Last time we spoke about how automation and AI is probably gonna take over your job soon enough.
Today I want to talk about why that is a good thing.
You read quite often about a company that replaced thousands of jobs with robots. This of course means that more people are unemployed which is bad but does that also mean that automation is bad?
That might just be the lazy developer in me speaking but whenever I can automate something so it's done by a machine instead of me that's just great. You can put that theory to the test by getting rid of your dishwasher, washing machine or pretty much any device you have.
If you are following political developments at all you can probably guess what comes next: Universal Basic Income.
Long story short, tax (the use of) robots heavily and use that money to give everybody a monthly allowance so everybody can do whatever they feel like and instead of cleaning toilets to just so get by they could focus on building the spaceship that gets us to Mars....or get high all day long.
But that is actually not what I wanted to talk about today, there are of course bad things about it and good things and depending on your political views you might think it's the worst idea ever or the only way to go forward.
If we look at our example of a typical household again: Would there ever be a point where too much automation would be a problem because it takes work away from us?
It doesn't because the beneficiary of the work are also the stakeholders and therefore all work you can automate is a net-win for everyone involved.
But can that scale up in the real world?
I believe it can, and blockchains might be able to help.
The concept is easy enough: Employee/community owned companies.
That means that every employee of a company has a (somewhat) equal shares in the company itself.
If you were to automate every single employee aways now they'd still all have the stake in the company and it just means their dividends are higher and compensate for the missing wage - or in other words: Every employee has an interest to operate the company as efficient as possible.
You can of course do that already and in fact they are some companies that operate like that right now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_employee-owned_companies
As with all business some do better than others and they are of course issues and it won't solve our job crisis completely but I think it's still a good step into the right direction while not getting rid of capitalism altogether.
One of my personal favourite are community owned farms, essentially a group of people fund a farming business and in return get fresh and local food for "free" - instead of drawing dividends in money you just get the food.
What are your thoughts? Did you work for an employee-owned company in the past? Would you be up for it for your next job? Interested in starting one?
