These new machines and the ever-growing numbers of NGOs (a good many organized around the production of food and housing) will largely replace much of the capitalist system before the middle of the 21st century, says Rifkin; he bases this conclusion on extrapolations of current trends. His book, cited and linked at the outset of this article, pushes some of the most important new technologies and kinds of organizational development to their logical, and sometimes scary, conclusions.
Most machine systems will eventually be self-replicating, he says, capable of producing their own spare parts and propagating themselves indefinitely. They will be powered by alternative energy sources like the sun and the wind, allowing them to run, pollution free, indefinitely.
They will be connected by the coming "internet of things," a self-organizing network that will allow them to operate as part of a new, pervasive yet intelligent and "electronically wired together" infrastructure. These machines will be fully automatic and will, for the most part, eventually require near-zero human labor to operate. (There are already plenty of robot-based factories in Japan and South Korea that operate in total darkness, 24/7, since no humans are present the vast majority of the time.) Such factories will soon provide products at virtually no cost, save the minimal one of supplying the basic raw materials and electrical power. And since the cost of their operation will be virtually zero, each additional item produced (i.e. at the production margin), will cost virtually zero as well. Hence the term 'zero marginal cost.'
The heart of Rifkin's argument
If, by way of ever more advanced technology, the marginal cost of producing each additional item falls almost to nothing (zero marginal cost), then products can to that extent become virtually free. So, in their pursuit of profit, businesses will therefore have irrevocably undermined their own profit margins, and capitalism will, to that extent, have opened itself up, by and large, to replacement by a better way to organize labor and the distribution of income, goods and services--essentially a new economic system. In this new system, income will no longer be based on people putting in long hours of work. Rising in place of capitalism, Rifkin argues, will be a civilization based on a new and more fulfilling communitarianism--a collaborative commons free of the hang-ups and fetishes that have characterized the back-biting, back stabbing, materialistic, dog-eat-dog, wealth-hoarding individualism of the late capitalist age.
Key technologies and arrangements
Included will be the 3D 'printing' of all manner of objects, tools and structures, including houses; open-source software; the internet of things; the sharing economy; thousands of online courses taught by the nation's best professors, often with millions of students in each class, that are already reshaping (here and here) education; and the artificial intelligence that is enabling machines to replace ever more types of human labor. (Note re: our nascent revolution in education: Five million books published between 1500 and 2008 have already been digitized by Google and are potentially available and searchable by anyone with access to the Internet.)
Three Rifkin predictions
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