Robots and industrialization in developing countries [pdf]
Robots solve one problem very, very well: Labor shortages.<p>Rural America is poor, not because it is not rich in natural capital and real estate, but because it suffers from a perpetual labor shortage.  (14 percent of the U.S. rural are spread across 72 percent of the Nation&#x27;s land area)   Urbanization has a monopoly on talent at this point in time because of globalization and the wealth structure of internationalist neoliberal capitalism.  (The Silicon Valley model)<p>Robotic labor will change that, especially given the strictness of UAV laws in the US and the UK today.  They are practically legislating that drones must find profitability in low-value, low-population areas.<p>Fine.  Challenge accepted.<p>To give another example of such labor shortages, 75% of the United Arab Emirates population is Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, and Filipino immigrants doing construction jobs.  The other 2.3 million native UAE nationals can&#x27;t possibly engage in all of the ancillary labor opportunities that Dubai money commands.<p>Wealthy nations are suffering from labor shortages all over the world and have been for decades.  They&#x27;ve raced to solve these problems in the only way they know how: <i>attracting the flow of post-colonials because of standards of living arbitrage</i>.  (Very often, people used to being so poor being treated like garbage in a wealthy nation is a significantly better prospect than staying home)  In the EU, for example, they can no longer print their own currency, but each member state can still issue bonds.  They are already engaging in socialist taxation regimes, so raising taxes to pay for the bonds is impossible.  Therefore, you need to enrich your corporations by giving them access to cheap labor and pray you can tax them before they allocate their new found wealth in the Isle of Mann.<p>Unfortunately, this impulse isn&#x27;t such a clean transition, as most of these old world nations (with old world money) have the political, institutional, and cultural reflex to give new blood two options: <i>Comply with your role in our social pecking order 100% or be exiled&#x2F;imprisoned&#x2F;exterminated.</i>  Race riots, cultural flare-ups, demographic conflict, and other Huntingtonian events can easily be exploited and exacerbated by political opportunists, ultimately destabilizing the very social configuration that made your nation attractive to begin with. No matter what the well-wishers say, when it all goes belly up, civilizations always divide themselves along ethnic (the American definition) lines.<p>If we continue to refuse (as many have since the 1970s) addressing the labor shortage problem with our established institutions, people like me will be forced to address it technologically and your cherished institutions and the morality that they stand upon will be ground into the dirt upon its passing.