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The world will become deflationary in no time and its inevitable, while we are reaching the technological singularity in AI and robotics, in most other fields technology has stagnated. There are a few fields like robotics, bio-engineering and specially AI with room for improvement but a lot of the economy today is already monopolized by 1 or 2 companies in their respective fields, a few tech giants dominate the digital cyberspace. Standar oil and U.S steel were monopolies at some point but today the production of oil and steel is monopolized by state companies and other transnational companies, logistics is dominated by amazon and ali baba and so on...
So tldr, the argument here is that when technology becomes stagnant and there are no new technological inventions that shake up a market, profits will tend to centralize on the few companies that manage to undercut the competition and produce at the marginal cost of production, so for example today, while we may think of the USA as a bastion for the pharmaceutical industry in reality china and india are undercutting the western companies in the production of generics, so when patents expire and the market is no longer artificially limited by goverments or patent laws these companies that focus on the production of generics will steal the market from the original company that produced the original active ingredient of a medicine, a big problem for the united is that china is already investing in a lot of R&D for new molecules so china may not only is taking the market of generics but also dominate the market of new medicines and the patent laws that benefited western countries in the past will hurt them in the future.
So lets deconstruct the costs of a product, lets say the costs of paracetamol:
To produce paracetamol, we need the raw materials, labor, energy, time, space and other utilities (water, the trash service company).
For example the manual processes to produce paracetamol, we could make it all manual labor and not use any machines because lets say we lack the capital to buy these expensive machines, we could use a person that manually breaks the raw materials with his own hands for 10 hours,
or we could use a mill and do it in 1 hour, also a machine is sterile while humans have bacteria on them.
Lets say we now crushed the raw material into a really fine powder in the order of mm, now we need to mix the different excipients of a drug like the active ingredient, the binder, the lubricant, sweeteners, etc. To do this we could tell a person to manually mix it for 5 hours,
or we could use an industrial mixer and do it in 1 hour,
Now to simplify the whole process, lets say our paracetamol is almost ready to sell but it still needs its characteristically disk shaped form, the next step would be to give a chisel to a person and mold the individual pill in a disk shaped form and do it for hundreds of pills, our worker would take hundreds of hours to do it but we could simply hire a lot of them thought it looks this would be expensive as fuck and i am not sure not even with child labor this be cheap enough to replace a machine.
Or we could use a pastillator and do it in 1 hour,
We still need to package it, we could use a person to manually package it and do it in 3 hours,
or a Packaging machine and do it in half an hour not even an hour,
So if we think about it, in the production of a product our labour costs can be divided into humans or machines, if we run out of oil humans will be cheaper. but lets say for the sake of the argument solar energy fully replaces fossil fuels then the costs of operating our machines become the costs of solar energy and if solar energy really becomes cheaper then energy will be cheap and using humans makes no sense compared to using the machines.
So whats the end game of ai, because for the moment our machines are powerful but they are simply calculators, a pastillator, the packaging machine and the industrial mixer aren´t alive they are just a machine that need an operator to work (and this operator is a human) but imagine a machine that could operate all our machines or imagine if the machines themselves were alive or were some form of neural networks that could operate in themselves, in these cases once we manage to buy a self operating machine that doesn´t need external manipulation to work, humans no longer have a place in our factory. The XIX and XXth century was the displacement of manual labour and the XXI century is the century for the displacement of mental labor in factories.
While limits and singularities are a mathematical phenomenon they are not real in real life, nothing is faster than the speed of light, the plank constant limits how small you can go and if you go smaller you become a black hole and the costs of production cant go to zero but they can do actually become close to zero,
So what happens when we combine deflationary money, products that almost require zero costs of labour and also almost zero costs of energy (and we haven´t talked about constrains like government intervention, the fact raw materials like metals are getting more expensive because they are actually becoming scarce and we are hitting resource depletion, also our rivers are polluted and we need water for most industrial processes, the fact that who will consume if a large part of the population becomes unemployed[the great depression had a 20% unemployment rate, imagine the unemployment rate we will get with ai], spect my next article. Hope this article gets some satoshis, i have been reading a long time to write this, i haven´t even touched the fact what should a NEET today do.
Lot going on here. Took a couple of read throughs but interesting.
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