This was a very interesting article, one which I shall have to read again tomorrow in more detail. I gave it a read tonight, but it is late and my head is not fully in the game. That being said, there was a discussion of capitalism and some of its failings in there, so I would like to say the following: For capitalism to properly function four things are needed. All transactions need to be bilateral, voluntary, and informed. Further, the function of these three must be backed by government and not at an instant rather over decades or centuries which brings us to the fourth need, that of corruption mitigation. Finally, capitalism is more powerful than its alternatives because it is decentralized and therefore takes more perspectives into account than the alternate forms of government can comprehend.
By bilateral I mean that transactions need to occur between two parties, if one pollutes to provide a product for another and we all pay the price of that pollution, the transaction is no longer bilateral.
Voluntary means that it must be a competitive marketplace. Anti-trust is an important role of government and duopolies are not legitimate competition. If many people lack legitimate alternatives the market cannot correct away from bad actors with a monopoly or near monopoly on some good or service. Beyond this, pollution is again another violation of voluntary, as I don't get a say in the pollution of others yet I too pay the price.
Informed means both access to information and the ability to understand that information. Government has a legitimate interest in education, and doubly so in a democracy where again access and ability to understand information are required for proper functioning. When I say access to information, that may not also convey the full of what I mean, methods which hide cost per use are also harmful to capitalism. These include but are not limited to planned obsolescence, byzantine contracts, the razor blade model, and inefficient energy burning products.
By corruption I mean the use of power in a game to change the rules of that game for personal gain. By power I mean both political clout and wealth as well as connections to either or both of those. By personal gain I also mean to include those a person with power cares for. This covers everything from blatant bribery, kickbacks and nepotism to more subtle efforts like regulatory capture, lobbies, astroturf, and research distortion by cherry picking what funded research to release.
Almost all of the shortcomings of capitalism as we have practiced it can be traced to a violation of one or more of these principals.
But as Churchill said democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others we've tried from time to time, so it is true too that capitalism is the worst form of economy except for all the others. This is because the decentralised model spreads power and therefore allows more people to meaningfully contribute differing views to the overall solution. I agree that automation will shake things up, so too will climate change and other natural resource limits we find ourselves up against, but the base things which were needed to make capitalism function properly will continue to be needed. But we need to be careful of how we react to this. Communism is just a bad idea, it's way too easy to gain control of because in practice it condenses political and even economic power to the hands of a few and makes the examples in your article look positively wonderful in comparison. Socialism may be the right answer, but only in that the word is so broad that it loses all meaning. But socialism often means state control of industries or close regulation of them, and these are harmful because of the centralisation of decision making. So we need to be careful when trying to envision the economic and political systems that we ought to use to solve the new problems we face and learn lessons from the reasons the old systems were built as they were in the first place and about what did and did not work within them.