If you think about it, human (big-L) Labor is something of an unnatural side-effect.
I don’t mean the human labor that we do for ourselves, like washing our own dishes or cooking our own food. That’s all as natural as breathing.
I’m talking about the idea of giving someone else money to do things that you either don’t want to (or are unable to) do yourself.
So that’s two primary causes:
- Wanting things done you don’t want to do yourself
- Wanting something done you actually can’t do yourself
If someone could sustain a family by juggling one red ball for five minutes a day and selling a service called “Five Minutes of Red Ball in the Air”, that’s likely all the juggling most people would do.
The problem comes when they want to sell more of that red-balls-in-the-air service, or when they turn 85 and their elbow and wrist hurt from throwing red balls.
Or even more ambitious—I want to sell a “Keep 1000 Red Balls in the Air” service.
I just can’t do it.
I can try to have a whole bunch of kids and hope they have a whole bunch of kids and that everyone stays in the balls-in-the-air business. But that’s a long game.
If I want these balls in the air right now, I have to pay some other people to keep red balls in the air and give them some of the money I receive in return.
The two pillars of the global economy
This is one of the two pillars of the global economy: labor and capital.
It’s a remarkably simple system.
On the one hand, you have people who have accrued tons of money by running services like keeping balls in the air, and paying people to do that work.
On the other side, you have people who make money by keeping balls in the air for other people.
This is kind of the main plot for the big human stories you’ve heard about—like the French Revolution, communism, capitalism, labor unions, wealth inequality, etc.
They tried to make it fancy in school, but these are the two fundamental forces pushing the entire economy:
- The money received by providing balls-in-the-air services
- The labor that keeps the balls in the air
Here’s the bubble
The people who receive all the money for keeping balls in the air are about to no longer need to pay anyone to keep balls in the air.
They’re now able to return to the natural state they had before, where they’re doing all the labor themselves.
How did they do that? Easy. Aliens visited and performed a surgical operation. They gave them 20,000 heads and 40,000 sets of eyes and arms and feet.
So now they can sleep, and go fishing, and start a painting career—while keeping hundreds of thousands of balls in the air.
What about all the people who got paid to keep someone else’s balls in the air?
What about that balance that produced democracy in France and kept the money people from treating the ball jugglers really badly?
Poof. That’s what happened.
Gone. Overnight.
Where there was money and labor, there is now only money.
I hope you have a lot of it.
We’ve lost the plot
Right now, people are obsessing on how much money is being spent on operations to install brains, and arms, and eyes, and feet onto the bodies of the people with money.
It’s a bubble, they say. “I can’t believe they’re wasting so much money on these stupid arms, feet, and brains. They are so stupid!!!”
We’ve lost the plot.
The bubble is not the tech that allows money people to do their own work.
The bubble is them returning to the natural state of being able to juggle the balls themselves—and thus not needing the other 95% of the planet.
Stop talking about the robot arms.
They are not the main character in this story.