In his BookTV presentation for “The Rise of the Robots. On the Disappearance of Jobs in the Future,” the Silicon Valley software developer Martin Ford predicted that 30% of American jobs could be gone within 20 years. He favors a basic income since work and income are already being uncoupled. He warned that plutocrats or the elite often make the whole subject of unemployment through digitalization disappear. He said he was a capitalist and supported a system where 1000 persons lose their purchasing power so Bill Gates and the 1% can become richer!
The time is right for alternative economics, reducing working hours, shrinking the financial sector and expanding the public sector, redefining work, health, strength, success and happiness, moving from quantitative growth to qualitative growth, becoming storytellers and not gazing at the stories of office buildings (whose profits like the $76 billion from WalMart are in Luxemburg or the Cayman Islands).
Websites like www.openculture.com, www.booktv.org,
www.alternativetrademandate.org, www.kickitover.org, www.steadystate.org and www.storyofstuff.com call us to a digital world of abundance and exchanging roles with access replacing excess and enough replacing more.
