Red Scare vs Robots and AI
Is public ownership the only common sense solution to our changing economy?
You’ve got politicians from both parties tripping over each other to demonize socialism and communism.
How does Hakeem Jeffries respond to the targeting of Americans for their political ideas? He gets up in Pennsylvania and cries out about the dignity and the value of work, like work is the most sacred thing we own. He’s not ready for what’s here now nor what’s coming.
What’s coming? Well, you’ve got the richest man in the world and his AI buddies telling us that THEIR companies and THEIR machines and THEIR robots are about to take all that dignified work. But worry not. They swear the genie’s going to grant our wishes. We’ll get a check.
A couple days ago Sam Altman said we’re already in the singularity, that his machines can do a third to near half of what people do for a living, and that the ones built for physical work land in 2027.
He’s selling utopia. But entire industries and trades will vanish if he’s right. Again, the guy who owns the machines tells us not to worry. Uncle Sam Altman will make sure the people are well taken care of.
Musk’s vision goes further, saying work will become optional and money disappears as a concept, and then he, richest dude on the planet again, assures us we’re gonna be ok. His suggestion is universal high income, where the robots make everything and we all get a monthly deposit.
I don’t trust these guys as far as I could throw them. Power concedes nothing. If we don’t own it as a nation, as states, and as communities, the offerings aren’t likely to be generous.
The wild part is the disconnect between the leaders of industry and the leaders in our politics.
Will work be the sacred thing Jeffries thinks it is, or the obsolete thing Musk says it is. They can’t both be right.
It would seem like a conversation we’d be having. When the dust settles somebody will own these machines, and right now that somebody is a handful of private companies and a former trillionaire.
That’d lead to what can only be called a corporate handout, and we don’t need that any more than we need a government handout. A check is a check. Whoever’s writing it can shrink it, change the terms, or stop it cold, and we have no say, because we have no ownership. Without ownership there’s no power. There’s no dignity. There’s no real quality of life. We’re just standing there with our hands out, waiting to hear what Musk and Altman are gonna give us.
Ownership of our economy is the fight we need to be having. That and the restoration of our democracy and the Constitution.
The political and economic power, the production, the software, the tools, the means of survival itself, all of it about to be concentrated in even fewer hands.
No king, no emperor, no railroad baron ever owned that much of what people need just to stay alive, because there was always work they still needed us for, and that work was our leverage. When and if our work is replaced, the leverage goes away.
There’s another way. If a few companies are gonna run the whole economy, then the people need to own them. Not the public owning every last thing, but the public holding a real stake in the machines and the tools and what they make, a stake that answers to a vote instead of a CEO.
You’re gonna imagine the USSR or Communist China. Those countries, unlike ours, had something in common before their revolution ever came, and it wasn’t public ownership. It was that the people were never free to start with. Tsarist Russia was an autocracy, no vote, no real courts, no free press or free speech. China went from emperors to warlords to civil war and never touched democracy along the way. So when the state in those places swallowed the individual and their freedoms, there was nothing in place to stop it.
It wasn’t public ownership behind the stories we were told about communism. It was authoritarians. The real disease is concentrated power with nothing to answer to, and that’s the same disease we’d get out of a future where a couple monopolies own the economy. It’s the oligarchs Bernie has been preaching about.
We aren’t an autocracy yet. We’ve got the remnants of a democracy, semi-functional courts, the Constitution. We still have a shot at turning the tide. But it will take hard conversations. Uncomfortable realities and changing the way we revere “capitalism.”
If we can remake these institutions, public ownership is our best path to freedom. If we can’t salvage them, then I don’t see the path.
Over the next few years we will be making the decisions that decide our future. When we vote, or donate, or march, we will be taking steps in one direction or another.
We cannot fear each other. We can’t have a government that we fear. We’ve owned massive portions of our economy before and not only stayed free but gained more.
Britain walked out of the war and put the railroads and the coal and the steel and the Bank of England under public ownership, and it built the National Health Service, and it stayed a democracy every day of it.
Norway owns its oil company and runs the biggest public savings fund on the planet and it’s about as free a country as there is.
This isn’t about defunding the police or abolishing prisons. It’s about one thing, whether regular people get to keep any control over their own lives while the economy changes in front of our eyes.
To protect and nurture our freedom, we’re going to need both kinds of power, the economic and the political.
If we own the future that’s on its way, together, in the open, with every check and balance our grandparents left us, we are gonna be better than ok.
Corbin Trent
I've been hearing the promise of technology freeing us up for less work and more leisure for 30 plus years. That 3-day work week never happened for me- my job just got busier, took up more of my time, and seeped into my personal space. Sound familiar? Also those online meetings and work interactions were all business and no fun. We were missing a fundamental human element: fewer jokes, chitchat, and donuts. All the while I had a sinking feeling these interactions and patterns were being mined by the machine to replace us- or our children.
And Instead of better customer service a lot of the so called efficiencies of technology simply downloaded the work to the end user. Anyone been to the grocery store lately? There used to be associates who helped ring up and pack your food. Now we do that work ourselves. With Security Guards watching to make sure we don't steal the food.
Instead of shortening work hours, many countries are increasing how many years you need to work before you retire and recieve social security. Other people are stuck working into their late 70s because they can't afford to stop. Lately I've met a lot of middle-aged women who spent most of their lives in supportive and care giving roles who are really economically vulnerable these days.
Wake up and smell the coffee burning!
What is Musk waiting for? Why doesn't he start giving away his money now? Wait, how did one man get and keep so much money in the first place? And if he's such a generous soul why is one of the first things he did to cut off transfers to the most vulnerable people in the world (in Africa)?
Truly relieved to be old and on my way out. Doesn't mean I'm giving up or giving in--I'll protest this abomination to the end. Always have; always will.