Indulge me for the coming delusion, but if we ignore who this is, forget all the reasons we know that we can’t trust him, and allow ourselves just a few moments to hope that we could live in such a world.
A world where manual labor is no longer needed, where people can just exist as large mammals are meant to exist. Robots will handle it all and we can just do as we please… and the robots are going to be plentiful because once enough of the process of making a robot becomes automated, the cost of it will go to zero. But to get there it is going to require a ton of money… these robots are going to be way too expensive for people to actually buy them, so investors and governments will help out. The investors will eventually lose everything, but that will put us on the way to having everything we need to be created through completely automated systems.
Of course, there will still be jobs for those who really want them - or more likely, who want them and are good at them - or even more likely, who knows the right people… but if we can get our basic needs taken care of it night not fully end poverty but it would be a step in the right direction.
But, alas… It’s Musk saying it so it’s only to further enrich himself and won’t actually happen.
This is astonishing.
He’s hoarding the profits of automation for himself, while socializing the lost wages and poverty that will come from this.
But the issue is that we know full well that they’ll escape paying out their massive profits as taxes, which is what MUST happen for the model to work. Shareholder payouts need to be taxed at like 50+% rate or even more.
There needs to be a hard cap on wealth at around 100 mil, but defined relative some multiple of a median yearly salary.
If the salaries grow, the total wealth cap can grow too. And vice versa.
Large wealth should be about luxury and having lots of toys, and not about being a law-making aristocrat who is themselves outside the reach of the law like now.
People who hit wealth cap should have no privacy, and be banned from any interactions with the government. There should be some trade-offs to huge wealth. A mega wealthy person should lose something for the priviledge of having so much wealth. Also mandatory psychiatric tests, to make sure they are human and not a lizard in a human suit. OK, I am joking about the last part.
Keep trying to fix something that doesn’t work.
What don’t you understand?
We have had capitalism for over three hundred years and now it has come to its end and here we are trying to prop up its corpse.
It’s time to become an adult as a (human) race and let the people take control of society.
No longer should we let the control of society be in the hands of the few.