Robots are taking over

It is currently fashionable to be concerned about robots taking over jobs, putting people out of work. There was an article about this in a recent NZ Listener, there was a BBC programme about it. I imagine the discussion is not that different from that during the early years of the industrial revolution, Spinning Jenny making skilled weavers unemployed. People losing their jobs, being unemployed, losing their livelihood and their self esteem is nothing new. But we may be better able to cope with this now than we were in the early nineteenth century, or even during the 1920s and 1930s, when automation replaced skilled tradesmen. There is a discussion going on, a recent article in the New Yorker, about Universal Basic Income. The nature of capitalism is evolving. The concept of the capitalist owning the means of production and the worker hiring out his labour is no longer a simple relationship. Capitalism is increasingly about monopoly and not about owning the means of production, monopolies undermine efficiency, access to capital and credit increases profits rather than production, or for that matter, in novation. With the gradual advent of capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the feudal relationships of mutual responsibility broke down. The labourer who hired out his labour had to work or starve. He was probably driven off the land, his link to the land was severed,  and he, she, the children had to find employment to survive. The worth of his labour could be negotiated. The idea of the undeserving poor, the ones who dropped off the poverty ladder was born. Wealth was the reward of hard work and virtuous life. Yet in this day and age, where wealth is often the outcome of monopolistic strategies and a measure of good luck the equation between wealth and virtue, or for that matter, poverty and idleness no longer holds. Fortunately the world is becoming a better place and old certainties about capital and labour, hard work and idleness, employment and redundancy are breaking down. There are currents of thought abroad that might tide the present generation through to new concepts of social relationship and self worth.