The trajectory of our modern economy is clear: people are redundant.

Corporations would rather buy robots to make things. They are cheaper, more efficient, more accurate in most cases and won’t unionize or commit suicide in defiance of poor working conditions.

Corporations are making enormous amounts of money not hiring people and why should they when machines will do the job faster, cheaper and better? Apple (AAPL) sits on about $76 billion of cash, Intel (INTC) about $20 billion and Microsoft (MSFT) about $40 billion. They won’t hire a single person unless they can make money from that hire. That’s just the nature of business.

This isn’t news if you’ve been paying attention. The real question then becomes: how do we feed, clothe and house people who do not serve any corporate interest outside of consuming corporate goods?

How do we sustain people who no longer are a cog in the capitalist wheel? And do not assume that you are immune from such a fate. Practically any job title besides “Owner” can be outsourced or replaced by a machine.

Source:  Xinhua

Taiwanese technology giant Foxconn will replace some of its workers with 1 million robots in three years to cut rising labor expenses and improve efficiency, said Terry Gou, founder and chairman of the company, late Friday.

The robots will be used to do simple and routine work such as spraying, welding and assembling which are now mainly conducted by workers, said Gou at a workers’ dance party Friday night.

The company currently has 10,000 robots and the number will be increased to 300,000 next year and 1 million in three years, according to Gou.

I seem to be on an anti-corporate rant this week. However, I thought that this article from Chris Hedges nicely summarizes why we are interested in sustainability. It is the same reason why we are drawn to search for solutions to a life of products and services that corporations tell us are convenient and comfortable. There’s something wrong with that life: nature is missing and this article explains it well.

Source: Common Dreams

Defy nature and it obliterates the human species. The more we divorce ourselves from nature, the more we permit the natural world to be exploited and polluted by corporations for profit, the more estranged we become from the essence of life. Corporate systems, which grow our food and ship it across country in trucks, which drill deep into the ocean to extract diminishing fossil fuels and send container ships to bring us piles of electronics and cloths from China, have created fragile, unsustainable man-made infrastructures that will collapse. Corporations have, at the same time, destroyed sustainable local communities. We do not know how to grow our own food. We do not know how to make our own clothes. We are helpless appendages of the corporate state. We are fooled by virtual mirages into mistaking the busy, corporate hives of human activity and the salacious images and gossip that clog our minds as real. The natural world, the real world, on which our life depends, is walled off from view as it is systematically slaughtered. The oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico is one assault. There are thousands more, including the coal-burning power plants dumping gases into our atmosphere that are largely unseen. Left unchecked, this arrogant defiance of nature will kill us.