Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto

by Aaron Bastani

Those findings confirmed the conclusions of an earlier report published by two Oxford University academics, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne. In 2013 they claimed that 47 per cent of all US jobs were at ‘high risk’ of being automated, with a further 19 per cent facing medium risk. Elsewhere Peter Sondergaard, research director for the consultancy Gartner, predicted that by 2025 one in three jobs will be automated as the result of an emerging ‘super class’ of technologies, with general purpose robotics and machine learning leading the way. Finally, in a 2016 report to Congress, White House economists forecast an 83 per cent chance that workers earning less than $20 per hour will lose their jobs to robots in the medium term.

A world of 10 billion people facing the challenges of climate change, ageing and resource shortages would endure levels of joblessness similar to those confronting Greece today – a country where 50 per cent youth unemployment has given rise to the most polarised society in Europe. Not only would such a scenario generate political and social turbulence on a global scale but importantly – and unlike with Greece – there would be no promise of a brighter tomorrow, however far away.

Several months later Amazon acquired Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion. While that might have appeared a strange acquisition for a company whose core business is online retail, the purchase provided them with the supply chain capabilities to support Amazon GO and take aim at the $800 billion global grocery market.

That is, except in China, where in late 2017 the local retailer JD.com announced the opening of hundreds of ‘unmanned stores’ ahead of anyone else.

Before Amazon Go was even announced, the British Retail Consortium predicted almost a third of the country’s 3 million retail jobs would disappear by 2025, resulting in 900,000 lost jobs as companies turn to technology to replace workers.

Even an optimistic view sees sectors leading to net job creation as few and far between. Geriatric care – which combines high levels of fine motor coordination with affective labour and ongoing risk management – is one; after all, societies around the world will be affected by ageing populations over the course of the twenty-first century. Health and education generally will remain labour-intensive and, at the very least, will take longer to disappear. Even with these growth areas in mind, however, the overall picture of job losses due to automation makes standing still seem wildly optimistic.

What might such a sequence of events look like? 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.

An Earth six degrees warmer than today would have sea levels as much as 200 metres higher than they presently are with the oceans themselves too warm to sustain much life. This world would be almost entirely covered by desert, with only today’s polar regions capable of supporting extensive agriculture. Yet even all of these challenges would be trivial compared to the real game-changer: substantially increased levels of atmospheric methane. In that event, anything with lungs would struggle to breathe.

The Rio Earth Summit, held in 1992, was the moment climate change became a story of global significance. Yet CO2 levels were 61 per cent higher in 2013 than they were in 1990, with the years following the 2008 crisis recording the highest annual increases in history. Properly understood, our present course isn’t one of inaction, it’s rushing full speed to oblivion.

In the UK for instance, energy consumption peaked at the turn of the millennium, and has fallen by 2 per cent every year since.

This means that despite higher living standards and a larger population, Britain’s energy use in 2018 is actually lower than it was in 1970 – this in a country far from energy poor. Right now each person in Britain is consuming around three kilowatts of energy constantly, 50 per cent more than the global average.

In light of these two facts – substantially increased consumption and a ceiling once a certain level of development is reached – it seems reasonable to use the per capita demand of the UK today as a template for the rest of the world in two decades. If anything, this is overly conservative – after all Britain is a comparatively wealthy country with a high standard of living and relatively cold climate.

This means that beginning in 2020, the wealthier countries of the Global North must initiate a transition to renewables, cutting CO2 emissions by 8 per cent each year for a decade, aiming to completely decarbonise by 2030. At that point the countries of the Global South will embark on the same journey at the same pace. This will mean that by 2040, in spite of growing populations with rising expectations, they will have transitioned too. So in a little more than two decades, the world can go beyond fossil fuels in meeting all of its energy needs – not just electricity.

Glimmers of that are already in evidence: in 2010, 2 per cent of UK electricity came from renewable energy, by late 2018 that figure was 25 per cent. Even more impressive is Scotland, a nation presently on track to completely source its electricity from renewable energy by 2020.

In 2009 Deutsche Bank reported the cost of lithium-ion batteries as $650 per kilowatt hour, predicting that figure would halve by 2020. Just like the IEA’s solar energy forecasts in 2014, however, those predictions were way off, with the price of the technology falling 70 per cent over the following eighteen months.

Take Nigeria. The most populous country in Africa, half of its 180 million citizens presently lack access to electricity. As is common across the continent, the country is not only poor but experiencing a demographic boom, and some forecasts estimate that by the middle of this century it could have a population of more than 400 million people. What is more, tomorrow’s Nigerians will rightly expect a higher standard of living than their forebears of today. But with fossil fuels that wouldn’t just prove catastrophic, it likely isn’t possible.

Instructive of how renewable energy may diffuse across presently low-income, energy-poor countries is the precedent set by the mobile phone. At the turn of the millennium there were a quarter of a million active mobile phone contracts in Nigeria, far fewer than the 600,000 landline connections. If you said then that access to a phone would be commonplace within two decades – in the absence of costly new infrastructure and with even the spread of electricity remaining mixed – you would have been laughed at.

No technology has ever scaled as quickly as the mobile phone. It has allowed millions of people to open bank accounts in Kenya and Tanzania, register to vote in Libya, and access agricultural information in Turkey. Research reveals that mobile phone use is as common in Nigeria and South Africa as it is in the United States, with about 90 per cent of adults owning one – making it the most rapidly adopted technology in history.

If electricity sounds relatively unimportant, consider this: in the early twenty-first century hundreds of millions of women still face the risk of dying in childbirth because they have the misfortune of going into labour at night, surrounded by darkness and miles away from medical care.

Part of the answer is energy conservation – and this holds true for all places regardless of solar exposure. While for now we might associate the idea of conservation with frugality and rationing, we shouldn’t. In just a few years, saving energy – in your home, car and workplace – will be entirely automated.

The main reason why is the arrival of the internet of things. Electric goods, including your car, won’t just be communicating with one another, but distributing and storing energy in real time. If that sounds like an analogue to the internet, it is. Energy internets will soon be operating within and between households, and even everyday objects.

The same will apply to an increasing number of gadgets, not to mention homes, schools and workplaces. And where solar exposure makes that difficult, in places like Britain, increasingly efficient wind farms will make up the difference. Indeed this is already starting to happen. In 2016 wind farms across the UK generated more electricity than coal power plants for the first time. That’s all the more impressive when you consider the latter was responsible for more than two-thirds of the UK’s electricity as recently as 1990.

In 1977, a group of Canadian researchers was contacted by the Saskatchewan provincial government to build a ‘solar home’ suitable to the local climate. Nearly airtight with triple-glazed windows, thick walls, roof insulation and one of the world’s first heat-recovery ventilators, it remained cool in the summer and warm in the winter using virtually no energy. The Passivhaus was born.

Across England and Wales every winter there are tens of thousands of ‘excess deaths’, primarily resulting from cold weather. Most of these could be avoided by implementing simple changes in homes and workplaces. Unlike renewable generation and storage what has stopped this from happening already isn’t technology, but political priorities.

Indeed if all UK lighting was switched to LEDs, illumination would account for 3–4 per cent of overall electricity consumption compared to the 20 per cent it does at present.

But as we’ve already seen, this is at odds with the essence of capitalist social relations, a system where ‘the most basic condition for economic efficiency … [is] that price equal marginal cost’ – that is, where things must be made for profit if they are to be made at all. That means one likely response to extreme supply in energy is that companies will try to make the appropriate technology artificially scarce, market rationality requiring that at some point in the commodity chain rationing (what is called excludability) has to be inserted. If that sounds bizarre, it shouldn’t. After all it was the very issue that Larry Summers wrote about in 2001, and his recommendations would ultimately inform how the entertainment industries adapted to the challenges of extreme supply with peer-to-peer distribution and file-sharing as they pursued new business models like Spotify and Netflix. As the price of energy, like labour and information, moves ever closer to zero, there too it is likely we will pay through rents rather than purchasing the good itself.

Regardless of where our energy comes from, the problem of diminishing resources is now more pressing than ever. As a report by the Club of Rome, an organization that researches global limits, ominously noted in 2014: ‘The production of many mineral commodities appears to be on the verge of decline … we may be going through a century-long cycle that will lead to the disappearance of mining as we know it.’

Perhaps the most alarming trend in mineral depletion, however, is phosphorus – an indispensable fertiliser in modern agriculture. While reserves of the chemical are far from low, only a fraction of it can ever be mined, meaning crop yields for 40 per cent of the world’s arable land are already constrained by its limited availability. Any shortage is particularly problematic in the broader context of declines in land productivity resulting from industrial agricultural methods which, in some places, have seen soil fertility fall by as much as 50 per cent. In 2014, researchers from the University of Sheffield claimed British soil had only 100 harvests left as a result of intense over-farming. At the precise moment the Earth’s human population peaks in its demand for resources, the planet looks set to give up in exhaustion.

Winning the race to land on the Moon didn’t come cheap. In today’s prices the Saturn V’s thirteen launches cost $47 billion over a decade – meaning each cost more than $3.5 billion. Launching twice yearly at its peak, the Apollo program came in at around $150 billion dollars accounting for inflation. After Apollo, in order to reduce overheads and enable launches with greater frequency, NASA pursued the Space Shuttle program. Yet even that cost the US taxpayer half a billion dollars per launch, with the system enjoying no more than five flights a year at its peak. Since 2000 and the arrival of a private space industry, however, costs have fallen precipitously. Today a Falcon 9 rocket (much smaller than the Saturn V) costs SpaceX around $61 million to launch, while the larger Falcon Heavy is less than $100 million. Nevertheless, even those figures mean many companies and individuals stand little chance of reaching space, and even if they have the means to do so, there is currently a two-year waiting list for launch. That could all change with Rocket Lab’s commitment to launching every week on a projected cost of as little as $4.9 million per flight.

All of which means that by the mid-2020s we can expect incredibly cheap, constantly improving rockets taking light payloads into space for a range of organisations. While the vast majority of their cargo will be ultra-small satellites, some will be exploratory landers capable of returning to Earth. Although progress will be intermittent, these trends will underpin the emergence of an industry set to define the twenty-first century: off-world mining.

While the premise for most science fiction is that our descendants travel among the stars because of a desire to explore, to go where others have never been, the impulse driving all of this is far from altruistic. Nowhere is this clearer than in the ‘Global Exploration Strategy’ (GES) published in 2007, months before the first rumbles of the global financial crisis, by NASA and thirteen other space agencies. Detailed inside is the framework determining coordination among the most powerful countries in the world, establishing the basis for private enterprise to make profits in space in the not-too-distant future.

In short, the GES showed how nation-states will agree on the rules for a new space race – one in which companies, rather than countries, will compete, and where the world’s elite become even wealthier.

The Outer Space Treaty, written in 1967 and ratified by over one hundred countries including the United States, remains the international standard for what humanity is permitted to do beyond the confines of Earth. That treaty specifically states that space is the ‘province of all mankind’, with countries unable to engage in ‘national appropriation’ or sovereignty over the Moon or other celestial bodies ‘by occupation or by other means’. That said, the treaty is a document of its time. Given it was forged in an era when only states had the capacity to engage in space exploration, and superpowers at that, it does not mention the rights and responsibilities of private business. Because there is no explicit prohibition preventing corporations from building or staking claims, mining in space could fall under legal parameters similar to those reserved for fishing in international waters.

For the first sixty years of space exploration, every significant breakthrough was achieved by nation-states. From von Braun’s V2 rockets to the USSR’s Sputnik and NASA’s iconic Apollo missions, private investment had no influence in any of these technological developments. As a result, there is an overwhelming case for space to indeed be the province of all. The technologies which are set to bring its abundance within reach were funded by ordinary people – not wealthy investors.

As Peter Diamandis, co-founder of Planetary Resources put it, ‘I believe the first trillionaires will be made in space and the resources that we’re talking about are multi-trillion-dollar assets.’

According to one estimate, the mineral wealth of NEAs – if equally divided among every person on Earth, would add up to more than $100 billion each. If we can access it, nature offers not only more energy than we can ever imagine, but more iron, gold, platinum and nickel too. Right now the resources we have access to are like a crumb in a supermarket. With the right technology mineral scarcity too would become a thing of the past.

The necessary advances to make asteroid mining a reality are steadily emerging. Japan’s unmanned Hayabusa spacecraft successfully landed on the 25143 Itokawa asteroid in 2005, returning to Earth with samples of material from its surface five years later. In 2014 the Japanese Space Agency launched a successor mission, Hayabusa 2, with the asteroid 162173 Ryugu – widely viewed as the most cost-effective option for asteroid mining – its intended destination. Hayabusa 2 landed in June 2018 and is expected to return to Earth with samples some time in 2020.

A 2012 Caltech study concluded it could cost as little as $2.6 billion to move an asteroid into near Earth orbit for easier mining.

You see, there is so much mineral wealth beyond our planet, on other planets, moons and asteroids, that the moment off-world mining becomes a viable industry, the price of the very commodities investors had previously found so precious will collapse.

The money spent on the International Space Station alone totals some $150 billion, a similar figure to that of NASA’s Apollo missions.* From the V2 to Sputnik, and even today’s SpaceX, the costs of space exploration have been socialised. It is only right, therefore, that the gains be as well. Private business was incapable of even launching a liquid-propellant rocket into orbit until 2008, sixty-four years after a V2 left the Earth’s atmosphere. So much for private sector innovation.

By 2020, for the first time in human history, there will be more people over the age of sixty-five than under the age of five. By 2050 there will be more people over sixty-five than under fourteen. This is perhaps the crowning achievement of our species – nowhere else in nature do the old outnumber the young.

That much was clear in a 2013 simulation conducted by the credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s which found that, as a result of ageing demographics, 60 per cent of the countries analysed were predicted to see their credit status reduced to junk within a generation.

While the performance of a computer chip per dollar is doubling every twenty-four months, the costs of sequencing a genome have fallen by a factor of between five and ten times a year. Even if that precipitous fall in price–performance slows down – perhaps aligning with trends elsewhere in computing for a further decade – sequencing a genome could cost as little as $30 by the late 2020s. That alone would transform healthcare, although according to Raymond McCauley, who previously worked at Illumina, such a conclusion is unduly pessimistic. His view is that by 2022 sequencing a genome will cost as little as flushing a toilet. In other words, it’ll be too cheap to even think about.

Remarkably this would be just the start for preventative medicine. It turns out that just as unborn children release their DNA in the bloodstream of expecting mothers, so do cancerous tumours. That means that tissue biopsies, used to investigate suspicious lumps, would be replaced with liquid ones where DNA in blood would be used to detect, track and treat cancer. As with biopsies the same process could replace mammograms and colonoscopies, not just because of convenience and cost – but also effectiveness.

The FDA proposed treating the edited portion of an animal’s genome as equivalent to a veterinary drug.

capitalism. As we have seen elsewhere, artificial scarcity has to be imposed in order to create a market – otherwise nobody can make a profit.

While it might not be immediately obvious, Elysium is a film about rights. The tensions between universal human rights and the foreclosed rights of the citizen; between the right to private property and the right to access public forms of healthcare. For most people, intuitively anyway, the right to life for some eclipses the ‘right’ to unimaginable wealth for others. This is why the final scene of the film is a happy one, despite Max making the ultimate sacrifice.

A 2009 report predicted that warming of three degrees would mean a 50 per cent reduction in wheat yields in South Asia between 2000 and 2050, along with a 17 per cent reduction in rice and six per cent in maize.

Put bluntly it is the meat and dairy consumption typical to diets of the Global North which have us living beyond our ecological means. Current levels of food production could even meet demand for 2050, but it would require a typical diet almost absent of animal protein.