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At the start of March 1977 the newly-launched British SF comic 2000ADintroduced its most famous, enduring and iconic character: Judge Joseph Dredd. Dredd is a law-enforcement officer with on-the-spot powers of judge, jury and, if necessary, executioner. Over the course of decades, Dredd has appeared in thousands of comics, numerous novels and audio dramas and two feature films. The world of Dredd, a hugely overpopulated American city of the early 22nd Century, is harsh and brutal, but also darkly humorous and bitingly satirical. It was also grossly fantastical and completely implausible from the perspective of 1977.
Almost half a century later and a third of the way from the comic’s launch to the date of its setting, Judge Dredd is starting to look a lot less satirical and a lot more accurate. In fact, a reasonable (and disturbing) claim could be made thatJudge Dredd may yet emerge as the most prescient work of British science fiction of the late 20th Century.
Postcapitalism, or How a Robot Stole My Job
In the world of Judge Dredd robots of varying degrees of sophistication have replaced menial workers and factories are almost completely automated (with only a few human overseers or supervisors). Computers and AI systems handle everything from food deliveries and transportation to intricate medical procedures. An early Dredd story, The Robot Wars (1977), has one robot named Call-Me-Kenneth become self-aware and attempt to lead an AI uprising to destroy humanity, but he is halted and new safeguards introduced to stop this from happening again. As a result of this automation, well over 90% of Mega-City One’s population is unemployed and surviving on a basic universal income.
This possible outcome has been mooted many times in science fiction but actual economists and politicians have always scoffed at the idea. They point to history: when the spinning jenny was invented in the north of England in the 1760s, the inventor’s house was broken into and his machines smashed by people angry that his increased productivity would lower prices (which was correct) and destroy jobs (which was incorrect), since one worker with a spinning jenny could produce cloth at roughly eight times the rate of a worker by hand. However, market economics always favour increased productivity over reduced costs, so companies with the jennies would rather increase output (and thus profits) 800% rather than cut labour costs. Indeed, the increased profits were used to buy bigger premises and employ more people, resulting in the invention of factories and mass industrialisation as we know it. The same was true of almost every major technological invention and innovation from the middle of the 18th Century to the late 20th.
However, this movement has been reversed in recent decades. Large factories have been built (mostly in Asia but increasingly in Europe and the Americas) which are very nearly completely automated. Cars are constructed and built on assembly lines with minimal human oversight. One computer server can now hold and retrieve records that used to require a battery of clerks to maintain. A company like Amazon can hold, buy and sell goods across the entire planet with a few thousand employees (mostly in warehouse stacking and retrieval jobs which themselves are vulnerable to automation) whilst traditional retail companies require thousands of stores, each with a dozen or more employees, to do the same thing. All of these innovations are built on cost savings: computers, AI and robots are cheaper to build and mass-produce than workers are to train and hire, they never go sick, they never need holiday pay and they’re unlikely to sneak off to the toilet to check on their Facebook feed. Adding more people to these high-tech industries will increase costs and lower productivity and profits rather than increase them. The recent suggestion that jobs outsourced to China could return to Europe and the United States has been surprisingly positively received because many of these jobs have since been largely automated and it doesn't matter at all if a robot is based in China or the USA.
More recently we have seen traditional jobs in customer services requiring human interaction being lost to self-service machines, not just in supermarkets but increasingly in banks. The rise in personal banking over the Internet has also seen thousands of bank branches (with their attendant jobs) all over the world being shut down as people switch to more convenient ways of banking.
The sudden advent of self-driving technology, being pioneered by companies including Uber, Google and Tesla, is an even more alarming threat to traditional jobs. Driving, either taxis or trucks for mass transport of goods, is a valuable source of income for low-skilled workers. In less than a generation, we may see the majority of these jobs disappear in favour of vehicles that can stay on the road 24/7, never get lost, (hopefully) never have accidents and never overcharge their passengers.
Some countries are moving to tackle the issue: Finland is trialling a basic income, where people get enough money to survive from central taxation and anything they earn through work is added onto that amount. A similar trial in Aquitaine in France is also planned, and the Pirate Party in Iceland is advocating for a trial of their own. Economic models in Europe, where taxes are generally higher than the United States, indicate that a basic income is both possible and sustainable, and has positive outcomes (one study showed that only 1 in 10 people on the scheme voluntarily chose to stop working, and most of those were older people close to retirement anyway or parents choosing to spend more time with their children). Such a system would be harder to implement in countries such as the United States, as it would require a near-doubling of taxes to be sustainable. In the UK it would be more achievable due to the UK’s over-complex morass of tax credits and rebates, not to mention the enormously expensive welfare state bureaucracy. Eliminating all of these would move the country some way to affording a basic income (which would replace them).
The idea of a basic income is controversial, since it suggests that during the likely decades-long transitional period there would be people who worked hard to effectively subsidise other people who chose not to work at all: Switzerland rejected the notion by 76% in a referendum last year. Although studies show that relatively few people would voluntarily choose not to work at all, there would no doubt be some who did that make that choice, increasing social division and resentment. There is also the risk that those on a basic income in areas with no jobs would soon find themselves in the “just about managing” bracket with the temptation of engaging in crime to supplement their income. This outcome drives a lot of storylines in Judge Dredd and is also a troublesome outcome in James S.A. Corey’s Expanse novels, where automation has required most of the population of Earth to survive on a basic income (whilst those in Mars and the asteroid belt have to work much harder just to survive, to their annoyance). Still, it is another idea once consigned to SF that is now being more actively discussed in the real world.
the Mars lander Insight touched down on Mars safely! 
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