RE: Disruption and the Gartner's curve 2016.
Excellent article!
And indeed, we are at the start of tremendous changes to societies since technology is (getting) ready to make those changes. And indeed, recent history shows that disruptive products and services are pushed back by the existing players in this world; Through their lobby the regulators and politicians are influenced big time to make that push back a reality. But I do think that the traditional powers will not be that powerful anymore at some stage.
If you take a step into the future, these technologies will change the world sooooo much, the world will be unrecognisable when compared with the world today:
- 3D/4D printing: almost everything will be printed, mostly local
- decreases long and medium logistics needs tremendously
- crashes production economies (Asia)
- takes away jobs
- Robotics and AI: almost all jobs (even in corporate environment) will be done by robots, and AI will take away lots of 'high profile' jobs. Robots/AI will also allow maintaining and eventually creating their own systems and infrastructure
- takes away enormous amounts of jobs
Politicians need to start seeing they cannot prevent the need for human's to execute tasks, decreasing tremendously over the next decades. I even believe we hardly need humans to execute tasks in 20 to 30 years time. We therefor need to completely replace existing economic models and create new ones.
Luckily some countries (as we do in the Netherlands) are already experimenting with 'basic incomes', something that is required in one way or the other to allow everyone to get at least the basic necessities in life.
That said, when we live in a world executed by Robots/AI where Robots are creating, producing and maintaining, most of the products and services can be offered for zero cost, ie for free.
But we need to bridge our world/economies now with this one in the future. That is were we will see A LOT of struggles, maybe even (complete) chaos at one point.
Nice point, what I do not agree is "If you take a step into the future, these technologies will change the world sooooo much, the world will be unrecognisable when compared with the world today:"
The point is, the world today would have been unrecognizable just a few years ago (we don't notice a change when is slow, and we get used to it), so what you say is not "in the future". Is here already. It doesn't looks like we imagined, (mostly because when you say "robot" people thinks to androids, while robots are quite different), but is here. Deflation of markets and shrinking of income are consequences, and the low-cost market is happening since years.
This is present, not future: the future will be even more different but... it's here already.
About the basic income, we have it already, we call it retirement. We are giving it to the old people. The best way to implement it, if you want the government to do it, is to lower the retirement age. So you free places for young people, and the demographic will do the job for you....
Excellent remarks and points! :)
Indeed, the 'future' is already here, automation is taking away jobs already for years, but until now we were able to create other jobs instead. However, that time is no behind us. Robotica and especially the AI part will make human labour not required anymore at some point in time in the future. I tend to go with what Ray Kurzweil is predicting, singularity of AI and humans is in reach in coming decades.
Basic income: correct, partially at least. It is not only lowering the retirement age, but also to find new financial models that we can actually lower the retirement age without increasing the income taxes to the people still working.