Aaron Bastani

Meanwhile 69 per cent of the world’s freshwater withdrawals are committed to agriculture, most of which is in meat production, with the average cow consuming 11,000 gallons of water a year.

‘What happens when … machines are smart enough to become workers? In other words, when capital becomes labour?’

Such an outcome would bring a number of problems, the most immediate being underconsumption.

higher wages weren’t only needed to retain staff, but also to ensure the people making the cars could also afford to buy them.

functioning properly, the system allowed employees to buy the goods and services their work had created. This proved the basis for a compromise across classes built on rising productivity, profits for the wealthy and progressively improving living standards for everyone else.

Paradoxical as it might seem, we employed animals like never before at the very moment they were becoming obsolete.

And while countries like China and South Korea benefitted from the global relocation of production after the 1970s, the same will not hold true for today’s lower GDP countries like Bangladesh and Indonesia. This time, capital’s ‘fix’ is primarily technological rather than spatial.

It has become clear that more ‘processor power’ is actually required for managing what we have historically considered to be low-level tasks for humans, such as motor-sensory coupling, spatial awareness and unanticipated responses. In other words, it is harder to build a machine that can wash the dishes than one that can solve complex mathematical problems.

A reasonable template might be the last time our planet was three degrees warmer than today, as it was some 10 million years ago. Then, sea levels were twenty-five metres higher than at present, with continental glaciers entirely absent from the Northern Hemisphere.
In this world, much of the Amazon basin would become a desert, and the glaciers which provide drinking water for much of China and the Indian subcontinent would all but disappear. The southern belt of the United States, countries bordering the Mediterranean – not to mention the Middle East, Australia and much of Africa – would become too hot to sustain their present populations. Alongside all of this, there would be a major rise in extreme weather events and a profound disturbance to the hydrological cycle. Here ‘once in a century’ weather events would be happening all of the time, with the previously extreme becoming routine.

Right now, the world’s human population consumes seventeen to eighteen terawatts of energy every hour, approximately 150,000 terawatt Hours (TwH) per year.