If you asked people in the 1900 what they wanted, they would have replied faster horses.
This gives you an idea of how people view technology. Our minds are naturally conditioned to look at what is taking place and accurately projecting it forward. Ultimately, we tend to underestimate how things progress.
At the same time, we are also awful in our timeline projections. Things, over the long term, move faster than we think.
Here is an image of New York City, 13 years apart.
The Disruption of Labor
I know there are a lot of futurists who claim that "technology always creates more jobs than it destroys". Personally, as stated in other articles, I do not think this accurate the last 25 years. Nevertheless, looking ahead, the pace of technology is surely to cause massive upheaval.
Reverting back to the image above, what got disrupted? Obviously, the horse was the component eliminated from society. As Tony Seba wrote in a blog post, humans are now the horses.
In other words, the disruption of labor is rapidly approaching. This is due in part to the rise of the robots, specifically humanoids.
Here is a forecast of how it could look:
Humanoid robots will enter the market at a cost-capability of under $10/hour for their labor, on a trajectory to under $1/hour before 2035 and under $0.10/hour before 2045.
This is the driving factor.
We are about to see massive deflationary pressure hitting the market. Notice the forecast deals with cost per hour. Naturally, our mind goes to what we know.
Humans work roughly 2,000 hours per year. That is 50 weeks at 40 hours/week.
It is also present day thinking. A humanoid robot can operate 15, 18, or even 20 hours per day, 7 days per week. We are likely to see 7,000 hours per year of output.
Taken from another perspective, if the robot operates 7,000 hours per year, and is in the force for 5 years, we have 35K hours. At a cost of $50K (a number I made up), that is $1.42 per hour.
That is a rate humans cannot compete with.
So what are people to do?
Web 3.0: The Ownership Model
Read-Write-Own
This is what we are told the next generation of the Internet is going to be. I have news for everyone: most things will be tied to the Internet.
The key here is ownership.
People who are looking at this situation, considering solutions, are all thinking income. They are basically asking how do we sustain people when income labor is removed?
Obviously, our entire economic model is built upon the concept of labor. This is something that was broken for a long time and continues to get worse as governments get involved. Of course, we can expect their foolish participation in the future, mucking things up even more.
To me, the starting point is this: labor income is dead.
If we start from this premise, then we can advance in our quest for solution. This means we are thus forced to look at the other alternative, capital income.
We all know this, it is "the rich get richer" that we hear so much about.
Essentially, it all boils down to the ownership of assets. To frame it another way, it is the owning of the economic production. Here is where Web 3.0 is already ahead of the curve.
One of the basic potentialities of Web 3.0 is to distribute economic productivity in a different manner. This is removed from the ism, usually capitalism or communism. Instead, it requires a new adaption, with completely new metrics.
Most associate Web 3.0 with owning the fruits of one's content. Actually, it is much bigger than this.
We are looking at a potential way of structuring the ownership of the economic productivity that is generated across the world.
In other words, the tokenization of everything actually applies to everything.
S Curves
There are always a number of S Curves in operation. Some are on the ascent while others going in the opposite direction.
Notice what happened between horses and automobiles. Again, replace the horses with humans and automobiles with robots.
The S Curve is guaranteed.
Consider this, in the US it takes $21K per year to raise a kid. If we use 1 million kids, that is roughly $21 billion per year. Over the course of 18 years, we are spending $378 billion before we have these people somewhat ready for the workforce.
Using the cost of $50K from before (which I think is high), we are looking at $50 billion for 1 million robots. However, unlike kids, they are ready to produce from the start. There is no lag. Thus, instead of $378K and 18 years (at a minimum) to prepare a human, we can spend $50K and a few weeks.
Which do you think will become the preferred model?
Of course, we have to include the fact that many other technologies are feeding into this. There is progress being made in computing, actuators, vision, and telecommunication systems. All of this feeds into the capabilities of robots.
Here is another unavoidable fact:
Robots are the most expensive and least productive as they will ever be.
Think about that for a second.
What this likely means is we are only going to see an acceleration of things. The compounding effect multiplies as more S curves overlap.
So what are humans to do?
In Conclusion
With all the talk of green candles, bull markets, and whatever else dominates the crypto world, we are overlooking the major challenges of our time. Web 3.0 isn't about moonshots or Lambos. Hell, it isn't even about social media.
These are simply aspects of a much larger system.
Web 3.0 is the solution to the upcoming labor issue we will see. Bet the ranch we will see solutions proposed that put the government at the center of everything. We will have for income redistribution, taxing the robots, minimums numbers of humans having to be part of the labor force by law, and a host of other things doomed from the start.
There will be those calling for the bans of the robots.
Nevertheless, we are dealing with a global situation that is going to usurp any government.
Of course, it was people in government who thought this was a good idea:
All of this is going to happen quicker than people think.