What is going to happen when many of the jobs are eliminated?
This is a question that is becoming of major concern. Many are awakening to the fact that the saying "technology always creates more jobs then it destroys" is not accurate. We could be faced with a future where massive numbers of jobs are lost.
The pace of automation is going to be stunning. We are looking at rapid advancement in AI. This is improving cognition in ways we never saw before. At the same time, we have the robotics industry moving from embryotic to more advanced. Naturally, there is still a long way to go but the idea of humanoids working in factories is not far-fetched.
How does society adapt to this? Where is the financial solution for people as the entire economy is upended?
As stated in the past, I think tokenization is the key. In this article we will discuss robots and how that could enhance the standing people have.
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It is obvious that robots are units of labor. Based upon projections. each robot will provide greater than 1 economic output per human counterpart. This comes from a combination of more hours worked along with transferrable skills.
The point here is that 1 billion workers could be replaced by 1/3 or 1/2 the number of humanoid bots.
It does not take a genius to figure out this could be a major problem. Billions are dependent upon a paycheck for survival. If this disappears, we have catastrophic outcomes.
Tokenization is a solution. I recently wrote how the idea of having stake in robotaxis could be an example of income generation for individuals.
Let is go one step further and look at the tokenization of robots.
We are going to see many different proposal offered up as we see unemployment numbers grow globally. These will be a variety of state (government) sponsored initiatives along with community-based ideas.
When we look at labor, we can start to question who owns the means of production. This was always the basis for the economic equation, with labor and capital (companies) fighting it out.
As robots enter the equation, the dispute ends. Capital wins and labor is out the door. Actually, this is the essence of the entire discussion.
Here is where tokenization enters.
What happens to the equation if the robots are not owned exclusively by the companies. In other words, a fraction of the means of production are directed towards other stakeholders.
For example, we could take a percentage of the robotic output and tokenize it. This could be set aside for individuals. There are many ways to structure this, either by direct investment on the personal level or through community or government intervention. It is an alternative to the "tax the robots".
The goal is to get tokenized assets in the hands of individuals. These could be a combination of appreciation and income distribution (yield). Individuals could own units in many different bots, helping to expanding the return while also mitigating risk.
One of the keys to this concept if that fact that robotics is going to follow the laws of information technology, at least to some degree. Since it operates in the world of atoms, the pace will be slower than IT. That said, we can see how, over time, costs will decline, at least on a per performance basis.
What this means is the robots 5 years from now will be able to output more while costing less money. That means the pie keeps getting larger, advancing at a pace far greater than humans set. It ultimately becomes an exponential.
The net result, whether the robots fractionalized on an individual or community basis, the productivity keeps increasing. One way of thinking about this is akin to a high growth fund. The output keeps growing, enhancing the stake that each person has.
All of this, I forecast, is leading to the economic singularity. We are likely to see a time of 30% annual growth in GDP. This is compared to the 3% average over the last 120 years.
Fractional ownership is going to really alter the distribution of value. Tokenization is one of the key under the new ownership model.
