Your article “Some of Hammond’s best friends are robots” (last week) describes how automation will have a transformative effect in raising industrial productivity and the delivery of services.
However, the article dwells too little on the likely downside: consumption falling off a cliff, caused by mass unemployment.
We are now engaged in the fourth industrial revolution — the age of accelerating artificial intelligence, of machines that possess vastly superior cognitive skills to the human brain in designing and operating highly complex nano and macro-technology systems that will challenge our way of life.
Anything that can be systemised will be, with the aim of engineering out the cost of labour. The result will be, as Mark Carney said, up to 15m British job losses. A study has found that half the UK workforce, including 850,000 public sector jobs, will be automated by 2030.
Of course, new opportunities will arise but not at a rate fast enough to absorb the swathes of displaced workers, not just in low-skilled jobs but in professional employment.
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This will have an impact on consumption. The ability to consume is key to the functioning of the capitalist economy. If unemployed people are unable to consume, how will taxes be raised to support the financing of the social infrastructure? Switzerland recently held a referendum on whether to introduce a basic wage for everyone, employed or not, but this seems totally inadequate in meeting this existential threat.
John Barker, Prestbury, Cheshire
We’ll pay for our own care
My wife and I cannot understand why our accumulated assets, including the house we live in, should not be used to pay for our care in our old age.
There is no human right that provides for assets accumulated by one generation to be passed on to the next. Indeed, we have made it clear to our children that the first call is to provide for our care and the second is to pay all taxes that could be due when we pass away.
We do not consider it moral to shelter our savings for the benefit of a future generation that may have done nothing to earn them. Let them stand on their own two feet as we had to.
Dave Wiseman, by email
Taxing the young to pay the old
Pensioners really have it made. Not only do they have a “triple lock” to protect their state pension (paid for by taxation of the working population), but now the government is giving the green light for councils to increase taxation to pay for care for the elderly. This comes in the face of rents in the private sector costing in excess of 40% of income, which among other things prevents saving for a deposit for a mortgage. This results in a downward spiral into a poverty trap, which is an unfair burden on the youth of today.
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The government has to address this urgently. Most of the elderly people requiring care have families: it is their responsibility to care for their elderly relatives, not the responsibility of taxpayers.
Caroline Clark, Brigstock, Northamptonshire
Corbyn off track for No 10
The Labour Party, under Jeremy Corbyn and with support from the rail unions Aslef and RMT, says it will gear up, win the next general election and govern Britain.
It doesn’t appear to occur to Aslef, RMT and the militant left that for every minute that strike-hit rail commuters are kept from their employment, one more citizen switches support from Labour to the Lib Dems or the Conservatives.
Geoff Taylor, Pouzols-Minervois, France
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