The book remains – 10 years after its publication - utterly relevant. It's not because it is clairvoyant about which technologies will shape the future, but how they will transform human labor, labor markets and how we deal as a society with the distribution of wealth, when jobs increasingly fall away as a distribution mechanism.
The crisis in natural resources is after all less relevant – yes, I hear all the people from the regeneration movement and biodiversity restoration shout “what is wrong with this guy?” – but in my understanding the key to solving the crisis in natural resources is to solve the crisis in human resources. We experience a consciousness ciris as late Jiddu Krishnamurti once said, which has grown so serious that it has turned into a social and ecological disaster of global dimension.
There is already a great cinematic take on this dilemma in Alexander Payne’s Downsizing. ROW should look at China’s rapid technological progress paired with its state capitalist model as an opportunity to deploy social innovation and move to the next level of consciousness.
1. Technology and social progress:
2. Social innovation
[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_accumulation_of_capital
[ii]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341264612_Captain_Planet_and_the_Planeteers_What_could_Xi_Jinping_do_to_avoid_climate_change
The crisis in natural resources is after all less relevant – yes, I hear all the people from the regeneration movement and biodiversity restoration shout “what is wrong with this guy?” – but in my understanding the key to solving the crisis in natural resources is to solve the crisis in human resources. We experience a consciousness ciris as late Jiddu Krishnamurti once said, which has grown so serious that it has turned into a social and ecological disaster of global dimension.
There is already a great cinematic take on this dilemma in Alexander Payne’s Downsizing. ROW should look at China’s rapid technological progress paired with its state capitalist model as an opportunity to deploy social innovation and move to the next level of consciousness.
1. Technology and social progress:
- Automation is a condition for more social fairness and unfolding of human potential: EU and its MS invest too little in mechanical and digital automation and therefore threaten well-being and living standards.
- Master plan for automation is needed: automate what people don’t like to do as a focus of technology deployment and make it possible for people to pick up jobs which they actually want.
- Electrification must be an industrial priority: clean, renewable and sufficient (PV) energy is the foundation for increasing automation to not put stress on the environment and make automation a force for social AND environmental good.
- China has understood the above three pillars of progress and executes them like a role model. Despite its advantages of high population density and a large home market, South Korea has shown that high industrial automation levels are not dependent on a large populace.
- Looking at the 2024 IFR data (10 years after Ford wrote this book), it is evident that Marxist China has deployed state capitalism to turn into the world’s largest owner of manufacturing assets. If China is ‘one enterprise’ it has turned into the world’s foremost capitalist (compare 2025 trade deficit) and has pushed ROW into class struggle.
- China applies large scale primitive accumulation[i] strategies to keep its system running. Industrial fishing is one striking example.[ii] Raw earth production another.
2. Social innovation
- Social contract 2.0: social innovation is how ROW can balance China’s industrial might in a competitive rat race which creates massive waste. A citizen dividend must be explored on a communal level. Municipalities should apply Leopold Kohr’s idea of village government and experiment with the right incentives to work and take part in society.
- A conditional citizen dividend is the vehicle which guarantees increased social capital and less environmental impact. The basic income should be paid by regions and municipal governments according to contribution aka proof of work.
- Jason Hickel calculates that 65% of US GDP – and with it, an immeasurable amount of resources and working time – would be eliminated if the goal of an economy were general well-being rather than national prosperity. According to his calculations, an income of USD 14k would be sufficient in the US to achieve maximum well-being, while the current GDP per capita is USD 59k. System transformation in the Anthropocene is therefore class struggle under new premises.
- Coupled with the predictable and already unfolding consequences of automation and machine learning, a rethinking of the concept of “wage labor” is inevitable. We must engage in experiments in model labor markets that either combine traditional wage labor with social and ecological contributions or prohibit work entirely as part of “extractive economies.”
- Comprehensive ‘distributed value accounting’ of the social and ecological impact of every (professional) activity is necessary if we want to meaningfully separate destructive behavior from regenerative action.
“Very few events have as much impact on civilization as a change in the basic principles of organizing work.” - Peter F. Drucker
[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_accumulation_of_capital
[ii]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341264612_Captain_Planet_and_the_Planeteers_What_could_Xi_Jinping_do_to_avoid_climate_change
