Rise Of The Machines = Decline Of Human Beings?

Comments

Paul's picture

It's weird to see Paul Craig Roberts sounding like a communist. It's also strange to see him describing what we have now as a free market.

Jim Davies's picture

A good find, A Magnus! Paul Craig Roberts has done some good work. I recall his outstanding portrait of govenment health care in the waning years of the USSR, for example.
 
In this piece however he competely fails to follow his own logic. Near the start he correctly writes "This [free-market] theory doesn’t work when the US government socializes cost and privatizes profits" but doesn't stop right there and observe that when government does that, no free market is operating. Any and all bad consequences result therefore not from a free market but from the absence of a free market.
 
The obvious answer is to dispense with government so that a free market can operate; but Roberts is a conservative, not an anarchist, so he won't let himself propose that.
 
Will a free society handle the problem of robots replacing human labor? - of course. The replacement or enhancement of labor by tools has been going on since our Race first evolved, and the result has been by far the most successful species on Earth.