Graphic courtesy of the P2P foundation
Still working on it! There’s enough here, however, you give you a sense of where this section is headed.
The title is from the Chinese aphorism, “There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent.”
Here I present the Rise of the Robots and the social disruption it will bring as a time of great progressive potential. The need for new solutions will be obvious to all. Will we have the answers to hand?
According to Marx’s proposition of historical materialism, “no social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed, and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.”
I believe the Rise of the Robots signals that we are living in just such a time of transition. Capitalism is nearly spent, but there is still room for the development of its productive forces. The new society, and the material conditions of its existence are even now forming.
In this section we’ll look at the evidence pointing to the emergence of a new social order. We’ll consider the rise of the creative commons, the renewed interest in alternative economic models (including the increasingly popular call for a universal basic income), and various socio-political experiments being conducted around the world which may better suit the new technological realities.
