RANT: AS I WENT 'A WALKING DOWN BY THE LAKE

 

THE OTHER DAY I WENT WALKING along the lakeshore. I hadn’t been down there in a while and I decided to take the new pathways and boardwalk they had put up earlier this year. There were boats and people about, sunbathers and swimmers, newly sod grass along the cement and tiled walkways with a couple of new footbridges arcing over creeks that flowed into the lake. It was quiet, orderly, with families and strollers, bicyclists and so on. The sun was out and the air was fresh. It was around four in the afternoon, and during that three kilometer walk, I saw three people being attended to by paramedics or police; three separate events, at three different places, during the course of a half-hour walk! I’d never seen that before. And these weren’t seniors having heart attacks or accident victims or whatever; these were young people collapsed by the path due to what looked like drugs or alcohol. Down, depressed, dirty and desperate, they’re like exhibits at a poorly-run zoo.  Of course I walk by thinking, like most everyone does, ‘Thank God that’s not me!’

"It's downhill from now on, baby!"

But where will they go? What opportunities, hopes, dreams, and visions for a future will they have? Good question. And I guess my point in mentioning all this is because this is just the beginning.

I was listening to a podcast, The KunstlerCast, on my headphones that day, and JHK (James Howard Kunstler) was interviewing the American economist Jack Rasmus. Toward the end of the interview, the economist discussed the trend toward financialization of economies in recent times (particularly the United States), and how wealth was being concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people; how more and more jobs are slated to be eliminated because it is more profitable, and because new technologies will make certain job categories redundant:  

 

JR: “…I think that’s why a lot of millennials are out in the street and really pissed-off, because they're indentured; they're trapped. But what’s coming is even worse; AI is going to eliminate even a lot of those contingent, low-paid jobs, simple decision-making jobs.”

JHK: “Who then will be the customers for the businesses that do this?”

JR: “Well, the customers are everybody else, except those people who are going to lose their jobs.”

JHK: “Well, that’s mostly or a large segment of everybody else.”

JR: “Yeah, at least half [of the workforce].”

JHK: “It doesn’t look like a good picture.”

JR: “No, it looks like we’re going to have more and more inequality. Those workers who are connected into this new development, this new technology are going to do okay….”

JHK: “But that doesn’t bode well for social order…”

JR: “No. No it doesn’t. They’re [government] going to have to come up with some way of giving half of the populace, particularly the young, you know the GenZrs and young Millennials, some hope…”

I don’t know if I agree that AI is going to be as widespread or viable as Rasmus predicts, but I do agree that young people need to see a light at the end of the tunnel, or quite frankly, they’ll start dynamiting the hell out of it! And who could blame them?

 

          Cheers, Jake