> http://cultstate.com/2019/03/15/The-Robodollar/
Most conversations about our inevitable future are explained within the narrow lens of political fantasy, as if the possibilities of the future have to be brutally squeezed through the tiny tube of collectivist deal-making. On the left, they swoon at the possibility of robotics liberating us from the hardships of work to spend the rest of eternity in play-making, paid for entirely from the yield of our new robotic slave friends. Perhaps if the population was reduced to Georgia Stone numbers, this might be true. (This should give you insights to the inevitable goals of ecofascism) On the right, robotics are a mechanism of high performance legal and culture enforcement while minimizing traditional political risk. Both approaches desperately imply robotics as something that should be smoothly bolted atop the current trajectory of economics and as such, both approaches are completely incorrect.
The common concern is that robotics will eliminate jobs. This is not true for most jobs because the implementation-to-savings spread is too far. Replacing a Walmart greeter (minimum wage, terrible benefits, indirectly government subsidized) with a humanesque robot as part of a vertically integrated package (thousands in manufacturing, tens of thousands in repair and support services, hundreds of thousands in glitches and legal insurance concerns, millions in public relations and market testing) is not feasible. The robots popular myth envisions taking our jobs are far too expensive to do the vast majority of jobs. Therefore, robotic roll-out will be targeting high-income jobs (doctors, lawyers, programmers, etc) and high political risk tasks. (warfare)
Robotics are also uniquely classified as dual-use, meaning, they can be used for civilian commerce/industry as well as military application. Any robot deployed at Walmart can very easily be repurposed for military operations. In effect, any roll-out of robotic assets also means a stockpiling of a passive robotic militia, waiting for activation. It’s not so easy to go the other way with that: An Uber for Global Hawk timeshares doesn’t exist and most likely, won’t exist for quite some time. Therefore, by default, all civilian robotics double as draftable soldiers for total war scenarios as well.
The careful balance between power, weight, and computation makes robotics with self-contained and objective-competent AI nearly impossible. Perception-decision trees can be exhaustively accounted for, but when robotic assets are deployed against sophisticated opponents, that strategy will be very easy to undermine. Therefore, in such scenarios, human babysitters are needed, which means early roll-outs of robotics in such operations will rely on large infrastructure requirements that are modular enough to conform to the logistical constraints of the DoD’s policy of a 72-hour window FOB deployment. This means being able to provide comprehensive power provision, information processing, communication layout, and data analysis operations to make sure human and AI operators from other locations, including transcontinental, are operationally feasible.
Manufacturing robotics requires revolutions in IoT and communications security, which will accelerate the push to cognitive mercantilism as nations preparing for robotic warfare will have to work hard to attract and retain talent in the face of overpaid Silicon Valley app developers and data scientists. The last thing you need is a robotic fleet with a silly backdoor (Huawei), an exploitable patent leak (Enigma machines), or an army of already-validated zero days waiting for it. These types of attacks allow for adversaries to convert your robotic assets into theirs. This will also require revolutions in language security and computation architecture to reduce the security surface area of robotic fleets.
Now you’re starting to see the brutal minutia of robotic labor tally up into a considerable challenge. Nonetheless, this price will be happily paid as long as corrupt democracies are the norm. Career politicians with 20-30+ year runs can easily secure graft and influence by allocating the productivity of their constituents towards the production of robotic soldiers. They would skirt the need to answer for unpopular drafts while securing extensive employment opportunities for their base. Politicians will evade drafts as will competent generals since such drafts will inspire not-so-nationalist employees within tech companies to sabotage their own complex and delicate robotic products as a form of revolt. In an era of mass data collection, identifying such actors wouldn’t be hard for either law enforcement, but it won’t be hard for adversarial nations looking for offensive opportunities either. The technological problem is hard, but the political problem is even harder. No one wants a “Different day, same Snowden” sort of scenario. This is where Robotic Nationalism comes into play.
The concept of robots replacing jobs is usually met with fear or enthusiasm, based upon the political agendas of the audience. The concept of robots replacing warfare, however, is generally met with visions of apocalypse from both war-planners and the general population. They envision factories mass producing endless fleets of mobile C4 using facial recognition to fly into anything that looks like a human. What they don’t understand is that the moment this type of warfare is rolled out, the rest of the world will be forced to adapt and emulate. Nation A with a robot army against Nation B with only human soldiers is a war crime waiting to happen. Nation B will quickly reconfigure military budgets to cover the “robotic gap”. After that retooling, you’d have Nation A and Nation B with a robotic army, staring each other down with steely eyes and beaten chests. Unlike nuclear warfare strategy, this would not result in a detente. Instead, there would be an accelerated willingness to engage in increasingly reckless conflict as robotic participants in warfare have a greatly reduced political risk. Any bourgeoisie attempts to extend human rights to robotic assets can be easily stifled with contemporary memetic countermeasures.
What does a robot-vs-robot war look like? Every downed robot means 20-70 jobs (aggregate) to rebuild the lost soldier. In effect, if two nations with robotic armies engage in warfare, they are both guaranteeing maximum employment for their citizens. If more employment is required to meet debt obligations, accelerate the intensity of the conflict. This model of robotic military Keynesianism is especially appealing to places like the EU where their energy requirements are increasingly encircled by Russian geopolitical strategy and the disparity of authority regarding currency printing (Brussels) and bond issuance, (EU members) a disparity that will result in the consolidation of financial and military power into Brussels. The ability for member states to engage in limited total war via robotics with other robotic states will serve as the essential foundation of all future economic cycles since the total employment this model allows provides member state bond issuance to be as good as (and almost better than) Euro instruments.
One might ask where such robot-vs-robot conflict will take place to minimize human life loss and environmental damage. 11% of all land on earth is used for farming. 50% of all human population lives within urban areas which make up 1% of all land. Deserts, pastures, and tundras are sufficient terrains for conflict. Eco-friendly materials can be utilized where possible during manufacturing. Robotic swarms can also recover downed robots for material, data, and component reclamation purposes. Countries can even lease land to host conflicts between nations and when the conflict is completed, robotic wardens can be deployed to restore the damage done to the local ecology as best as possible, allowing a unique opportunity for nations to willingly pay for the forestry and land reclamation services of other nations.
The very nature of robotic warfare is designed to not only maximally attract quantitative easing, but redirect the flow of currently deployed easing away from developing nations and into developed nations. If those nations endure labor shortages of knowledge workers and technicians for the initial infrastructure, the redirected quantitative easing will provide the necessary financial incentives for retraining unallocated labor while expanding consumers. Cognitive mercantilist practices will maximize virtuous cycles between domestic producer and domestic consumer by isolating foreign knowledge workers according to the national security reasons of all nations. (A nation will not offer potential adversaries funding and a nation will work to prevent talent moving to other nations)
In short, properly managed robotic warfare allows for states to restore credit in the face of foreign debt obligations, establish absolute control over their unemployment rates, and generate a surplus force of robotic labor to tackle capital intense tasks such as deep mining and space labor. In a post-petrodollar world, this cycle of robotic creation and destruction would generate a genuine and stabilizing domestic demand for national currency, which then stabilizes floating currency demand between nations without the need for a centralized arbiter to manage the distortions caused by artificial reserve currency demand. While obvious, it should be mentioned that such managed warfare would exhaustively reduce the loss of human lives when states and corporations become uneasy with one another.
In essence, we replace the petrodollar with the robodollar.
All that remains is for Icarus to ensure the transition.
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