Disrupting the Factors of Production

Producer Goods in the Role of Labor

In the centuries old scheme of factors of production, there are three -
1. Land - the raw materials necessary to produce goods for consumption
2. Labor - the human factor, skilled and unskilled
3. Capital Goods -  the machines necessary to turn the raw materials into consumable products in conjunction with labor

It is the contention of this blog that capable autonomous robots using artificial intelligence disrupt this theoretical analysis to the point of requiring a fourth factor -

4. Labor Goods - those machines possessed of intelligence that function as both Labor and Capital Goods at one and the same time

Adding in and accounting for this Fourth Factor creates economic scenarios that would have been unimaginable for Adam Smith and unthinkable for Joseph Schumpeter.
Of significance in this new scenario is the fact that any AI robot capable of substantially replacing human production labor is capable of making, maintaining, and repairing itself. That presents a solid unscalable face to what was creative destruction with its corollary phenomenon of raising the employment bar. 'Normal' comprehensible adjustment cannot be done.
An autonomous artificially intelligent robot of significant capability bankrupts classical economic theory. It is simply a matter of adding in this Fourth Factor, this producer good, this machine\labor hybrid, but that addition changes the economic analysis out of all recognition because it creates a new economic order such as has never been seen before.
Our present economy in the United States is a capitalist welfare state committed to innovation, which is to say, the market forces allocate resources to relevant entrepreneur and arbitrageur talent and those that fall victim to creative destruction in the process have a safety net to cushion the blow.
This economy is institutionally consumerist and has been since the form installment loan contract was declared legal so workers could buy refrigerators, automobiles, and houses. Consumerism evolved in an ad hoc, heuristic, fashion to absorb overproduction and in so doing created chronic overproduction. The system that these factors have brought into being is systematically criticized for its waste and nihilist commercial values but not for its princely lifestyles. Everybody wants a helicopter but nobody wants to pay the cultural cost.
This economy functions within liberal tenets and institutions that deny the importance of talent and insist that anybody can do anything with proper training. It is therefore a system in constant conflict with itself.
An autonomous artificially intelligent robot changes the whole consumerist, capitalist, dynamic reducing demand, wages, and opportunity if left to itself. This situation must be addressed. One cannot muddle through an economic innovation, an economic revolution, of this order of magnitude. Unlike other economic revolutions that have preceded it, this one does not merely change the nature of human work, it dispossesses it into a pure machine empowerment of human vision. We are not prepared for this kind of dislocation and it grows closer by the day. It is time to get ahead of the curve.
It is time to consider backcharging Labor Goods for the cost of this dispossession. As Labor Goods, they are certainly eligible for some sort of taxation and the funds so generated could be used to develop vision and perhaps, within the liberal model, generate makework projects. Such a levy would slow the deployment of these machines, but not their development, and create manageable rates of change.
I prefer the consumerist simplicity of a Universal Basic Income devoid of socialist theory. As an ad hoc  restructuring of economic profits such a consumerist device would continue to support production and provide the means to develop one's talents for the marketplace.
Whatever the concept, some address must be made, not in abstract political terms but in the sense, as trading bots have demonstrated, that you, whoever you are, are next.
Do Well and Be Well.

Meaning and Motivation: Structure, Fit, and Drive

There is always a social context to our behavior. We all have a prescribing culture influencing that behavior and either there is a myth, however personal, ordaining that culture, making that context legitimate, or one is a nihilist.
We speak of meaningful social existence and motivated people in vague generalities and specific examples. This blog is an attempt to bring order to that chaos of analysis, to rationalize, if not the actor, then the act.
What is meaning? That question drives the quest of philosophy to define goods and find happiness. What, in short, does meaning mean? For human behavior, it means personally relevant social context, structure, in which one behaves and relevance in that behavior to that context, fit, and a temporal point A in that social context worth occupying and a temporal point B beckoning, drive.
I have a personal psychological space of Victorian and transcendental symbol and canon that defines my relevant context and pragmatic values that define my behavioral repertoire simply because that era is the last instance of true continuity in Western Civilization. In this multicultural, linguistically relative, universe that has technologically been brought into being, I have to pick my relevant moments and ignore, to the extent possible, those that aren't personally relevant. This has given me a reputation for being distant and cavalier but I suspect that reputation of being authored by disordered and irrelevant social contexts. In any case, it is a condition of my existence.
Being civilized is difficult under the kind of disruptive influences that hold sway today. Civilization is found, as it has been since Byzantium, in the library and in individual lives and in those books and in those lives one finds structure, fit, and drive.