Post-labour economics, with David Shapiro

In this episode, we return to a theme which is likely to become increasingly central to public discussion in the months and years ahead. To use a term coined by this podcast’s cohost Calum Chace, this theme is the Economic Singularity, namely the potential all-round displacement of humans from the workforce by ever more capable automation. That leads to the question: what are our options for managing the transition of society to increasing technological unemployment and technological underemployment.

Our guest, who will be sharing his thinking on these questions, is the prolific writer and YouTuber David Shapiro. As well as keeping on top of fast-changing news about innovations in AI, David has been developing a set of ideas he calls post-labour economics – how an economy might continue to function even if humans can no longer gain financial rewards in direct return for their labour.

Selected follow-ups:

• David Shapiro’s Substack
• David Shapiro's channel on YouTube
• Julia McCoy's channel on YouTube
• Next stop: Miami - Waymo
• Resource Based Economy
• Debt: The First 5,000 Years - book by David Graeber
• Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better - book by Lyn Alden
• The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking - book by Saifedean Ammous
• Normalcy bias - Wikipedia
• Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty - book by Daron Acemoğlu and James A. Robinson
• Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail - book by Ray Dalio
• Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom - book by Grace Blakeley
• The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and Fully Automated Luxury Capitalism - book by Calum Chace

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration