Stephen Hawking Says We Should Really Be Scared of Capitalism, Not Robots
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I would have loved to see a Milton Friedman and Thomas Piketty debate although. :-)
In a sense, robots (automated machines) are the perfection of capital, where the ratio becomes arbitrarily high: human labour becomes decreasingly needed until it's basically unnecessary.
Private ownership of this capital - which is what capitalism is all about - is then absolutely the problem, because it pits a small group of capital owners against a majority which depends on the products produced by that capital without having anything useful to trade left.
[0] How you measure this ratio is an important but difficult topic, and in fact one must be careful not to let an implicit definition of measures frame the discussion.
Where is the evidence for this?
Your entire arguments falls apart when this isn't the case.
As manufacturing moved towards automation, labor moved toward rendering services.
The number of jobs is highly correlated to the size of the population. We didn't see a reduction in available employment due to automation. We simply saw a shift in the type of work performed, with jobs moving toward things that were more difficult to automate.
> Where is the evidence for this?
If you do more with same amount of people it still holds true. It doesn't mean technology causes people to loose jobs only that human labor needed for unit of stuff made per unit of capital decreases as technology progresses.
The number of jobs was highly correlated to the size of population so far, but we already see the rise of bullshit jobs, that serve each other in closed loops, providing no real benefit except of wasting resources to give some people something to do. It's not as obvious as ordering people one day to dig up a hole and the next day to fill it up again, but e.g. a lifecycle of a leaflet - from commissioning, designing and printing it, to delivery, giving it to people and having it end up in a thrash can, seems really similar.
Is there actual evidence of this? As in, actual statistics rather than grandiose claims of AI destroying the human race?
Yes, you might get replaced by a piece of software and you may need to retrain to a different industry, but this has always been true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction
> The number of jobs was highly correlated to the size of population so far, but we already see the rise of bullshit jobs
This doesn't make any sense. At some point, someone is handing over money and expects a specific amount of work be done, which he finds to be a good exchange. It's far easier not to hire someone, than to hire them. So if you don't need work done ... you don't hire anyone.
Why would someone pay someone else money to perform "bullshit"? You only have instances of this when it is mandated by regulation, not in a free market.
I'm not talking about AI, I'm talking about replacing people in service jobs who were needed for some particular function provided more by their brains than by brute strength.
For instance, consider self-checkout machines replacing casheers in shops. It's already happening, it makes shops employ less people. Not zero, because automation is not a binary process, but less. (Also, n=1, I used to do inventory in a shop as an external contractor, because they couldn't count up everything in one night with the staff they had; that ended pretty much overnight when they got themselves automated inventory trackers with barcode scanners, which reduced the number of people needed by half.)
So is automation replacing people in services? Yes, you can see this everywhere around you. Do those people end up jobless? Not yet.
> Why would someone pay someone else money to perform "bullshit"? You only have instances of this when it is mandated by regulation, not in a free market.
Because it's not obvious bullshit, per leaflet example I described. The nonsense nature of work done only becomes apparent when you look at the whole chain of services provided. At each link, someone is paying someone else for a job they need to get paid by someone else entirely. And as long as you get paid, why would you refuse the job, or care what happens with the artifact you've built later? So there you have, some chains of services are direct mind-to-thrashcan work. Others run against each other, in a zero-sum-game, each cancelling out the results of another one. They exist, because at each step someone is paid to do something that the other party needs.
In my experience, half the machines are out of order. The other half are working, but they need a person to stand there full-time to help the customers with items that don't scan and make sure that people don't just walk out of the store without paying. You also need someone to maintain those machines. If I had to guess, I'd say they don't really save the store any money since they still end up employing the same number of people. I'm also starting to see less of them than before, suggesting they were more of a fad.
> Others run against each other, in a zero-sum-game, each cancelling out the results of another one.
I think I understand where you're going with this. A competitor engages in a behavior that results in a benefit so long as nobody else is doing it (ie leafleting), but once everyone is doing it, it benefits nobody, but you still have to keep doing it because everyone else is?
That's not leafleting. That's marketing as a whole.
I suppose you can say that marketing/advertising is a bullshit job (and you wouldn't be the first), but that's just a fundamental outcome of human nature and capitalism. It's always been around and doesn't have anything to do with technology.
If anything, technology gave us things like AdWords, etc., automated ways of marketing. I imagine there are fewer people employed in advertising/marketing today than before largely because of those technological changes.
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21594264-previous-tec...
http://www.npr.org/2011/11/03/141949820/how-technology-is-el...
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html?_r=0
Automation is moving up the skill / knowledge chain.
The canonical introduction to why "better technology makes more better jobs for horses^Whumans" doesn't make sense.
It's only a problem if you can't/won't tax. If you can tax owners of the capital and give away that money to other people (bureaucrats, army, unemployed, everybody) everything still works just fine. Everybody still has money to buy stuff and this keeps the game that capital owners play between themselves live.
The only way we can screw this up is to weaken the governments and strengthen the corporations to the point that governments won't be able to tax. So probably private armies are bad idea, also neglecting people so that they pummel their own governments.
So it's ok if billionaires own all the robots, that make stuff, sell stuff to poor (everybody who's not a billionaire), as long as government can tax billionaires 98% tax and bomb them if they don't pay up.
Because I don't think it would work. Why would producers give bombs to the government? Why would they give food to the populace? Why would they submit to taxation when they have more power than the entity trying to tax them?
That's how it already works. Money is taken from capitalists and redistributed to bureaucrats and military and some expended to appease the populace.
> Because I don't think it would work. Why would producers give bombs to the government?
Because it's good money and government has already plenty of bombs to force people to make more bombs for them.
Similarly you could ask, why on Earth any company supplies stuff to IRS. Because it's profitable and because you could face consequences if you openly refuse.
> Why would they give food to the populace?
Because populace will pay them with money, for the cheapest, best quality food they can make. Money will come almost in full from producers pockets, but it won't be a problem for them because as long as competition pays the same or more then it's all good.
> Why would they submit to taxation when they have more power than the entity trying to tax them?
Wait!? US capitalists have more firearms, bombs, tanks and planes than US army?
What I am saying is that it's not some scheme that will get established. I'm saying that it's already the case. Governments are still stronger than corporations, same way North Korea is stronger than South Korea. Technologically and socially way behind, but with huge army.
I'm basically saying that monopoly on violence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence is the factor that keeps capitalism from eating us, and right after that, itself.
> Because it's good money and government has already plenty of bombs to force people to make more bombs for them. If the military could express force against a producer the moment they refuse to supply weaponry, and before they stockpile it for themselves, then this is true. However if the period of delay between producer non-compliance and military intervention is too great, the producer may have an opportunity to stockpile enough force to mount a realistic defence.
The government, nor the military, controls the means of production that their Monopoly on Violence depends upon, let alone the responsiveness and potentially not even the stockpile (I'm not sure of the figures) to mount a sustained defence against cooperating producers.
EDIT: The idea of producers acquiring legitimacy greater than that of public institutions is also an interesting idea with respect to Monopoly on Violence. Immediate self interest of citizens (taxation minimisation) could potentially lead to a "tragedy of the commons" type outcome for public services; leaving the private sector as the only viable and legitimate provider. This could also undermine the legitimacy of public institutions perhaps?
I think you are heavily underestimating capacity of armies. Hardware that modern armies operate is absolutely horrific and knowing how to use it most effectively is the only thing they do.
Capitalists know how to make money not use military hardware and I don't think anyone could stockpile enough weaponry without any government organization noticing to carve out any sort of tax independence.
Closest to what you are imagining is mafia carving out tax independence from government in Mexico or wherever. But then you have another problem if government is too weak to prevent you from stockpiling weapons, it's also too weak to prevent your competition from stockpiling weapons and that's way worse for the business than being taxed (even heavily).
> ... to mount a sustained defence against cooperating producers.
Why do you things producers would cooperate? They can cooperate to some degree but they want to get ahead of each other. Having armed competition would be horrible.
You might potentially imagine scenario, where produces stockpile weapons, unite to abolish government (and army) that due to weakness haven't noticed the stockpiling and haven't defused situation and haven't stockpiled accordingly. Then they either fight among themselves or not and become new government and army (because it's easier to tax than to manufacture and sell, when you have an army). So even in catastrophic scenario everything is back to status quo.
If you like SF I recommend "Beggars in Spain". Nice vision about what might happen if 1% gets immensely more productive then the rest of humanity.
> leaving the private sector as the only viable and legitimate provider. This could also undermine the legitimacy of public institutions perhaps?
I know it's popular fantasy to think that governments are legitimized by services they provide to (poor) people. While in truth they are legitimized by armies that hide behind, them that give illusion by being civilly controlled in exchange for inordinate amount of resources.
Sadly, this seems to be the dominant narrative among people these days. I can understand that when fighting for less taxes, they're thinking about themselves and their neighbours who run small businesses, but in the end this will likely turn self-destructive, as the businesses increasingly consolidate and governments are less and less able to protect the intrests of their people.
That most governments are run by openly corrupt media stars doesn't help either.
> So probably private armies are bad idea
Private armies are such, such bad idea that it's hard to believe there are actually people advocating them.
First of, I don't try to pretend to be a scholar in economics, so please bare with me.
That a capital system contains people/entities that accumulate wealth is exactly why I finished off with the Thomas Piketty comment. His very interesting book, Capital in the 21st Century, argues that our current system favours capital owners and we should tax capital, not income.
About labour being displaced, I can recommend Second Machine Age by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, however it does not contain silver bullets. :-)
I can only theorize on what Stephen Hawkings meant with his answer, but to me it didn't look like a general critic of capital, but more the system we have now.
It's just like communism. Wherever communism exists, tyranny and oppression exists. Every single place. For capitalism, it's the special interest groups which in many cases rise to the level of tyranny and oppression and serve the same purpose.
I don't know if there is a solution for special interest groups in capitalist systems, but as long as people keep separating this as 'not part of capitalism' there won't be. There certainly isn't one for the communist equivalent.
Tyranny and oppression are arguably worse in communism than any other -ism. (yes, arguably, even worse than feudalism!)
Don't conflate economic models with government models.
Like politicans, you seem to be confusing communism with totalitariansim. True communism, with the people making the rules has yet to be tried. Instead we have seen totalitarian regiems labaeling themselves as communism.
The global trend is, that governments in all nations loose more and more of their former power and (partially) dump it to international corporations which hold the real power in their hands.
There is an older documentary, that is still valid with the name "The Corporation" which shows, how corporations have used the US constitution and decades of lobbying and court cases to gain more and more power. So today, the corporations are difficult to held liable for things they do (in many cases they come away with small fees that don't even cover the harm they caused), but enjoy many of the rights which where meant for real citizen.
This documentary comes to the conclusion, that many corporations behave like psychopaths, because when a corporation has to decide, (for example) to keep the environment clean or make more profits, the corporation rule is, to go for the money and forget about the rest.
Anybody should watch this. Either on DVD, or I also spotted it on worlds favorite video site.
With international treaties like TTP and others, the power of international corporations is hardened and it gets more and more difficult to reverse this global trend. With all their lawyers and lobbyists, the corporations are bound to win over the democracies -- what dictators did not manage to.
This trend is undermining democracies and human rights, because corporations are not democratic and have only one rule to obey: The profit rule.
So finally, we are all governed by money and nothing else.
Also, link: http://thecorporation.com/
As non-native speaker, the differences don't shine out so visible.
A lot of what is wrong with large corporations is that they don't place any priorities on customers, employees, and the environment, when making the most profit is what they are legally mandated to do.
Making a profit needs to be balanced with the reason the company is in business, (i.e. the needs of its customers), its employees, and the environment.
I completely agree. I also don't think, that public sector is always optimal. Public institutions some times tend to be inefficient.
The problem, I see in many privatizations, is that profits are the main (and sometimes only) motive and any efficiency improvements are put into shareholder value instead into public benefit.
TPP, huge inequality, centralization, unemployment ARE NOT a consequence of free market capitalism.
In such case, automation just doesn't outpace the labor market.
Now, when tech companies are partying with an artificial economy controlled by the government, they have more than enough money to that.
Then what's the cause? Surely you have a guess?
As for unemployment, there are many things that give rise to it, but part of it is definitely market optimizing things so much that people are being pushed under minimum survivable wage and have to rely on (the bad, communist) welfare to survive. Automation is playing a serious role here, even companies know that (hence the "don't vote for increased minimum wage, or we'll have no choice but to replace our workers with robots" ads that started to appear).
We all know the about the suffering of industrial workers. What's less well known is the far greater suffering of the pre industrial revolution peasant. What's also less well knows is that the advances in conditions and prosperity that bring us to today were will under way before, and had very little to do with, progressive state interventions.
Also, there are many that could kill you and get away with it even in a western democracy. It may not be "legal" if the public ever found out (it won't), but the end result will be the same - you'll be dead.
The current, legal solution is to drive you to financial ruin. Equally effective as means of coercion.
Indeed, that's the problem. The state gains support of corporations by "partnering" with them. I will certainly not dispute that a free market system is often perverted by state cronyism.
Considering the United States was (and remains) a mixed market economy at the time, your statement is incorrect.
To have a shiny vision of capitalism, that just is not compatible with reality, does not help. Communism's failure was not, that it was not a nice idea, it's failure was, that it's thoughts where not compatible with reality!
Reality is, that international corporations have huge stacks of money and plenty of lawyers and lobbyists. And they use it for the only ethics they got: profits.
And TTP, inequality, centralization, unemployment ... are results of the thrive to more and more profits for the owning people at the expense of the working people.
Today's capitalism is shaped by the profit motive -- and the profit motive has no morals and no ethics.
And when you talk about "free market" -- there is no such thing. A real free market would give everybody the same chance. But the situation today is, that the big corporations are shaping the laws and the small players can not. So there is no such thing as a free market with free and equal competition in reality.
Name it however you like, it doesn't change that there are processes you mentioned that bring about the results we don't like. We need to focus on those.
> Today's capitalism is shaped by the profit motive -- and the profit motive has no morals and no ethics.
In a way, our economy is a paperclip maximizer. It doesn't love or hate you, but you're an expendable resource that can be used to make something else (profit within the system).
Your last sentence describes it very well. It is the mechanics, which are the driving force -- and the direction is predefined by the mechanics. The driving force we have today is profits ... and the result is a de-humanized and un-ethical society, because profits are not ethical at all.
Indeed! How about we fix that and don't let big corporations shape the laws? Crony capitalism is not an inherent feature of capitalism, it's a perversion of it which really ought not be taken as a given.
Also last I checked Facebook and Google were operating in very free markets and yet they don't really have any competition.
Google 67% Yahoo 10% Bing: 10% Baidu: 8% AOL: 1% Other: 2%
Just because 67% of consumers are choosing Google search despite a myriad of other options, doesn't make it a monopoly nor does it mean they don't have competition. Google is constantly being pushed by its competitors to improve and maintain its marketshare.
Google is also competing with every type of advertising on the planet.
I would put my money on newspeak. "Free" sounds more positive than "competitive". Freedom is like always good, while competition makes it clear that there will be losers as well as winners.
It's also much harder to be against freedom than competition. Often, we want cooperation instead of competition. But what could possibly replace freedom?
They're not?! How can you say that? Did you forget to put a /s (sarcasm) tag?
That may be the ultimate tragedy of capitalism in our time, that it
has achieved its dominance without regard to a social compact, without
being connected to any other metric for human progress. [...]
Capitalism stomped the hell out of Marxism [...] but the great irony of it
is that the only thing that actually works is not ideological, it is impure,
has elements of both arguments and never actually achieves any kind of
partisan or philosophical perfection. It's pragmatic, it includes the best
aspects of socialistic thought and of free-market capitalism and it works
because we don't let it work entirely. [...]
Labour doesn't get to win all its arguments, capital doesn't get to.
But it's in the tension, it's in the actual fight between the two, that
capitalism actually becomes functional, that it becomes something that every
stratum in society has a stake in, that they all share.
(the original talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNttT7hDKsk )
Traditional economics assume that if the price of an egg is $1 you'll eat one a day. If the price drops to 1c, you'll eat 100 a day. But: Would you?
In other words, at some point we are going to live in the world where consumption cannot catch up with the production. What then? Surely, economy would collapse: Goods won't be purchased and people producing them would be fired. Those fired would not have money to buy goods. The demand would decrease. More people will be fired. And so on until last human being dies of hunger.
I would even argue that in developed world we've already reached the limit and the economy is kept afloat only by desperate measures such as whipping up the consumption using ads, lowering the productivity by employing large numbers of paper pushers and so on.
It would be in our best interest as a civilization to help them build solar and nuclear infrastructure, to skip the fossil fuels. But the way things look right now, I don't see it happening.
(The analysis assumes that there's no wellfare, basic income, single worker feeding large extended families or any such non-markety stuff.)
Basically it depicted world(s) of plenty, tho' yes it did have wars and trade etc, which is what made Deep Space 9 and the Ferengi so interesting :)
There are some key technical linchpins that make that universe possible, and commensurately unlikely for us in yours and my lifetimes.
1. Near-free, externality-free, near-Kardashev Type II-scale energy ("The Grid" in his universe). 2. Strong AI, replete with emotions and benevolent AI sapients (even though they eclipse human intelligence by far). 3. FTL, anti-gravity, matter manipulation (molecular level at inter-stellar distances) physics we simply can't even begin to prod at. 4. Nanotech.
But that is one heck of a nice universe to strive for and toss the pebbles of our lives into moving towards however infinitesimal, nicht wahr?
[1] http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm [2] http://smile.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_11?url=search-ali...
Our system was pretty good for bootstrapping humanity into a technological era, and was pretty well aligned with our shared values for a time, but now it's becoming less and less well-aligned, in dangerous ways. In the end, with robots capable of doing anything, trying to keep people working for a living is prima facie ridiculous and evil. We need a way to avoid this future, and focusing just on new ways to solve government corruption isn't, I think, going to help us with this much. We need to stop riding the feedback loop.
C.f. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ for some pretty good analysis of the problem
The reduction in the amount of work available is proportional to the reduction in the cost of everything, so the wages from fewer hours of working buy more stuff. Everything is fine until we literally get to zero, which may not even be possible, and if it is then we're living in Star Trek fantasy land where everything is free and anyone can just press a button to get whatever they want.
The only real trouble is unemployment as a result of demand for labor not matching the skillset of the labor pool, but solving that is hardly rocket science. Large grants for education (and food and housing for students). Send everybody back to school until they're qualified to do the jobs that still exist.
Why are we getting rid of the retraining part? We still need people to be qualified to do those jobs.
Obviously we don't need to separately subsidize food and shelter specifically for students if we have a basic income, and a basic income is a Good Idea. But it isn't Not Capitalism. By all accounts it's more aligned with capitalism than the ridiculous system of "subsidies for everything but not if you get a[nother] job" that we have now.
That said, this is a discussion about the endgame of automation. In the current state of affairs, I absolutely agree with you that the unreflected "down with capitalism" one occasionally hears is counter-productive. You just also have to be aware that the endgame of automation is quite likely a qualitative change instead of only a quantitative one, and will require some serious re-thinking of economic models.
I don't know that anyone is claiming any expertise at all - this is just how things get emphasized and repeated online.
So he probably just didn't answer smart enough to not get exploited for a political agenda.
I feel sorry for him since Hawking the physicist is probably much more enjoyable for the greater public than Hawking the armchair economist.
He didn't even use the word capitalism, just "redistribution". ..which is a common effect in even the smallest transaction. The headline is pretty stretchy.
Why do we think that destruction of jobs by technology is something new? Do we really think it's happening faster now than in times past? I call this presentism. The cotton gin, the loom, the printing press, the steam engine, electricity, the internal combustion engine, the assembly line, domestication of the horse, the wheel -- each of these in it's time put a sizable share of humanity out of a job. Compared to the steam engine, the self diving car is a mere incremental advance.
Perhaps the time and place of the most rapid job destruction was the 19th century in the U.S and England. During this period, the standard of living of the average worker shot up somewhere between 10-fold and 100-fold. You will not find a measure by which average people's lives was not radically improved.
In free markets, the blessings of technological innovation are enjoyed disproportionally by the immediate innovators, but they cannot hold their advantages for very long, not without protection from the state. Competition levels. History and reason amply show this.
People see rising inequality and are told to reflexively blame capitalism. But is what we have today in the U.S. really "capitalism?" If capitalism is "fee markets bounded by private property rights," that's not what we have. The U.S. system is best called crony capitalism[1], or corporatism[2], and lemon socialism [3]. While some of the rising wealth of the rich today is earned, much of it is scam. Bailouts, regulatory capture[4], and the Fed's serial asset bubbles[5] -- these are just some of the zero-sum schemes which today shift massive wealth from the middle toward the top.
Automation in free markets has always and will always make everyone richer.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_socialism
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
[5] https://mises.org/library/how-central-banks-cause-income-ine...
However, "everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared" depends on someone maintaining the machines and the distribution of produce. (Because the opposite of Skynet - an AGI that maintains itself and keeps every human satisfied - is even less likely than Skynet.)
And who is going to work for free while keeping everyone else's best interests in mind?
The fact that, well, nobody would, not really, is somehow missed by people who blame "capitalism" or whatever instead of blaming human nature.
Ideally we would find creative ways for other people to work if they desired it. But these may become increasingly rare and undependable. People need a safety-net they can actually reason about. Modern welfare isn't it. They could relax and think MUCH more productively if it were simply: I can live in this tiny box and eat/sleep/internet indefinitely while I learn whatever I want. $35/day buys you that.
Please don't.
Such a market is not obvious to set up. Take the internet for instance. There are several ways to get a free markets, some of which lead to healthy competition between many many providers, and some of which lead to near-monopoly.
Basically, it all starts at the handling of the last mile. There are many last miles to cover, and it doesn't make technical sense to duplicate them. So, one solution is have the state build the lines, then lease them to providers at regulated rates that allow small providers (10-100 subscribers) to use them at rates no worse than the big boys. That solution tends to lead to the "free and fair" market you seek.
Another solution would be to minimise state intervention (because "free market"), and thus let providers build their own last miles —and lease them if they want to. The result? A local monopoly at worst, and an oligopoly at best.
Free markets require a proper set-up. That means prior intervention —by the state if need be.
So in this case, solution #2, so it happened that because of people shouting "free market!" we have last-mile lines owned by companies and a bad oligopoly has appeared. The solution should be to adjust - the government should come and say, "thank you for all your service, but the balance of force needs to be restored", take over the line and put everyone in order.
Yes, there are (recursive) problems with that particular solution, but still, if we want to implement a perfect theoretical "free market", we need to embrace the constant adjustments that are required to keep it.
Is there actually any evidence of this? Here in the US, we often have on cable company providing cable internet, plus another company offering DSL (high speed land phone line) internet, several offering cell mobile internet (4G & HSPA+), plus satellite internet (not great, but it's there).
The wireless offering do not count. Satellite is too slow, and virtually all 4G offering are not even internet connections: they don't give you a public IP.
Your very situation is evidence of what I am saying.
(Also note that you have one company on the cable, and one company on the DSL. Only one per physical line. Here in France, we at least have 4 big players in the DSL alone, and a number of very small ISPs that nobody knows.)
https://mises.org/library/myth-natural-monopoly
Any day now, Google will knock on my door to install Google Fiber in my house. Funny how for 10 years I had the same Time Warner Cable modem, and they recently sent me a new much faster one. Funny how, AT&T trucks are suddenly appearing around my 'hood to upgrade their plant so they can offer higher speeds.
As a result my service will be better, faster and cheaper. This is not supposed to be possible.
Yeah, Google. Not a smaller, local company.
Sure, it's not a monopoly. But when only big players (like Google) end up servicing you, that's effectively an oligopoly, which is far from ideal.
Maybe there is no natural monopoly here. But there is a natural "only huge corporations may ever enter here". That's nearly as bad.
I've seen firsthand the huge investment it takes to wire a neighborhood with underground fiber. A small company cannot do it. Okay, so what?
Google is offering free internet forever for a one time $300 construction fee which you can pay off over the course of a year. I'm buying gigabit plus premium TV package, 2TB 8-tuner DVR, etc, and my costs will be halved for a massively better product. If this is oligopoly, bring it on.
With state created monopolies, prices rise and quality stagnates or falls. I don't know anyone who would dispute that. But these so-called oligopolies constantly innovate and drive prices down and quality up. Apple is part of an oligopoly as are many other darling tech companies. The constantly innovate and drop prices. Even in the days of the so-called robber barons it was so. Standard Oil controlled 90% of the oil market for about 10 years, during which time the price of a barrel of kerosene fell something like 300%. [1]
[1] http://tomwoods.com/blog/beware-the-robber-barons-and-more-t...
So, have the state (or city) build the damn last mile. It's a public service, just like electricity and water. (If it's not a public service, maybe it should be.) Then have the state get the fuck out by leasing the lines (or the bandwidth in the lines) at some price (preferably without bulk offers, which favour big providers).
I bet prices would fall way faster with a scheme like this.
Also, I'd be wary of Google being my ISP. They spy on me way too much already, I'd rather limit my interaction with them (I'm off Gmail, and use DuckDuckGo). Not to mention the obvious conflict of interest created by the vertical integration: they are ISP and content provider. To name one example, the temptation to make YouTube go smoother than Netflix is significant.
Apparently not even Stephen Hawking understands the broken window fallacy.
Capitalism is ultimately a human system. Humans are much scarier than robots, the robots are only doing as other humans instructed (at least at the beginning). Capitalism, a human creation and system, has become a force that is ultimately good for advancement/innovation, but one that people can take too far in greed.
Without some regulation, by design humans take it as far as they can go, it is part of our programming. But, when the future depends on the good will of mega rich humans to spread it around, that future is a very frightening prospect indeed.