Thoughts on WEF Guff...

I've been struck down with ManFlu since the middle of last week. Most of Social media was awash with the World Economic Forum and the Donald wanting his slice of Greenland. 

But in the dim dark corners, were a few talks by CEOs of technology companies. Including surprisingly, Elon Musk. I thought he was no friend of the WEF.

I was interested in what the various "experts" had to say about A.I. and robotics. 

Now, I know what my thoughts on the two are, but I was interested to see what they were predicting. 

Nothing but sunny uplands. Even if the A.I. and robots did all the jobs, all it would do is free us from the drudgery of everyday work.  

Except, there was no discussion of the mechanism of how that would come about. If there was any discussion, it seemed uneasy, stilted and very careful. 

You could see the WEF-class see the use of A.I. and robotics as a utopia, where robots would supply their every need. Unwavering, unchallenging, unquestioning, loyal, protective, servile robots. I imagine It's something like a Romanesque idyl, with robot slaves feeding the elites with grapes, whilst they recline on chaise lounges.

But if you have an A.I. and robot workforce, how do you feed the peasants that have been displaced from the job market? All those inconvenient, unworthy, unproductive, people.

Well, the real, stark answer that guests on the various panels avoided saying out loud is: you don't. 

Those of us that understand what's coming is that every A.I. and every Humanoid Robot introduced needs to be treated as a human worker from a Social Welfare aspect. So every company and every individual using these tools needs to pay as if they are employing an actual human. Thus the government should impose a tax similar to national insurance for each unit in use.

But then the fear is that will impose a drag on development. Any tax imposed on this new technology would reduce the ability of corporations to use it, and we all know that corporations get their way, so you can see that there is a very high chance that the scenario isn't Sunny uplands and huge benefits of cheap robotic labour for those of us at the bottom of the pile. The future is redundancy in the starkest meaning of the word. Not just from the job market, but from society.

I mean, the experts did say that some form of universal credit scheme should be introduced, with no detail on how that should be financed. I'm sure in the minds of the CEOs, the idea would be that someone else finances the payments to the plebs.

But this is where the intellectual pygmies of the WEF always falter: very lofty ambitions, without doing the deep dive into the implications and eventual outcomes. 

I for one am appalled every year by the WEF and what I hear coming out of it. 

Their original idea was to have a global workforce. Which then depressed wages across the globe as corporations moved work to the cheapest workforce.

Then there have been various cover stories like climate change in order to smokescreen what is actually going on, which is the de-industrialisation of the West. 

Than they had the great idea of bringing the cheap workforce into the West to depress wages for jobs that couldn't be offshored. Which has led to mass immigration and with it the societal change of the West. 

Now, the great idea is to scrap all that and go for a digital workforce. With the unsaid outcome that the majority of people without independent wealth starve to death.

Such nice people, the WEF people.

Oh, and while we're on the subject of the WEF, what was with all the old ladies in leather? Lots of power dressing going on by the ladies. Looks to me as a sign of insecurity.