A little over a century ago, it took ninety people out of every hundred to produce the nation’s food. Now, it takes 2 or 3% of our population to produce a greater variety of cleaner, fresher food than ever.
Today, there are millions of school teachers, most of whom aware that their profession could be as automated as food production. The best handful of teachers in the nation, with videos and broadcasts, could teach every subject to every student far better than it is currently being taught, at greatly reduced costs.
Similarly, doctors could remotely diagnose and treat patients better than billions of people are now being taken care of. If people were trained to accurately describe their own symptoms, patients could enter information that would lead to computerized treatments that are, across the board, better for their health and welfare.
Every field can have the number of workers in it reduced. Commercial printing operations disappear as more work is transferred to printers with capabilities undreamed of a decade ago. Book publishers, increasingly, are selling thoughts and information on electrons rather than expensively printed on paper. Industries are disappearing as new ones are being created.
We first saw assembly lines reducing the number of workers needed for manufacturing. Now, robots are reducing the number of workers on every assembly line. Homes used to be individually built, on site. Today, they’re increasingly produced in factories with better quality control and fewer workers.
As the number of workers needed to produce a society’s goods decreases, Babylon is left in a quandary. How does she keep masses of unemployed people from making trouble while maintaining her need for more taxes?
When the Book of Revelations talks of Babylon collapsing, which takes up most of Chapter 18, an economic understanding helps us see the collapse occurring because automation reaches a tipping point in replacing workers in all the production that went on within economy. While she reigned, organized sin kept her increasingly unemployed people occupied. That employment was so offensive to God that He would not let it, or her, stand. He was angered by her people-destroying vanity, as those who embraced new technologies replaced meaningful work with sin and slavery. The process accompanies, and destroys, every state.
We see that Babylon’s collapse was, and is always, caused by religious fervor leading people to obey God call: (Rev. 18; 4) “A new voice spoke from heaven; I heard it say, ‘Come out, my people, away from her, so that you do not share in her crimes and have the same plagues to bear.'” At that point, many stop propping up their own, and others’ vanity and begin turning to God. The finances then collapse as the best people in the society, who ones who obey God, leave the marketplace and destroy it by their leaving the government increasingly under the The Culture of Death’s control. Though often overlooked, the conservative Jewish author, Ayn Rand, in her impassioned books about “good people pulling out of a corrupt system” is repeating the philosophy brought forth in the Christians’ Book Of Revelations.
Fear of automation is almost a living being within Babylonians terrorized at the thought of having their jobs replaced. That fear, within the teaching profession for instance, is practically palpable. Every teacher knows that better jobs could be done by automating the profession. They know that just as automated welding robots make better cars, that both students and taxpayers would benefit if education were automated and costs were reduced.
Rather than allow freedom to help students learn more and more quickly, the “prostitution” that the Book of Revelations mentions, part of which is worshipping the idols of Make-Work so intensely that millions of lives are spent lying about the “good” to be found in enslaving neighbors with higher fees and taxes than the services provided taxpayers are worth, destroys the nation taxed into destruction to pay for them.
The longer and more successfully that similarly motivated Babylons fight for vanity and against sanity, the worse the collapse. Babylon, the actual city, held on longer than practically any place on earth, and was the most utterly destroyed, becoming the uninhabited wasteland predicted by the prophets to whom The Loving Programmer had given access to future downloads.
