The Digital Disruption: Technology and Economics for the 99%

[eridani]

http://www.nationofchange.org/digital-disruption-technology-and-economics-99-1357915349

Robotic automation is a subject we rarely hear mentioned in all the talk about the economy, jobs, climate change, and other elements of our growing global crisis.

Why? Because the 1% dare not address an issue that shakes our system to its foundations.

The bipartisan perspective of our current leadership is that our problems are just another, mysteriously huge, business cycle; that “any day now” things will turn around and “we” must tighten our belts until then; and that with enough reforms we can restore economic balance and avert global climate disaster.

The truth is that the continued existence of capitalism is incompatible with the positive potential of robotic automation.

<snip>

Because the process we’re describing is irreversible: companies must automate to compete. The system can recover from a simple excess of goods (our cycles of recession and recovery), but it cannot recover from the destruction of its foundation: exchange value.

Consequently, there will be no real "recovery" to this system. Put another way, recovery no longer means a recovery of jobs. Unlike the boom and bust business cycles of old, this rupture does not have an upswing. From here on, all the 1% can offer the 99% is austerity, telling us to “get along with less in this new reality”. Thus, corporations and the rich are not “job creators.” They are job destroyers.

[jonthebru]

1. Well done.

"recovery no longer means a recovery of jobs" and hasn't for a while now.
All those boarded up factories across America will probably remain boarded up.