There is a growing concern among people about how AI and robots are taking over our jobs, depriving us of our livelihoods, reducing our earning power and destroying our economy. Anticipating this, countries like Canada, India and Finland are exploring options for a "universal basic income" - the unconditional provision of a constant amount of money from the government to support the population, regardless of employment. But people forget how quickly the cost of living is falling, how quickly certain things are being demonetized.
What does it mean? That they are becoming cheaper and easier to meet our basic needs.
Thanks to the exponential advancement of technology, the cost of housing, transportation, food, medical care, entertainment, clothing, education, and the like will fall until it ultimately vanishes, believe it or not.
Let's take a look at how people are spending their money now and how "technological socialism" can demonetize life.
How we spend our money today
Shopping habits around the world tell a fairly consistent story: we tend to spend money on the same basic products and services.
Take, for example, the shopping habits in three large countries: the United States, China and India.
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In 2011, 33% of the average American's income in the United States went to housing, 16% to transportation, 12% to food, 6% to healthcare, and 5% to entertainment. In other words, more than 75% of the American salary goes to housing, transportation, food, health and personal insurance.
In China, the situation is similar: food, home, transportation and health account for most of the costs. Remarkably, in China people care more about appearance, more about good food and less about entertainment than in the United States - about half of the average person's salary is spent on food and clothing.
In India, with a population of 1.2 billion people, most of the spending is spent on food, transportation, various goods and services. A smaller part of the cost is spent on renting or maintaining housing and on healthcare.
These differences represent cultural differences between the three countries, but overall it is clear that most of the spending (and in our country as well) goes to seven product categories:
- Transport
- Food
- Health
- Accommodation
- Energy
- Education
- Entertainment
Now imagine what it would be like if the costs for each of these categories were suddenly reduced.
Have you presented? Go.
Rapid demonetization: what it is
For me, “demonetization” means the ability of a technology to take a product or service that used to be expensive and make him or her cheap or free at all (for that matter). This means excluding money from the formula.
Think of photography: In the days of Kodak, photography was expensive. You paid for the camera, for the film, for developing the film, and so on. Today, in the era of megapixels, your phone's camera is essentially free - no film, no development. Completely demonetized.
Think about information: in the past, collecting piecemeal data was difficult, time-consuming if you did it yourself, or financially if you hired analysts and others. Today, in the age of Google, information is free and its quality is a thousand times higher. Access to information, data and analytics has been completely demonetized.
Think of video streams or phone calls: demonetized by Skype, Google Hangouts and other systems.
The list goes on.
Boards like Craiglist have demonetized ads.
iTunes has demonetized the music industry.
Uber demonetized taxis.
Airbnb has demonetized hotels.
Amazon has demonetized bookstores.
If a smartphone was worth a million dollars
Peter Diamandis gives an example of how we demonetized $ 900,000 worth of products and services built between 1969 and 1989.
People with smartphones today have access to tools that would have been worth a thousand decades ago.
Twenty years ago, the world's wealthiest citizens could afford a camera, camcorder, CD player, stereo system, game console, cell phone, clock, alarm clock, encyclopedia collection, world atlas, and a bunch of other applications, for more than $ 900,000.
Today all this is available for free on your smartphone.
It's weird that we don't appreciate these things when they become free. We're just waiting for it.
Now let's look at the seven points mentioned above that people are spending money on today and how they will be demonetized in the next ten to twenty years.
1. Transport
The trillion dollar car market is being demonetized by startups like Uber. But this is just the beginning. When Uber rolls out a fleet of fully autonomous services, the cost of transportation will fall. A whole bunch of related costs will disappear: auto insurance, auto repair, parking, fuel. The total cost of the trip will drop 5-10 times when compared to owning a car.
This is the future of car as a service.
Ultimately, even the poorest people on earth will be on wheels.
2. Food
The cost of food has dropped thirtyfold over the past century. This decline will continue.
Additional cost savings will begin as we learn to efficiently produce food on vertical farms. Now 70% of the final price of food is spent on transportation, storage and processing.
In addition, as we make breakthroughs in genetics and biology, our yield increases per square meter.
3. Medicine
Medicine can be roughly and roughly divided into four major sections: a) diagnostics; b) intervention / surgery; c) chronic treatment; d) medicines.
a) Diagnostics: Artificial intelligence has already demonstrated the ability to diagnose cancer patients better than doctors, to identify and diagnose pathology, study genomic data and draw conclusions, and sift through gigabytes of phenotypic data … all at the cost of electricity.
b) Intervention and Surgery: In the near future, robots will become the best surgeons in the world, and they will be able to perform surgeries with high precision and close proximity. Each robotic surgeon will be able to access the data of millions of previously operated ones, thus having superhuman experience. Again, the cost will approach zero.
c) chronic treatment and care of the elderly: care for the elderly and the chronically ill is best done by robots;
d) medicines: medicines will be discovered and produced, again, more efficiently due to the use of artificial intelligence, and then produced at home on a 3D printing machine, which, in addition to preparing medicines, will take into account the individual rate and biochemistry of blood in a specific moment.
It is also worth noting that the cost of genome sequencing is falling every year. Accurate sequencing will enable us to predict which diseases you are likely to develop and which drugs will be most effective in treating them.
4. Housing
Think about why housing is so expensive. Why does a single room in Manhattan or the center of Moscow cost $ 10 million, while on the outskirts it will cost $ 100,000?
A place. A place. A place. People flock to high densities, demanding housing close to work and play. It is the demand that drives up the cost.
Housing will fall in value for two reasons: the first is two key technologies that will make your home's proximity to work unimportant so you can live anywhere.
a) self-driving cars: if you can read, sleep, relax, watch a movie, have meetings along the way - is it so important that the journey takes 90 minutes?
b) virtual reality: what happens if your workplace becomes a virtual office in which all employees are represented by avatars? When you don’t have to move anywhere anymore? You wake up, connect to your workplace, and travel from your village to the island of Lesvos.
The second reason is robotics and 3D printing, which will reduce the cost of building buildings. Several startups are exploring construction opportunities using 3D printed structures and are already talking about how they can significantly reduce construction time and cost.
5. Energy
Every hour, five thousand times more energy is poured onto the surface of the Earth than all of humanity uses in a year. There is really a lot of sun. And so much the better that the poorest countries on earth are also the sunniest.
Today the cost of solar energy has dropped to 3 rubles per kWh. And it will fall until it finally falls, thanks to advances in materials.
6. Education
Education has already been demonetized in many ways, as all the information available at school is already on the Internet and for free.
Coursera and schools like Harvard, MIT, and Stanford are already producing thousands of hours of high-quality online lectures that are sprinkled with translations in every language in the world and available to anyone with an Internet connection.
But this is just the beginning. Soon, the best professors in the world will be artificial intelligences who will know exactly the capabilities, needs, desires and knowledge and teach everyone with maximum efficiency and speed.
The child of a billionaire or beggar will have equal access to this kind of AI, making education completely free.
7. Entertainment
Entertainment (video and games) has historically required the purchase of expensive equipment and services.
Today, thanks to a variety of music streaming services, YouTube, Netflix and the App Store, we are seeing an explosion in every segment of entertainment available at the same time, and at the same time - a decrease in the cost of access to those entertainment.
YouTube already has over a billion users - that's nearly a third of all people on the Internet - and people watch millions of hours on YouTube every day.
ILYA KHEL