Steem, automation, and the dream of basic income

Like many of you I have long been aware of the threat that automation poses to the prevailing economic model. Unless you're reading this from aboard a yacht, odds are good that within the next few decades you're going to be in the same sinking ship as the millions today who have been replaced with machinery.

Meanwhile today's wealthy elite and their progeny, having at last cut us loose, will accelerate away like a rocket bound for Elysium. We are the exhaust being cast out the bottom so the rocket can climb. There are still holdouts who have not thought the matter through all the way saying things like "But the wealthy will still need us to buy products, we can't do that if we're poor."

None seem to realize that when the technology exists to manufacture any sort of material good, the few who own those machines can simply turn them inward and live off of what they produce. "Utopia for me, but not for thee". What's really being described here is a robotic support infrastructure for human beings, and what's at stake is whether it will support a few, or all.

But I don't want a yacht. I just want to write. My beef with the current economic model is not that I must work to live, but that I am not being utilized correctly. I will stick my neck out here, exposing myself to possible backlash by claiming to write very well. That is what I am routinely told anyway, and I have no reason to disbelieve it. You be the judge. If you don't love it, I'll eat my own face. :0

My only pride is in the joy I've brought my readers. To have provoked unfamiliar thoughts, to bare the contents of my heart to strangers and discover from their feedback that I am not alone in feeling that way; that my own life experiences overlap to an unexpected degree with others simply because we are all human.

I would be content to write and publish free work for anyone to enjoy until I finally croak and they shovel dirt on my face. But in this world, you still need money to live. Holding down conventional jobs, in particular ones where I have to deal with people face to face, has proven very difficult on account of having an autism spectrum disorder.

The ones that don't require such contact still typically let me go after a few weeks for a variety of reasons that I suspect involve sensory overload, difficulty with imprecise instructions and the tendency to upset people without realizing I've done it or why they are upset.

There are plenty of people like me out there. Perfectly willing to work, but longing for the freedom to choose what sort of work to perform. Perhaps not in every case, but in most, the individual has a better idea of what their strongest skills are than the market does.

This represents an absolute ocean of lost potential. There are, right now, sublimely skilled musicians, writers, performers, directors, scientists, mathematicians and so on flipping burgers, manning call centers, picking defective phones off an assembly line, stripping, selling their bodies (though that's not to say there aren't some who choose to work in the adult industry because they enjoy and are good at it) all because the market decides the only useful thing a skilled violinist can do is dig ditches, or the only useful thing a math savant can do is to mop floors.

Part of it is that people who have put a lot of time into developing a talent don't often know how to monetize it effectively. Part of it is that there's such a deluge of media these days that it can be difficult or impossible to get discovered. Think about how well 50 Shades of Grey sold compared to unfathomably better novels which will sit, largely ignored, on some forgotten shelf.

But these barriers can be overcome. At least it now appears within reach. Steemit represents a platform for easily monetizing quality content. The individual decides what they can contribute that others will value, and the community rewards those contributions proportionally to their enjoyment.

There is still the discoverability problem; hot girls on vacation, makeup tutorials and stolen content rake in the dubloons while for all we know, the secrets of the universe lay buried far below all of that with $0.01 in earnings. But the perfect should not be the enemy of the good! Two huge barriers on the path to financially fruitful self-actualization are now demolished.

Perhaps this is it? The lifeboat many of us have been searching for which will keep us afloat until technology and political changes make the post-scarcity economy a reality for all of us. If so, you won't find me sunbathing on a yacht. I will be holed up in a cabin somewhere, furiously typing away.