> “Automation has now made it possible to eliminate human labor at a scale that is almost scary,” says Katherine Newman, an anthropologist and provost at University of Massachusetts Amherst. “It’s not clear what ordinary people are going to be able to do for a living if you don’t need clerks at CVS anymore because all that’s done by barcode.” So, is the notion that every person SHOULD have to work for a living outdated? Where is all the savings going from all that automation? Into the hands of a few in positions of power. What if instead of concentrating it, it was shared. I know, I know, communism, etc; but not necessarily a total, state-run, “redistribution” iron system—more like just, what if an impulse more humans had when inventing amazing things that (can) generate more human freedom was to share it, at least somewhat? What would all those free minds come up with? How would people voluntarily make themselves useful if they weren’t spending all their energy surviving in the world of the illicit, the marginal, and the outright illegal? > “Simply arguing that there is more inequality is not enough,” emails Saskia Sassen, a sociologist at Columbia University and the author of “Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy.” “I think the economy we have right now is generating expulsions—you are simply out. This generates desperation—you become an outcast.”