Jeremy Rifkin: Intelligent technology and the future of human labour

Earlier this month, I spoke to Jeremy Rifkin about his new book, The Zero Marginal Cost Society. Our conversation ranged widely over many of the book's central arguments, particularly those concerning the transition, driven by new information technologies, from a capitalist market economy to what Rifkin calls the "Collaborative Commons". We ended with a brief discussion of the future of work. In the following guest post, Rifkin discusses in more detail the implications of the "wholesale substitution of intelligent technology for mass wage labour and salaried professional labour."

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Jeremy Rifkin

The wholesale substitution of intelligent technology for mass wage labour and salaried professional labour is beginning to disrupt the workings of the capitalist system. The question economists are so fearful to entertain is, what happens to market capitalism when productivity gains, brought on by intelligent technology, continue to reduce the need for human labour? We are seeing the unbundling of productivity from employment. Instead of the former facilitating the latter, it is now eliminating it. But since in capitalist markets capital and labour feed off of each other, how will society respond when so few people are gainfully employed that there are not enough buyers to purchase goods and services from sellers?

Over the next several decades, the massive build-out of the Internet of Things infrastructure in every region of the world will give rise to one last surge of mass wage and salaried labor. The maturation of the Communication Internet, the conversion of millions of buildings into renewable energy micropower plants, the reconfiguration of the electricity grid into a green Energy Internet, and the changeover to an automated Logistics and Transportation Internet, will require millions of skilled and professional workers and spawn thousands of new businesses. However, by mid-century, economic activity in the marketplace is going to be increasingly in the hands of intelligent technology, supervised by small groups of highly skilled technical workers. The question then becomes what kind of economic system would we need to envision to engage millions of people in meaningful employment in a world where much of the economic activity is automated, nearly free and shareable?

With fewer human beings required to produce goods and services in the market economy, millions of people around the world are beginning to migrate to new job opportunities in the burgeoning nonprofit sector growing alongside the evolving Collaborative Commons. The nonprofit sphere is already the fastest-growing employment sector in many of the advanced industrial economies of the world. In the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom employment in the nonprofit sector currently exceeds 10 per cent of the workforce. Despite the impressive growth in social commons employment, many economists disparage its significance, arguing that the nonprofit sector is not a self-sufficient economic force but rather a parasite, wholly dependent on government entitlements and private philanthropy. Quite the contrary. A recent study of 42 countries revealed that approximately 50 per cent of the aggregate revenue of the nonprofit sector already comes from fees for services, while government support accounts for only 36 per cent of the revenues, and private philanthropy for only 14 per cent. For an increasing number for young people, the emerging social economy on the Collaborative Commons offers greater potential opportunity for self-development and promises more intense psychic rewards than traditional employment in the capitalist marketplace.

It is likely that by midcentury, a majority of the employed in many countries will be in the nonprofit sector, advancing the social economy, while purchasing at least some of their goods and services in the traditional marketplace.

If the steam engine freed human beings from feudal bondage to pursue material self-interest in the capitalist marketplace, the Internet of Things frees human beings from the market economy to pursue nonmaterial shared interests on the Collaborative Commons. Many—but not all—of our basic material needs will be met for nearly free in a near zero marginal cost society. Intelligent technology will do most of the heavy lifting in an economy centered on abundance rather than scarcity. A half century from now, our grandchildren are likely to look back at the era of mass employment in the market with the same sense of utter disbelief as we look upon slavery and serfdom in former times. The very idea that a human being’s worth was measured almost exclusively by his or her productive output of goods and services and material wealth will seem primitive, even barbaric, and be regarded as a terrible loss of human value to our progeny living in a highly automated world where much of life is lived on the Collaborative Commons.

Jeremy Rifkin’s “The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, The Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism” is published by Palgrave Macmillan (£16.99)