Unchecked Capitalism's Inevitable Conclusion

While we consider mega projects to build up Canadian sovereignty next to a United States government gleefully starving its people, artificial intelligence and automation are driving us down the road toward an even greater cataclysm that we need to get ahead of.

On Thursday, Tesla’s board, fearing Elon Musk would lose interest in their company, voted for an $878 billion pay package if he meets certain benchmarks over the next decade. That’s about the same as South Africa’s current real GDP, adjusted for purchasing power parity, according to the CIA’s World Factbook.

Musk, whose current $482 billion net worth is already equivalent to the entire GDP of Hong Kong, would become the world’s first trillionaire. If paid out today, it would vault him to a net worth of approximately $1,360,000,000,000, just about Pakistan’s GDP, passing the GDPs of the Netherlands, Argentina, Malaysia, the Philippines, Colombia, South Africa, Singapore, Romania, Belgium, the United Arab Emirates, Switzerland, Kazakhstan, Algeria, Sweden, Ireland, Chile, Iraq, Austria, Ukraine, Peru, Czechia, and Norway on the way by.

Stacked end-to-end as US $1 bills, his net worth would stretch about 212 million km, or one and a half times the distance between Earth and the Sun. If we assume he will live to 100 years old, he would have to spend about $81 million per day, or nearly $1000 per second, to use it all up before he dies, and that assuming no further growth.

If it appears to be an obscene amount of money for any one person, for any reason, it’s because it is an obscene amount of money.

What is the purpose? What value has he brought humanity that would warrant a single bonus package worth as much as the sum total of every transaction that takes place in his native country over the course of an entire year?

But Musk, for all his flaws, is not the problem here.

Our modern version of capitalism has become completely unhinged, deranged, grotesque. Far from incentivising innovation to advance society, it has instead created a race to see who can hoard the most wealth at the expense of everyone else.

The conditions for this pay package are ambitious. His net worth would only go to $1.36 trillion if the market valuation of the company itself gets to their target of $8.5 trillion. To do that, his targets also include selling 10 million subscription-based self-driving cars, a million humanoid robots, and a million self-driving taxis, among other requirements.

As with so much of our society right now, to increase his own net worth by the GDP of his birth country, he is mandated to put a minimum of 2 million people out of work and replace them with machines.

Amazon, run by Jeff Bezos, another centibillionaire, is planning to replace about 600,000 workers with robots over the next 8 years.

These are just two of thousands of examples. According to the World Economic Forum, we are headed for 92 million job losses to AI. That is probably on the low end.

Under our corporatist structure, this is not only legally acceptable, it is demanded. We exist in a world governed by the concept of “shareholder primacy” where profit is the only driving force of business. Environmental and social responsibility is growing within some businesses, but ESG is far from being the legislated priority of the corporate universe; shareholder primacy still trumps those efforts when push comes to shove.

If our objective is industrial efficiency across society, then the introduction of automated and AI systems should, as a general principle, improve the lives of all people. AI is not, on its own, a problem. Replacing automatable jobs with that automation is not only to be expected, it is largely inevitable.

But we, as members of society, as voters, as people, must demand that our leaders rethink the corporatist agenda. We cannot accept trillion-dollar pay packages for individuals under any circumstances. If that much wealth exists, it belongs to the society as a whole that built the infrastructure to create it, not to any one person exploiting it.

We cannot just accept that millions of people will no longer have the possibility of a job and the associated revenue required to survive because machines can do those jobs. The machines may well be welcome, but we have to ensure that the people that they replaced are not lost in the shuffle.

When our collective productivity exceeds the output of the working people, capitalism will reach its logical conclusion. As more and more people are replaced with computers and robots in the search for limitless profits, there will eventually be nobody left to buy the things capitalism produces. The trillionaires will have all the wealth with nowhere left to spend it, and the rest of us will slowly be migrating to riverside shanties, talking about the way things were while scavenging toxic food from poisoned waters.

Ultimately, we will need to reclaim our governments from the wealthy donors who fund election campaigns and influence policy. Only then will we be able to redesign our entire tax system to limit wealth, to have the output of automated production contribute to the collective, and use those revenues to provide a guaranteed minimum income so that every person may live — even when there is nothing left to do.