What are we even focusing on too big to fail for? That's not the only reason why we have such exploding income inequality. With the trend of liberalization of trade, crushing labor rights, a rigged tax code, the maximizing of productivity as cheaply as possible, politicians bought by corporate lobbyists, and Senate rules that make no sense, etc it's looking more and more like there's no real answer to this. Capitalism is fundamentally flawed.
I think these points are correct, though I don't think system is the problem. Every system will be flawed whether humans or robots run it. You will always have the human element as the labor. Even if you had a robot running a perfectly distributed socialist system, you run into the human run problem of passivity. What motivates someone to study beyond a certain level? In such system, traditionally money has been replaced with prestige or position. This is fundamentally not socialist. If you had a perfectly capitalist system, you run into the problems listed by VictorVonDoom. Liberalizing trade may seem capitalist, but trade terms are never balanced because of the difference in partner economies. It will be very efficient for the one that owns the capital but likely bad for the labor in both partners. Labor rights are another problem that can't be solved by a computer.
I think you'd have to go a little further to solve these problems. It probably sounds funny, but I think its labor that has to be eliminated. Labor is the exploited element and will always be because human greed will always be there. This is not to blame labor. This is to blame the systems that create and exploit them. As strange as it sounds, I think this is an inevitable reality that we are approaching much more rapidly than 98% of people think right now. When i say eliminate labor, I mean that work in a sense is becoming automated. You're even seeing a return of manufacturing to the U.S., but a lot of it is automated, as this is now becoming cheaper than cheap labor. You used to see a lot of law discovery outsourced to India. Now you're seeing a lot of that become automated. Driving is becoming automated. Cadillac is talking about debuting a system that can automatically drive on highways for you. You already have dynamic cruise control and self parking on production cars. Google, GM, Ford, BMW and Mercedes have fully autonomous vehicles testing on roads right now. This will eliminate driving jobs. 3-D printers will replace a lot of deliver and manufacturing systems as well. That's not even getting into Engineering A.I. or future medical systems. Soldiers and pilots will be replaced. What type of jobs will be left? Programming? Robotics engineering? Eventually that will be replaced by giving a rudementary plan, that the AI does the engineering for. Sounds like The Matrix, but where do you think robotics is going? Very few corps owning all of the production capital.
Not to sound cuckoo, but whether you think labor is eliminated as a whole or not, you have to respect the trasition that is rapidly approaching. A lot of jobs will be replaced, and we will see if our systems can tolerate the current systems of distribution. If they can't adapt, there will be a lot of people needed complete re-education and training. A ton of people competing for very scarce jobs. I bet we end up with an incredible famine as cheap labor jobs are completely elimated first. Then just as with outsourcing, the job replacement will slowly move up the ladder. Can a government be strong enough to maintain control in this situation and create a wealth distribution system, or will the corps just run and politic their way out of things the way they do now? Will this force a Chinese type system? I dunno, but I think we are certainly headed to a near future where the systems we know will be ineffective.
you're not american are you?
