In a thousand years the nature of commerce and trade will
certainly make the transfer of currency obsolete. Even in the early years of the 21st
century, the age of highly-paid manual labor is coming to a close. That is not to say that all labor will cease,
but its dominant place in the grand scheme of things will certainly be small by
comparison to the population of the earth.
Retail shopping is fast becoming a do-it-yourself activity with the
buyer scanning the price codes herself and bagging the items in reusable
containers. Soon the items will scan
themselves much like how airports track and distribute bar-coded luggage
through massive mazes of conveyor belts from plane to carousel. Internet-based
shopping is already highly automated requiring only minimal human employment in
order to get a product from a manufacturer to a customer.
Farming is the bellwether of employment decline. That which used to engage the labors of most
of the population of the United
States now accounts for less than 2% of
it. And that 2% could even be less if
there were no farm families clinging (for now) to the traditions and customs of
their grand and great grand parents. A
family farming unit will be ill-prepared to meet the needs of a billion or more
Americans. More land will need to be
placed under cultivation and the houses and barns will be quaint exhibits in a
Farm Museum. Even as the mechanization of farming by agri-business continues to
dominate the production of food, there has risen a movement to decentralize
that production. Spaces in the sun everywhere will be tapped to produce
chemical-free food that can be grown in ever smaller volumes of space. Yes,
volumes, not areas. Conventional farming uses acreage as its measure. Future
food production will necessarily go (grow) vertically.
The steel industry in the United States experienced a huge
reduction in domestic employment as the mills and the finishing plants moved to
other continents. That conversion did
not create much of a net change in total employment, but there was a decline in
the actual numbers of people needed as the modern furnaces use automation to do
what mill workers used to do.
In the era of the American Civil War, tens of thousands of
slaves and other low-skilled laborers walked the cotton furrows picking bolls
by hand. The short harvest period made
it essential that a sufficient number of people be available to get all the
work done in time. Today one person
driving a reaper can clear a field in a few hours, and a few dozen drivers can
harvest all the cotton in eastern Arkansas
within a few days.
Wheat and hay have a similar story. What remains is the temporal need for migrant
labor to pick the fragile crops like strawberries and blueberries. An apple harvesting machine deploys a net
under the tree, reaches out with a mechanical arm and hand, and swiftly shakes
the tree with micro-movements that drops all the apples in under 30
seconds. No need for humans with
ladders.
There will be precious little for 12 billion or more humans
to do to engage in the then-to-now paradigm of exchanging ones muscle force for
wages.
The Protestant Work Ethic that has been instilled as the
driving force of successful families in the US for generations will come to an
end as we move toward the next millennium and beyond. There will not be any
need for all the people who are willing and able to work for a living. More
people than not will "receive their daily bread" merely for the fact
of their presence in the world. They will be assigned their dwelling and be
provided their clothing and other common implements such as communications and
entertainment devices. What they do all day will be up to themselves since the
civilization won't have any other use for them than as consumers of goods and
services. Without income from capital investments or physical labor, all the
subscriptions that businesses rely upon in the 21st Century will become non-existent.
The paradigm of monetizing everything will become obsolete.
The era of investors reaping profits will decline as the magnitude of
investment for even simple enterprises will far surpass the ability of wealthy
people to place their money in the business.
With few people actually working, there will be no working
class tax base from which to draw funds. Corporations will have to suffice to
use their corporate attitudes to do good for people with no other impetus than
"the jobs needed to be done." There will be no source to pay them for
doing what they do. No longer will it be possible for one person in the
business to be paid $10mn per year every year.
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