Billionaire: “We Are Destroying the Middle Class. That’s What Keeps Me Awake at Night.”

“We’re in for a huge change in society. Get used to it. And be prepared.”

That’s not a new message, but as the warning will affect the personal wealth, job prospects and ability to stay afloat of nearly everyone on the planet, it is worth paying attention to.

They are the blunt words of Johann Rupert, a jewelry and fashion mogul from South Africa worth an estimated $7.5 billion.

Rupert blasted the actions of “.1 percent of .1 percent,” or roughly the upper 7,000 individuals of the population, which paints with a narrower brush than the general class warfare slogans against the 1%, who instead make up an enormous 70 million people across the globe.

Bloomberg reported:

“We cannot have 0.1 percent of 0.1 percent taking all the spoils… It’s unfair and it is not sustainable.”

“How is society going to cope with structural unemployment and the envy, hatred and the social warfare?” he said. “We are destroying the middle classes at this stage and it will affect us. It’s unfair. So that’s what keeps me awake at night.”

The already widening wealth gap is not properly seen by the masses below, who are perhaps ready to simply blame anyone in sight who holds wealth. Instead, the true gap is between the insiders, who used just a handful of powerful individuals to manipulate the economy and tilt things towards their control.

These tensions between the haves and have-nots will “escalate” even more drastically than they already have, according to the billionaire, “as robots and artificial intelligence fuel mass unemployment.”

[Rupert] said he expects advances in technology to lead to job losses after having read books on the subject recently.

The stakes could hardly be higher.

The manufacturing, delivery, warehouse and even service industry transition away from human labor towards robotics and A.I. will threaten the supporting net of nearly the entire working force, unless a transition to fabled new industries can be envisions and implemented with as little disruption as possible.

As these trends shape our future, a very real group of insiders are meeting at the secretive Bilderberg Group during their annual conference to discuss, among other vital global topics, the issues surrounding “artificial intelligence” and “cybersecurity.”

Attended by some 150 powerful individuals who represent the most dominant firms on the planet, Bilderberg has increasingly invited tech geeks and Silicon Valley billionaires to advise the banking and finance cartel who steer world politics, industry and social life.

Paul Joseph Watson reported on the attendance of DARPA director and Google researcher Regina Dugan, whose work in bioauthentication has sparked controversy:

Former DARPA director and now Google executive Regina Dugan, who is helping to develop and promote the idea of an ingestible identification microchip, will be in attendance at the secretive 2015 Bilderberg conference in Telfs-Buchen, Austria.

[…]

Google Chairman Erich Schmidt along with Demis Hassabis, Vice President of Engineering for Google DeepMind, will also meet with over 100 global power brokers from finance, politics and academia during the elitist confab.

As SHTF previously reported, job-killing killer robots are on the way to changing the social strata, and making more poor people than ever before:

Already many human jobs are being displaced by computers, and most trends point to a rise of automated assembly lines, computer-run logistics and services and robots to do jobs humans did before that.

From The Week:

The robopocalypse for workers may be inevitable. In this vision of the future, super-smart machines will best humans in pretty much every task. A few of us will own the machines, a few will work a bit — perhaps providing “Made by Man” artisanal goods — while the rest will live off a government-provided income.Silicon-based superintelligence and robots will dramatically alter labor markets — to name but one example, the most common job in most U.S. states probably will no longer be truck driver.

The future looks bleak for those who once made up the middle class, and who now find themselves and their contemporaries competing for meager earnings and struggling to maintain qualification for increasingly predatory loans and financial arrangements, just to keep afloat.

Further Resources

The Anatomy of a Breakdown

The Prepper’s Blueprint: The Step-By-Step Guide To Help You Through Any Disaster

Prepper’s Home Defense: Security Strategies to Protect Your Family by Any Means Necessary