What is the crossover point?
The crossover point represents a change in the nature of something, a shift in its character and substance. In personal finance, you can spend 20 years paying off a mortgage, 240 monthly payments but it is the last payment that represents a crossover point, where one big bill suddenly disappears from your life, hopefully forever, and you suddenly have a huge amount of extra money to spend every month. If you are pursuing financial independence, you slowly build up your cash machine, each month it generates a little more money, but again the crossover point is when that income has increased to the point where it can pay for all your expenses, that is the point where you no longer have to work and it becomes instead a choice as to what work you do.
It is any situation where you make marginal gains for a long period, and then you suddenly reach a point where the benefits changing their nature. If you become a healthy and happy person, who happens still to be overweight, there is a long period where you work hard to lose that weight but suddenly it becomes easy when you reach your ideal BMI(body mass index) and you change to maintaining your health and happiness.
This doesn't just apply to individuals, also happens to entire countries and the world as a whole. When a society is poor and full of corruption, there is a slow progression in its advance, every step seems so small, it seems easier just to pay the little bribes, it is the cost of doing business. However as enforcement increases and people's confidence in that enforcement increases, there is a point at which it stops being normal and it becomes socially unacceptable, and the old habits almost completely disappeared overnight, except for the odd politician or police chief, who always seem to be the slowest to adapt to the new circumstances.
And there is crossover point coming for the whole world, probably far faster than anyone can imagine, it's going to affect everyone. For as long as there has been humans, we have had to be the Labour that got stuff done, we were the tractors, the computers, the drivers, the makers and the thinkers. We have been vital in providing all the goods and services, we may have been exploited and taken advantage of, but nothing initially is gonna feel was bad as not being needed at all.
And that is what is coming, for the first time ever we are not going to have a symbiotic relationship with capital. Labour is no longer get a be needed to maintain and produce more capital, instead capital is going to generate more capital, it is going to be able to search and exploit resources without the need for labour, it will be able to care for and repair itself, it is even going to be able to think for itself. Artificial intelligence will be able to use capital in a more effective way than the human mind will be able to, it will be able to imagine that's beyond our capabilities to understand, it will be able to comprehend our wants and needs better and with a greater search capability than we are able to do for ourselves. Already Amazon and Netflix can find new products and experiences for us quicker than we would be able to by searching through their huge catalogues and inventories, they do not have to be perfect they simply have to be better than us and we might think we are superior, that we have better taste but betting on that, might lead to us to being very humble, very quickly.
When the crossover point is reached, extraordinarily strange things might happen, the financial system could well collapse, if labour isn't needed, that means there's no demand for and no one is going to get paid for their labour. Conversely, if capital can produce capital in addition to all the goods and services we need, there could be the kind of deflation that the world has never seen before, especially for simple, basic goods and services. There has for some time been a hidden deflation on food, it feels more expensive in a simple price on the stick way, however relatively compared to incomes food is actually cheaper, even if it doesn't feel like at times. Light, that is artificial light, the most basic and empowering technology that there is in the world, that means people can learn and read in the evenings, has been getting actually cheaper and consistently for over thousand years, now you can buy the most basic torch for pennies and it can literally save your life on the dark roads of Africa.
The need for paid work whilst it isn't going to disappear overnight, and there is certainly going to be the demand for human services for a long time. A cup of coffee served by a real person is always going be better than having a robot do it, who knew baristas are going to be the last working professionals, and that they were wiser than all of us in their career choice. So there is going to have to be a changing attitude to our relationship with money, instead of only being worth something because we had to earn it, it is going to have to be seen instead as the way we allocate the resources of the world.
That is what money really is, we swap our resources of labour for the resources of the rest of the world or at least our little slice of it. When we no longer have labour to swap for money, that does not mean money is useless, it just means that money needs to come from somewhere else, have a different point of connection, instead of swapping labour, we will be swapping our good citizenship, our contribution of social capital to the capital of the world and we will be paid via an universal basic income. And then we will play the same game of swapping bits of paper between us, in return for whatever is of value to us and we will all end up happier.
