Depopulating Workplace: Global Future

One aim of business used to be to provide jobs so people could afford to buy goods and services.  During the Industrial Revolution Henry Ford paid his workers enough that they might be able to afford his Model T product. 

That philosophy is long gone as employers work to depopulate the workplace.  Physicist Stephen Hawking warned recently (source: ZeroHedge):

“The automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining. 

“With not only jobs but entire industries disappearing, we must help people to retrain for a new world and support them financially while they do so,” he added.

Hawking wrote in his piece:

This in turn will accelerate the already widening economic inequality around the world. The internet and the platforms that it makes possible allow very small groups of individuals to make enormous profits while employing very few people. This is inevitable, it is progress, but it is also socially destructive.

We need to put this alongside the financial crash, which brought home to people that a very few individuals working in the financial sector can accrue huge rewards and that the rest of us underwrite that success and pick up the bill when their greed leads us astray. So taken together we are living in a world of widening, not diminishing, financial inequality, in which many people can see not just their standard of living, but their ability to earn a living at all, disappearing.

ZeroHedge stated:

Hawking also warned that artificial intelligence and increasing automation is going to decimate middle class jobs and worsen inequality, and risks creating significant political upheaval.

The majority of people are sick of the status quo and feel they have been "abandoned by their leaders," writes renowned physicist Stephen Hawking.

People see leaders gaining wealth and mobilizing public resources to reward supporters, many who led us astray and received public bail out money. 

President elect Trump has two cabinet nominees that received billions in FDIC subsidies that personally enriched them.   Neither man ran their respective bank into the ditch but got massive public subsidies and put up relatively little equity.  This is the status quo of which voters have grown sick.