Just buy yourself some damn robots.

Five rows of two hundred machines in each, simultaneously gnawing with incisors into steel blanks, threw the finished parts onto a continuous conveyor belt, stopped for the time required to fix new clips in the clamps, clamped them and, again biting into the blanks with incisors, threw the finished parts.

Paul opened the box in which the tape with operations records was stored, controlling all of these machines. The tape was nothing more than a small eyelet that continuously ran through the magnetic scanners. At one time, it recorded all the movements of a turner, processing shaft for a motor of one horsepower. Paul tried to calculate how many years ago it happened - eleven? twelve? No, thirteen years ago, it was he, Paul, who made this recording of the work of a turner working on shafts ...

We had not had time to dry the ink on their doctoral diplomas, as he, with Finnerty and Shepherd, was sent to the machine shop for the production of such records. The foreman pointed out to them his best worker - what was his name? - and, poking fun at the puzzled turner, three capable young people hooked up a recording apparatus to the levers of the lathe. Hertz! - that's the name of this turner. Rudy Hertz, a man of the old way who was about to be sent out to retire. Now Paul remembered his name and the respect that the old man treated talented young people.
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At the end of the work, they begged the foreman to let Rudi go with them and, with ostentatious and eccentric democracy, “from the machine” people invited Rudy to the brewery opposite the factory. Rudy did not really figure out why they needed all these records, but he liked the fact that he liked it: after all, he was chosen from thousands of other turners to immortalize his movements by writing them to a magnetic tape.

And now this little loop of ferromagnetic tape lies in a box in front of Paul’s eyes, the embodiment of Rudy’s work, that Rudy himself, who turned on the current that night, set the number of revolutions, looked after the cutter’s work. That was the essence of Rudy from the point of view of the machine itself, from the point of view of the economy, from the point of view of military efforts. The ferromagnetic tape was the essence, the quintessence, isolated from this small polite man with wide palms and mourning under the nails, from a man who believed that the world could be saved if everyone reads the Bible for the night; from a man who, in the absence of his own guys, adored a collie, from a man who ... What else did Rudy say that day? It occurred to Paul that this man was probably already dead now or, having fallen into childhood, is living out his days at the Manor.

And now, by turning on the lathe on the switchboard and transmitting signals from the belt to them, Paul can make this “quintessence Rudy” process one, ten, one hundred, or one thousand shafts.

Kurt Vonnegut, "The Mechanical Piano"

* * *

Something strange is happening in the soul of investors, to whom for the most part we are obliged to today's bull market trend . trans. ], and almost no one talks about it. And I will.

The first American pension system was available only to shooters who were well-controlled with weapons. Then a colonist somewhere in Massachusetts armed himself and defended his settlement from the Indians. They chop off his hand, because of what he could no longer participate in the only kind of labor that existed in those days — manual. He could not build shelters, raise animals, cultivate the land. Therefore, the settlers collected funds in the form of taxes, which allowed the wounded soldier to retire and support himself and his family.

Do you know who exactly collected these taxes from the settlers? This fighter himself. Yes Yes. From there, and went the evolution of pensions. [ The first retirement benefit is the monetary support for naval officers, introduced in France in 1673. In Russia, since the days of Peter I, there was the support of the injured soldiers, and Catherine the Great introduced pensions for civil servants. From the second half of the 19th century, pensions for private company employees began to appear. After the formation of the USSR in 1918, the formation of the provision of all workers began with a pension / ca. trans. ]

For most of the 18th century, you worked on a farm until you died. The pension began with a grave. It was only in 1875 that the American Express railway company founded the first private pension fund, and soon many others followed it. There was nothing of the kind in it, since the average life expectancy did not greatly exceed 50 years. The US government created a public version of this system — the social security system — in the 1930s, when it became clear that not everyone would be able to work long (and safely) to earn these pensions.

The system developed until the 1970s, when the personalization of the pension fund appeared, an individual pension account, form 401 (k) [the most popular accumulative pension account of the private pension system in the USA / approx. trans. ], etc. Pensions began to be replaced by investment accounts owned and managed by the employee himself, which is happening to this day. Therefore, the pension system known to us, in fact, is only 50 years old. This is what most investors did in the market - transferring today's spending to the future in order to have enough money to spend on it later.

But now something else is happening. In our way of investing a sense of despair creeps in.

***

Why don't people panic ?!

Trump, Kim Jong Un, nuclear bombs, border walls, racial riots, breaking trade agreements, preparing for impeachment! Sell, damn it!

But they do not sell. Markets beat records, volatility disappears. Every week there is a new reason for hysteria. But no reaction from investors should be, except for short and sharp bursts, resolving in a few hours.

Why?

Apparently, there is something more terrible than the current news. 45-year-old man with his wife and two children who need to support two funds for education. The constant but distant threat of nuclear war does not disturb his sleep. On the contrary, it can be a relief for him. It is a bundle of naked nerves, and each new day carries more horrors and bad omens than the previous one. His nerves and his amygdala pulls something more awful. He, like everyone else, is afraid that he has no future.

He is stunned with horror at the thought that the skills he has acquired in his entire life are already out of date.

***

In Kurt Vonnegut's 1952 novel, The Mechanical Piano, we are shown a future in which only engineers and managers have a meaningful life and profitable work. And if you are not an engineer or manager, you belong to an army of nameless people repairing roads and bridges. You live in a farmstead, far from producing all machines, and you are treated as a helpless baby throughout life. You are no longer needed by the world. Everything that you can do, machines can do better, and they remind you of it every day - both the society and the one and only omnipotent production corporation that keeps track of everything.

He wrote it 65 years ago. And this text could not have been more timely for the situation that we are now observing, even if he wrote it this morning - entirely, even to a nostalgic demagogue, seizing the possibility of inciting rebellion to all the non-attached and offended. When millions of people begin to observe how their destination disappears, and how their self-esteem is taken away from them, they begin to feel that they have nothing more to lose.

In the book, this led to a cruel riot against cars. In the real world, we instead invested in them.

It may be that we are inside the first investment bubble in the history of the United States, based on fear - when the masses are buying not out of greed, but because of extreme horror. Robots, software, automation, owned by Capital, are celebrating new victories over Labor with ever-increasing speed. In recent years, it has been developing in a parabola - in every industry, in every region of the country, everywhere in the world. It's great to feel like a part of it if you own robots, software, and automation. If in this equation you are on the side of Capital.

And if you're on the other side — on the losing side — it's a horror movie in slow motion.

The only way out is to invest in your own destruction. In this sense, the investment in the shares of FANG [ an abbreviation of the names of techno-companies Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google, forming the word fang - "fang" / approx. trans. ] - not a trick or a fad, but a rescue, his mother, a raft. Commenting on what is happening in the market, people ask rhetorical questions about how much investors are willing to pay for owning shares of tech giants. This is the wrong question for a person who thinks he is drowning.

How much would you pay to survive? Grab a raft.

Here is the schedule of the “robots and automation” fund traded on the stock exchange for the last two years:



It is visible panic. A more steady panic than the one that Trump's statements or North Korean militancy can cause.

***

There is a great joke about an automatic Japanese car factory where robots work in the dark (they don’t need light) and where there can be only two living creatures on the factory’s territory - a man and a dog. Why do you need a man? To feed the dog. Why do I need a dog? In order not to give a person to touch the machines.

Matt Levine from Bloomberg View interestingly describes Bridgewater, a huge hedge fund managing almost $ 200 billion in assets:

If you need to briefly describe what 1500 Bridgewater employees are doing, a good option would be “do not invest.” To invest they have a computer! The work of Bridgewater is based on algorithms, and the company is famous for the fact that a very small part of its employees really understand how these algorithms work. Instead, people are engaged in marketing, working with investors, and - most importantly - evaluating and criticizing each other. I once explained my Bridgewater theory to the following: “One way to imagine Bridgewater is that it works under computer control with absolute logic and efficiency. In this model, the main problem of the computer is to occupy 1,500 people, so that they do not interfere with its flawless logic. ”

Such a heuristic - a room with geniuses who manipulate each other, while computers support the flow of money - is definitely stupid, but Vonnegut would have liked it. And symbolically, it works beautifully, even despite the somewhat distorted picture of reality. In Bridgewater collected the most highly educated and thoroughbred labor. Therefore, the picture of how these guys are trying to do something at work - even if it’s not real - can only intimidate more people working in firms located down the food chain of the knowledge economy.

***

We are told that we need to tackle the "specialization" of non-attached workers. “Enhance education, improve skills! Move to another city! Find a niche in which technology will not replace you! Learn to program! ”They are trying, but such options do not seem like good solutions in the long run. Nowadays, we are already told about how the AI ​​will write its own code. The machines will work as lawyers, diagnose diseases, write songs, design buildings, give financial advice, drive cars. Every day there are more articles about this or that breakthrough. No restrictions, no protection. The situation is approaching lawlessness.

No one is protected. Even creative people. Netflix users have already spent 500 million hours viewing Adam Sandler’s creations, so it’s easy to imagine an algorithm that creates an art-based production with Sandler in the lead role. Why do we need producers? Why do we need such a monster as Harvey Weinstein in the near future [the most famous and successful film producer in Hollywood, whose films repeatedly won prestigious awards; recently suffered a sudden harassment with various accusations, sometimes unsubstantiated - approx. trans. ] if now the software decides what we want to see, and automatically gives us more of this content? What will be the role of Weinstein in all this, except how to paw people and generate enormous legal costs for his film studio?

People have never felt so embarrassed about the meaning of their existence. This is manifested in the fact that Facebook, Google, Uber, Nvidia, Apple, Amazon and Alibaba throw millions of dollars. Yes, these companies create jobs, but these are other jobs, and most of the people left without work cannot take them. When 10,000 workers in the folding department are laid off in fifty different cities in the country on Friday, they are unlikely to be able to move to Seattle and start creating interfaces for Amazon’s mobile devices next Monday.

***

Professor Scott Galloway, an expert on the technological giants dominant in all facets of the economy and our lives, writes:

“Uber has only a few thousand employees, and they are all technically savvy. The company figured out how to isolate gentlemen (4,000 employees) from farmers (2 million drivers) earning an average of $ 7.75 per hour, so that these 4,000 employees could seize $ 70 billion, unlike the two million hourly workers. This is how Uber said the global workforce, quietly, but clearly: “Thank you, and you went to x **”.

Michael Betnik surrounds it as a payment for progress, turning into a full-fledged crisis. We have no answers to such questions. He hopes we will find them. But everything happens faster than we can adapt, even if everything that happens is going to benefit us (and which capitalist will argue differently?)

Anarchists from the book of Vonnegut paid the price of progress. They are worried that their sons would commit suicide after they were sent to life-long roadworks as a result of IQ tests instead of inviting managers and engineers to the top echelon. They write a letter explaining that the destruction they are preparing will be the price paid for all this “progress” caused to them:

I strongly protest against the fact that there is a natural or divine law, according to which machines, their productivity and organization of production must constantly increase in scale, become more powerful and complex in peacetime, just as it was during of war. I am inclined to regard this growth now as blatant lawlessness.

The time has come to put an end to this lawlessness and arbitrariness precisely in that part of our common culture that is in your jurisdiction.

Now it is the case that, regardless of human aspirations, machines, technical devices or new forms of organization crowd out a person, replace him every time when such a replacement turns out to be economically advantageous. Such a replacement is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but to do it without taking into account the desire of people is arbitrariness and lawlessness.

New machines, new forms of organization of production, new ways to increase efficiency, without taking into account the changes that may make in the way of life of society, are constantly being introduced. To do so is to create arbitrariness and lawlessness.

People by their nature cannot, apparently, be happy without active participation in enterprises, which gives them a consciousness of their usefulness. And therefore they should be re-introduced to these enterprises.

***

Code of the destroyer, repeat after me: "Your profit margin is my opportunity." In other words: “Your profitable small business is a marketing failure. But this is temporary, because we have investors, bastard. "

A friend of a friend owns a small chain of grocery stores in New Jersey. A few years ago, when Amazon entered this market, he changed his mind to invest in growing his business. He began to spend his capital on buying shares of Amazon. He saw what happened to Circuit City and Tower Records, Borders and Barnes & Noble. So he bought a little bit of Amazon, and then a little more.

It was not a retirement investment. It was something else. How do we call it? Destruction Insurance?

I do not know. In short, Amazon has grown by more than 1000% over the past ten years, and (we turn on the Jersey accent ) these shops haven’t rested on it (we turn off the accent).

***

According to the latest labor report, 96% of people looking for new jobs are working. This, of course, does not include tens of millions of people of working age who have ceased to look for work, work illegally or simply surrendered. Most of these people belonged to areas of the industry or professions that have ceased to exist. This phenomenon is not new, and occurs since the beginning of time.

But what cannot be denied is the fact that the speed of such progress has increased to dizzying heights. It also benefits those who have already benefited from it. Winners continue to win. The law of conservation of momentum for people. One would expect Wall Street dealers to celebrate record asset prices. But the opposite is true - they are unhappy. Cuts and closings of funds are accessories of the current bull market, instead of luxury parties and cocaine. This has not happened yet.

In the last fifty years we have invested in retirement. In the last 2-3 years we have been investing in a different scheme. What will be the maximum share price of a company struggling to replace you?

What else is left to do? Just buy yourself some damn robots.