Replaced by Robots By Brian Simpson

     While we may accept that many jobs will quickly disappear due to IT and robotics, it is often thought that some lower level jobs like construction will survive. However, the endless march of technology out of our control continues, as illustrated by a MIT robotic system designed a 3D print basic structure for a building in less than 14 hours, using what has been called the Digital Construction Platform: http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/02/technology/3d-printed-building-mit/index.html; http://robotics.sciencemag.org/content/2/5/eaam8986. But in China, whole apartment complexes have been 3D printed, if the press is to be believed: https://www.cnet.com/au/news/worlds-first-3d-printed-apartment-building-constructed-in-china/.

     The retail industry is also set to be gutted, with a report by investment advisory firm cornerstone Capital Group claiming that almost half of all US retail jobs are under threat due to automation technology: http://cornerstonecapinc.com/2017/05/retail-automation-stranded-workers-opportunities-and-risks-for-labor-and-automation/. The service industry was supposed to be where industrial workers went once their work paradigm was destroyed, but now, it too is going.

     I am well aware that there are debates about supplying people with a non-working wage, and social credit authorities have rightly critiqued that arguing that more fundamental changes are needed to the financial/economic system if people are to have livelihoods, notably through the national dividend. As has been explained by M. Oliver Heydorn, the national dividend, by contrast to Guaranteed Income Schemes, goes directly to the root of the problem of technologically produced unemployment:

“As a matter of fact, the dividend allows us to kill two birds with one stone. The particular phenomenon, which, on a physical plane, is responsible for technological unemployment, i.e., the displacement of labour by machines, is the same phenomenon which, on a financial plane, generates an ever-increasing gap between the rate of flow of consumer prices and the rate of flow of incomes that are distributed in the course of their production. The dividend solves both problems. On the one hand, it allows us to fill the price-income gap in a way that restores a real or self-liquidating equilibrium to the circular flow. On the other hand, the dividend also ensures that all of those individuals whose labour is no longer required in the formal economy will nevertheless receive an income enabling them to have access to goods and services.
 Thus, unlike the Basic Income Guarantee or the vast majority of basic income proposals, the dividend is not tied to ‘full employment’ as a fixed policy. If an economy is physically capable of providing everyone with all of the goods and services that they need to survive and flourish without calling on the full capacity of the available labour force, then the amount of the dividend need not be artificially restricted so as to maintain the positive incentive to work. The fewer the labour hours that are physically necessary to provide for our genuine needs, the better off we will all be because we could then enjoy the decrease in the need to work in the form of increased leisure.”
From: http://www.socred.org/index.php/blogs/view/a-national-dividend-vs-a-basic-income-similarities-and-differences.

     The only alternative that I see to social credit being adopted out of necessity, will be widespread social breakdown and the ultimate collapse of civilisation, as a number of writers are now predicting: https://www.amazon.com/Five-Stages-Collapse-Survivors-Toolkit/dp/0865717362; https://www.amazon.com/Shrinking-Technosphere-Technologies-Autonomy-Self-Sufficiency/dp/0865718385/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_2/139-0148238-5811623?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=6AMTKYT486R5DATSD5NM; https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Age-America-Cultural-Collapse/dp/0865718334/ref=pd_sim_14_4/139-0148238-5811623?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0865718334&pd_rd_r=6AMTKYT486R5DATSD5NM&pd_rd_w=gH0vR&pd_rd_wg=y7y0B&psc=1&refRID=6AMTKYT486R5DATSD5NM.