The future is happening right before our eyes and still most people can’t see it. As a synergist it comes natural for me to connect the dots. This blog tries to shed some light on the convergence that is right now taking place. It is a dangerous opportunity for modern civilization to get it right. But it also presents the threat that we could get it terribly wrong. (Check out a sampling of links at the bottom of this post.)
Here is my Thesis:
This was what Amazon looked like in 2020:
This was the state of automation in 2013:
The automated machine tools manufacturer recently launched a new bin-picking automation solution in partnership with Universal Robots (UR) that is being heralded the “next level in automation for turning machines.”
The Muratec infeed device features ActiNav™ flexible machine loading with real-time autonomous motion control software, intelligent 3D Vision, and UR’s world-leading cobots.
The shipping industry currently accounts for between 2.5% and 3% of global greenhouse gases emissions, according to the International Maritime Organization. Now a solution is emerging…
“I don’t know how we move forward as a society or a democracy in that world.”
“We are at that point where civilization could collapse or we could take it to the higher order.”
China’s top private wind turbine manufacturer, MingYang, has introduced the world’s largest 16 MW offshore wind turbine with a 242 m diameter rotor, 118 m long blades, and a staggering 46,000 sq m swept area, the equivalent of more than six soccer fields.
The so-called MySE 16.0-242 turbine can generate 80,000 MWh of electricity every year, enough to power more than 20,000 households. According to MingYang, it can eliminate more than 1.6m tonnes of CO2 emissions over the course of its designed 25-year lifespan.
The costs of solar and coal power will be comparable across China by 2023 as solar energy conversion becomes more efficient and the cost drops, according to a new study by researchers in China and the United States.
The researchers also found that solar power, when paired with the capacity to store energy for later use, could meet more than 40 per cent of the country’s electricity demands by 2060, at less than 2.5 US cents per kilowatt-hour.
China is the world’s biggest producer of solar power. It had 170 gigawatts of installed solar power capacity by the end of 2018, up from 77GW in 2016.
The country is also the world’s largest solar cell manufacturer, producing 110GW of the 144GW of solar cells made globally in 2019, according to the International Energy Agency.
In the year 2,000 a supercomputer that was able to achieve one TerraFlop cost about US$ 46 million and occupied about 1,600 sq/ft of space. In 2020 a Sony PlayStation 5 performs about 10 Terraflops, costs about US$400 and sits on top of your television. That is the speed at which exponential processing capacity is growing. All that capacity is searching for ways to apply itself through AI, Autonomous transportation, robotics, and machine learning as you see in the column to the left.
But the same technological revolution is driving down the price of solar panels which are increasingly going to be manufactured in self contained, fully autonomous and automated plants.
This kind of production flexibility was not possible while we still had humans working 8 hour shift and drawing paychecks. But as automation and AI takes over and wealth will be generated by energy alone through robotics and algorithms production can easily adapt to the cycles of solar and ta into the overcapacity it naturally affords.
The wealth gap and the Pandemic
The Racial Wealth Gap
“In the US, almost 90 percent of equities are owned by the wealthiest 10 per cent of households, according to the Federal Reserve.
Not only do market gains flow overwhelmingly to the wealthiest, but the link also runs in the other direction: inequality contributes to the gravity-defying rise in markets, in a self-reinforcing cycle. The richest 11 per cent of the world population hold more than 80 per cent of its wealth, Credit Suisse estimates. This means that the rich have a lot of excess savings. There is, after all, only so much anyone can consume. This “savings glut of the rich” is a pile of capital that has to go somewhere.
“ A team at the New School’s Institute on Race and Political Economy has proposed a guaranteed annual income of $12,500 per adult and $4,500 per child, phasing out at the national median income. Giving people money is “the most direct and parsimonious way to eliminate poverty,” Darrick Hamilton, the director of the institute and one of the authors of the plan, told Vox.
Such a plan, or any of a number of other approaches to severing our basic livelihoods from wage work, would surely face political opposition, as they would likely require significant tax increases. They would also require changing a fundamental American belief: that we should have to earn the basic necessities of life through our jobs.
However, some say the idea that we actually earn our income has already been exposed as a fraud — just look at the fact that the average CEO made almost 300 times the median worker salary last year, a gap that’s only growing. “If we can detach income from work — and that’s what’s happened in the labor market — why not just do that?” Livingston asked.
When automation and IA is able to communicate in a way that is indistinguishable from humans we will burst into the age of massive unemployment. Unless of course we can wrap our minds around the end of jobs as we know it and find new ways of redistributing the wealth that society creates to the people. We must change the rules of the game.