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The world needs a plan B. The unemployment rates are reaching their max peaks in most of the developed countries, especially in Italy, where the crisis is taking over small businesses and entrepreneurs. People are desperately looking for jobs in order to survive and random politicians make promises they can’t afford. The truth is that we can try to solve the problem for the next five years by creating jobs “out of nothing”, it’s still possible, but in ten years time nothing will make sense.
In a world where technology is going faster than ever, it seems almost impossible to create more and more jobs to meet the needs of people. The advances in technology that we are making will produce machines able to replicate what a human can do. They are already doing it in supermarkets with electronic tills, but that is just one of the dozens examples around the world.
Why wouldn’t a business owner want to replace people with more efficient and cheaper machines? Someone might argue that the human side counts much more than the efficiency of a Robot; but that’s not what is gonna make the difference, why? Because we are talking about money. When there is money involved and the possibility to make more money is just in front of you, there is no way to change the human behaviour. People would simply get robots.
The more technology advances, the more unemployed people will have. There are a lot of jobs that could be easily replaced, but there are also many that will probably need the “human side” forever. With this idea in mind, whenever I see a person that is shouting in front of a camera “We Want Jobs!” or “We Want To Work!”, I feel embarrassed, because I am pretty sure that there is no way to reduce that rate, it’s going to increase in any case.
Even Google is thinking of partnering with Uber to have self-driving private cars. Where are all these people going? The world doesn’t need more private cars and that’s why the company will probably stop recruiting or firing its drivers. In the end, we’ll end up having 40% of unemployment rate, including Computer Scientists, if we are able to build self-replicating machines.
That’s why the world as we know it needs a Plan B, a different way of thinking the economy and capitalism. I don’t think I have the answer, I can’t be that foolish to think I have got the solution, but there is something simple that might save thousands of people. We’ll definitely need a basic income in the long run, where people get an income just because they are citizens of the world. In the same way, following this scenario, we would completely change the way we live.
Our current lives are based on our job, but what if our life was based on actually enjoying life? What if we build a different lifestyle focused on enjoying living, without waking up at 6am, working for more than eight hours everyday, and seeing our kids growing, but missing some important milestones of their lives, because we are busy at work. This is not a Plan B, it’s not an exit strategy and it’s not even a foolish way of looking at the world.
This is the only solution to Self-Driving Cars, Amazon Prime Air, Military Systems and even electronic baby sitters. We don’t have any other alternative, except a complete re-thought of the world we are living in. The worst thing is that we are running out of time. Entrepreneurs, Computer Scientists and Software Engineers are on the verge of the biggest technological revolution of the past hundred years and they won’t slow down.
They are not our enemies, because they are innovating and probably giving a big hand to the growth of our economies, but they are ringing a bell that says “it’s just a matter of time”. We shouldn’t even be scared, because if we all work together as a community, our jobless lifestyle should be much better than the ones lived by our ancestors. I am afraid we will be forced to re-think capitalism, something that banks don’t like.
