Submitted by Jake Anderson via TheAntiMedia.org, [6]
Stephen Hawking has been outspoken in recent years about the catastrophic dangers humanity faces in the 21st century. He said we should be cautious in attempting to contact aliens [7], warning that advanced extraterrestrial life may not be friendly toward us and could destroy the human race. He also stated we should be cautious in creating strong artificial intelligence. The renowned physicist joined Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and Google executive Demis Hassabis in signing a letter that warned against a military artificial intelligence arms race [8].
Hawking even issued a warning to the scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) about the dangers of the Higgs Boson “God Particle,” claiming it could initiate “catastrophic vacuum decay [9]” — a quantum bubble that expands at the speed of light and wipes out the universe.
Recently, Hawking addressed the threat he says may be more far more dangerous to the future of human civilization than robots, aliens, or quantum particles: capitalist greed. During a Reddit AMA [10], he argued that the future is wrought with the peril of rampant inequality expedited by an automated machine-based global economic system.
“If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed.” Hawking continued, “Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.”
Predictably, a dramatic response thread followed. Many commenters agreed with Hawking and denounced the globalist oligarchy that is currently consolidating wealth [11] at an unprecedented rate. Responses ranged from calls for a “bloody revolution” to references to the recent films Elysium, Wall-E, and Zeitgeist 2: Addendum. One commenter invoked the anarcho-syndicalist [12] political views of linguist Noam Chomsky.
The main theme of the discussion centered around the automation of labor and how that would affect the human workforce and the global economy. Hawking seems to believe that our current trajectory will make such automation a death knell for the working classes, with the bourgeoisie machine owners exerting total economic control over human civilization.
One commenter strongly disagreed with Hawking, referencing recent Journal of Economic Perspective [13] articles and claiming “technology has never, will never, and simply cannot result in structural unemployment.”
The comment thread [10] is a treasure trove of wide-ranging ideas that include:
- The efficacy, or lack thereof, of voting
- A “universal basic income”
- Microeconomics
- Techno-socialism, with “an open source decentralized consensus algorithm for the masses”
- A post-scarcity society run by strong artificial intelligence
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As we recently noted [14], Stephen Hawking is undoubtedly a nice man and a genius in his field. This is probably also the field he should stick with. Anyway, we can lay his worries to rest: once there is no longer scarcity in the world, nobody will have reason to worry about wealth redistribution. Of course, it’s also not going to happen anytime soon and probably never will. There is also no reason to worry about employment while at least vestiges of a free market exist: as long as there remain unsatisfied human wants and as long as there are more resources than people, everybody will find work. The only real problem is government intervention in the market process.
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It is truly remarkable how deeply embedded socialist thought remains in society to this day, in spite of the downfall of the socialist Prison State in the late 1980s/early 1990s, after its utter bankruptcy could no longer be concealed (as an aside, we plan to soon post another article on the enduring popularity of collectivism, a phenomenon that strikes us as more than passing strange). Thus yet another popular and renowned physicist, namely Stephen Hawkins, has jumped into the debate, seemingly attacking capitalism. According to the Huffington Post, “Stephen Hawking Says We Should Really Be Scared Of Capitalism, Not Robots [15]”.
To paraphrase Albert Jay Nock, it is downright absurd that socialist ideas are still so unquestioningly accepted that one is actually forced to discuss and defend capitalism, as if there were any other type of economy! An economy cannot be anything but capitalistic; without economic calculation, there is simply no rational economy to discuss. It makes no sense to call any other system an “economy”.
It follows that the only people who have reason to discuss the viability of the capitalist system are those who want to return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. But they can do that without trying to enforce their nonsense on anyone else. Surely there is enough room in the Amazon forest. If a handful of morons eager to shun civilization want to ship themselves there, we imagine no-one would object (such as e.g. the insane eco death-cult of Paul Kingsnorth [16] in the UK; they probably wouldn’t do it though, due to the lack of wall plugs needed to recharge the batteries of their iPhones).
