Over the past twenty years I have been excited about what became known as "digital transformation" [see photo]. Indeed I was eager to see what humans would do with all this new processing capacity and power. I hoped that these new technologies would be utilised to enhance life on our planet, to increase the well being of all humans living in our world, and to see dramatic improvements in every contemporary model of governance. Some of my hopes and dreams have come true of course because there are still a few decent people left on this planet; but, in the main, the outcomes from digital transformation are horrific.
Digital Earth is progressing towards a dystopian nightmare of concentrated power, wealth, and control. And with the genie well and truly out of the bottle: there is no turning back. There is no way back to an analogue life where systems were slack, time consuming, inefficient, and expensive. So we all must learn to live with [under the thumb of] tyrannical digital systems which can control every aspect of our lives. Life ahead will be restricted by a series of government, media, and corporate mandates which are enacted by digital means.
Employment is a thing of the past. Sure people will still have jobs but these will be menial service jobs and other work types that will soon rank below the status of everything done by AI bots [which has a higher status today the AI algorithms at Google, Facebook, and Twitter along with the financial models used on Wall Street or your current job?]. Compensation for these digital workers will be low and the taxes levied upon them will be high. Dreams of a Universal Basic Income schema [UBI] that can effectively compensate everyone equally is pure wishful thinking and by no means a practical solution to anything real. That is not to say that some type of UBI schema is not needed and could not prove to be both efficient and effective. But let's be honest here, the real barriers to any UBI schema comes from the new dystopian notions about "fairness". Fairness, and the related idea of "the greater good", is at the core of this new dystopian digital world.
Richard.
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