhaps funding for these programs is cut. Because most people in these environments have no capacity to grow their own food, there is a need for social programs such as food stamps. In some cases charity is necessary, but the problem long term is that each year new people are born, and unless the food supply is increased locally, the food has to be produced outside of the city and imported in. In the situation of a natural disaster or collapse, there could be food shortages, looting, rioting, and civil unrest. The only long term solution for this is to increase the capacity of each citizen to generate at least some portion of their food directly.

Some people would say it must be some kind of joke to expect every American to have the capacity to grow at least some of their own food. In my opinion, giving every American this capacity is a means of reducing the demand and stress on government programs. It's also a long term solution for decreasing the cost of living which is really the only way to avoid an economic collapse in urban environments. It is the case that as automation, AI and similar technologies increase, the risk of technological unemployment increases, and there is no reason to believe millions of jobs lost for unskilled laborers will ever be replaced. Jobs do get created and this is true, but these jobs will pay significantly less and less over time until perhaps millions of people are remote workers, doing jobs which resemble Amazon Turk. These jobs are called microjobs, and they are forms of work, but if you look closely you will notice there is no minimum wage, there is no traditional structure, you get paid hundreds of dollars a month instead of thousands, with the exception being the superstars who are almost always going to be rare.

Future work

Today we know some of these future jobs, which include posting on Steemit, but also include being a Youtuber, being an Instagram marketer, being a social media professional, or being some form of Internet famous. These jobs will always exist, and could be considered a form of unskilled labor in some cases, but these jobs typically do not pay enough for the cost of living in the typical urban environments. Urban economic collapse could happen as the current housing bubble collapses in spectacular fashion, as the taxi driver or truck driver (there are millions of them) will not be able to pay their mortgage, will not necessarily even be able to afford rent in some places, and from this there will be a question which arises of what will the people displaced from their jobs do?

The failure of the public education system

Public education is a total failure. If someone is a millennial perhaps they graduated highschool, went to college, did everything their parents told them to do, and now they live in their parents basement unable to afford a house of their own, or even pay rent in an apartment without roomates. Public education does not train students to find a good job, nor does it teach self sufficient living off the land, but it does indoctrinate. In my current opinion the best hope for education is to go virtual, and let the student go at whatever pace they desire, to learn whatever skills necessary to survive in their unique environment, which will different from location to location, and education should be personalized to the unique background and demographic of the student. Artificial intelligence would be able to determine how best to educate a student perhaps better than any human can, and can personalize the education to such a point where it can cater to the unique demographic details, personality, and ethnic/cultural background of each student. Human teachers will still have to exist, but function more as mentors and coaches than focus on rote memorization. The public education system should be capable of rewarding up to the Phd level, through an AI based system, where costs can be reduced as much as possible, while also allowing students who can afford, to have access to human mentors, labs (instead of virtual labs and simulations), and other 1 on 1 experiences.

If technological unemployment is inevitable, how do we create resilience?

Technological unemployment may be inevitable. It's not an option to simply sit waiting for it to happen. A strategic approach would be to build a decentralized capacity to provide options and relief to people. Bitcoin may be a part of this in that it can be used in a time of economic collapse but Bitcoin does not go far enough. A capacity for decentralized education (knowledge exchange), a capacity to generate food in some personalized way, a capacity for enhancing self knowledge such as allowing an individual to know their own health and genome to reduce costs, all of this could be possible with the aid of the same kind of technologies which would cause technological unemployment.

Technologically enhanced basic income was to be a means of creating resilience in the face of technological unemployment. Basic income is basically a citizen's (netizen's) dividend paid out to all stakeholders in a virtual economy, virtual nation, etc. Of course this would be controversial, but so are 3d printers, vertical farms, solar panels, and other potential solutions which could improve resilience. In an urban environment technological methods work better than in a rural environment, and in that case these technological solutions can work to increase self sufficiency and resilience. Farming in an urban environment for example might more resemble server farming, running nodes, being a witness, a miner, etc. As long as the farming is profitable enough, then it could produce the same effect as what Bill Gates described as a solution to poverty which is to give chickens.

References

1. http://www.nature.com/news/where-to-put-the-next-billion-people-1.20669
2. http://time.com/4372930/bolivia-chicken-bill-gates-donation/
3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/05/28/evidence-that-banks-still-deny-black-borrowers-just-as-they-did-50-years-ago/
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber_protests_and_legal_actions
5. http://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-to-pay-1-3-million-fine-to-french-taxi-union-1453905237
6. https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/10/german-report-calls-teslas-autopilot-a-hazard/
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen%27s_dividend

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