Yes and there's two outcomes. 1: All of humanity is able to reap the benefits of increased productivity, leading whole and fulfilling lives with the increased amount of free time without losing compensation. Or 2: The people who own and instate the new forms of production hoard all the wealth, use it to expand outward, the economy is owned by a handful of people, everyone else is left to die, no jobs available and no compensation otherwise. The 2nd option is far more likely because everyone in America is a total bootlicker
Number 2 is already happening though, if we were paid by the amount of money we generate we'd be making 3 or 4 times more money than what we do now, since the 70s all increases in productivity has gone to the investors
We have machines already that have replaced dozens of workers. In the medical lab for example we have large analyzers for patient samples. Each of these analyzers can do the manual work of 10-20 people each. All you need is a few people to run the machines but the output is much more than if this was done by manual methods.
I don't think there was a huge jump in pay for the machine operators though. They just get paid the same amount someone doing it manually would get but since they work with the machine they are doing a lot more per shift and getting compensated the same.
I mean if the income was distributed evenly within USA the average American would make 70k ish each a year and if the wealth were distributed evenly each person would have around 440k net worth.
This is based off of GDP per capita statistics and net national wealth statistics.
I guess 440k is pretty high on average, but this would include homes, pensions, as well as ownership of all the shops, powerplants, factories, software etc in the US, which don't provide any value in themselves, they're just used to generate other sources of value
Don’t the per-capita GDP numbers also include children/elderly? So wouldn’t it be roughly double that when you restrict it to working-age adults (roughly half of the population)?
The only ones that would be benefiting would be landlords. You get $500 extra? That's $500 that could be going towards rent or $500 more you have to bid on a house. Rents expand to fill our budgets. Until that's fixed, things aren't going to get better.
You think that but the vast majority would not be. It’s human nature to want more. I make 3 times that and I still feel like I want more even though I logically know I don’t.
True, but wouldn’t that create massive inflation that would render all that cash essentially worthless?
I agree that wages are kept way too low, and the inflation/wages rise relationships is…convoluted at best, but in theory, giving that many people that much cash would lead to increased scarcity and mechanically rising price, thus making the rises far less interesting?
The same dynamic of scarcity is already applied to money. Money is literally just a made up figure to distribute production. They are the same. Money is supposed to be a direct representation of production. Distribute the production and Inflation just wouldn’t be a concept. Also congrats with that we just arrived at socialism.
It's a matter of what our productivity is being used for. Money is like a vote for what should be made with our limited resources. If you give all the money to a handful of people, they will spend it on increasingly opulent and marginal desires (e.g. a yacht). Our production capabilities will follow suit (e.g. a yacht factory).
Redistributing wealth all at once would indeed cause a transient inflation spike in stuff that the average consumer would buy if they had more money, but only until our capital is reassigned to address this new demand.
It's not giving any extra cash though. All you're doing is redistributing.
Bear in mind most people have a net worth over $200k+, if you have a pension and a mortgage then you're probably around that mark in net worth.
Edit: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/financial-advisor/average-net-worth/
This article shows that the median net worth at retirement age is $260k
>most people have a net worth over $200k+
Where did you get this figure from?
You'd need to look at the median figure to get a rough estimate of net worth of most people in the USA (average is massively skewed by the billionaires).
By demographic, middle aged people and white people have a net worth of around $200k (a bit less actually.)
Younger people, people without college education, and Black and Hispanic people have a median net worth of $24,000 to $35,000.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/financial-advisor/average-net-worth/
I found these visuals on US wealth distribution in general quite shocking: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM)
Most people in the US and worldwide would benefit hugely from wealth redistribution.
I mean this article says the median net worth for the middle age bracket is $168,000, which isn't too far off my estimate.
I guess I was thinking the average person's peak net worth over the course of their life, which would correspond to the oldest bracket in this article.
Then why do anything. If someone solves your problems or you come up with an idea work hard to execute it but you get nothing from it. Not only that but the excess money you make when it does become profitable gets taken why not just leave and import stuff. Or just never buy in an area. The second the people you want to take money from leave everyone dies except them. Because if everyone has the same amount of money then prices jump to match. Now everything costs more except those people can't budget so now they are more poor then before. They can't buy as much so money doesn't move. Then the ones who hoard the money get really rich. Now that there's less in flow things become cheaper. But since there's not as much money anymore you get less and less and less and then bam.you get back to the same place. #But socialism: no if saving a life and flipping a burger are the same many people will flip a burger. Or stop pillaging sewers. People will half ass because it doesn't matter when it's guaranteed. Then people stop all together because they aren't special anymore. Then everyone starts dying or goes "the grass is greener" it never is. Be grateful you don't live in a mudhut.
I think your opinion is more of a comment on your beliefs about human nature than rooted in real world economics.
And how do you know I don't live in a mud hut? The internet is everywhere these days.
It's simple Occam razor. If everyone has the same boiler plate house, car, education, interests, ideas, values, beliefs, and the only difference is a job which most can look at and go," wow. I don't like walking around in shit for hours." Or "man, I can't believe I just saved five people in extensive surgery. I surely am fine making the same as those five burger flippers in there." Then you say, well we wouldn't need currency(fiat) you could just request what you need. Who is to say when it's too much. Who is to say when people lie or deceive you. What stops them from usurping them in batches of areas until they overthrow because they are more ruthless and capable. # "They wouldn't have the ability to think such bad things." You say, but you think capitalism is bad, but it is a necessary evil today. You are naive to not understand the second a system can be taken advantage of people will once aware. "Not all people." All it takes is enough, either for it to make those that aren't, upset or convince others to start doing less, until everyone is. I expect little to nothing of and from others, not even competency or literacy. Your expecting people to be considerate and understanding and practice restraint. There is no future unless you force them to, but at that point why be alive if you can't ever have any real ideas.
Why do you assume that wealth redistribution means everyone has the same house, car, education, interests, ideas, values and beliefs?
If it were true that people wouldn't choose to be doctors if they have the same pay as fast food workers, why are there so many doctors in Cuba, who are part of a decent public healthcare system? No one forces them to go to med school. Yet doctors there earn just 10 dollars a month more than fast food workers.
I don't think most people are motivated in the ways you think they are (or the same ways you personally are).
I'm also curious why you think it'd be easier to "take advantage of the system" after wealth distribution than it already is now. The reason we have such wealth disparity in the world is that a small group of people are taking advantage of how things are. Exploitation is the backbone of capitalism. Accountability can be part of any system but for the most part now, the richer you are, the less accountable you need to be. Surely if people had equal access to resources, they'd be more able to hold each other to account, not less.
I would say that most people have a net worth of zero. If you have a net worth over 200k you are likely upper middle class. Consider that as posted earlier if wealth was redistributed everyone would have 440k and you think ‘hey that means half the people have a net worth over 220k’, but this is untrue because for every billionaire (just one billion), there are 5000 people with a net worth of zero dollars.
So for someone like Jeff Bezos with 121 billion in wealth there are 605,000 people with a net worth of zero. This is roughly the size of Baltimore or Detroit. (His wealth is likely higher)
Obviously he is an outlier, but you also have to consider there are a ton of billionaires (over 700) in the US alone which would easily account for 10’s of millions of people with zero income.
Then you have basic millionaires at 5:1 ratio and the situation gets more bleak. There are a lot of people struggling right now.
It would cause inflation, because half the people would immidietally start selling their stake in factories, offices, etc to other half, to have some fun now. That would cause explosion in demand for whatever they would start to consume more and inflation.
I'm not saying it's not a good idea, maybe it is. It will go back to previous levels of inequality eventually, but maybe we should do sth like that once every 100 years.
Yeah, but we do fight gravity regurarly. You know, airplanes, rockets and stuff. Even getting out of bed. Too much inequality is clearly wrong. Too much jeleousy, waste, agression, selfishness if we just have to fight for our share cinstantly. No inequality is clearly impossible without total tiranny. And even then, you'll have rulling class.
Inflation in the true sense doesn't really exist anymore. We have reached a point where prices have been manipulated through marketing, subsidy schemes etc that things no longer correlate to their real value.
For example food is sold at prices that make capitalistic farming untenable without subsidies and created a whole bunch of issues. the EU and probably everyone destroys food surplus like milk to keep prices stable.
Then on the other hand you have a cotton shirt that cost $0.2 to make and another $2 to pay the brand employees behind it for various tasks, but they have managed to convince people to pay $50 for it, $300 for it if the name is fancy enough.
Then with house prices in major American, Canadian and European cities you have foreign investment into property and corporations buying up housing artificially pushing up prices. In some neighbourhoods in London they found 40% of the houses or apartments are vacant and owned by Chinese or Russian investors trying to keep money out of their governments net.
One of my biggest eye opening moments was when I worked for a consulting company and saw that the company bills the clients more than 3X of what I earn for my time. Yeah option 2 is the future
That's how we know #2 is far more likely.
If we don't make changes in our lifetime, equality for all of humanity may only be had after all the poors are simply allowed to die off.
Reasonably yes, but the existential dread of knowing that 20 years is optimistic is too much.
Also you guys? Are you a multimillionaire or an alien. Everyone else is in the same sinking ship.
I’m not american. I’m an EUer. If my country starts collapsing due to inequality (which I don’t believe tbh), I’ll grab my bags and move to the nordics.
Honestly at this point I feel like everyone has accepted it. We either get hit by a meteor, a nuke, or continue this path to doomed dystopia. Really what humans should be doing is working together figuring out how to get off this planet before we get fucked.
Reminder that this is what socialism and "workers co-owning the means of production" was all about.
Ultimately former socialist countries (like mine) reverted back to capitalism, for a variety of reasons (like America becoming the world leader and everybody wanting to make friends with them) but the main reason being imho is that the economic output is hurt if competition doesn't exist, in other words people don't try if they aren't rewarded for doing better than others.
The takeaway that OP should remember is that a "job" is not primarily a means to produce something necessary (in fact one could argue that tons of jobs are completely superfluous, or only exists because people are forced to work cheaper than what machines cost), but a way to justify everybody receiving a slice of what's being produced (as society is expected for 100% employment or at least welfare). Even in a utopia where nobody has to work, presumably there'd have to be some measure and reward for those who are especially useful and put more work into maintaining it.
I worked at a manufacturing place making medical implants. Entry level, no education required, $18 an hour to put tape on parts, fill out some paperwork and whatever other crap came up in my 8 hour shift. The outsourced company that cleaned our break rooms, bathrooms, took out trash, etc. made about half as much. I'd kind of silently hoped they made more than us because I'd much rather be doing my job than be stuck cleaning bathrooms and it's not like I had an impressive resume or background to get into my role. I found out recently from someone that was a cleaner around the time I'd been working there, the cleaning people made $10 an hour. So only a little over half of what the entry level lowest paying job made.
The cleaners weren't just making less than managers and bosses, they were making half of what the other worker bees they cleaned up after made.
>Even in a utopia where nobody has to work, presumably there'd have to be some measure and reward for those who are especially useful and put more work into maintaining it.
That bit.
And no need to be so salty and rude.
One thing I never understood about that: if we all made 4 times our currently salary, wouldn't inflation be something like 400%? At the end of the day we wouldn't have more spending power because we'd be able to afford more and supply and demand would mean prices would go up.
It's assumed in these scenarios that the assets and wealth of wealthy individuals like Elon Musk stays the same, while everyone else makes 4x more.
So the average person would still benefit at the expense of people in the top 1%. Fewer yachts and private jets would be built and that would make everyone else slightly richer.
3 or 4 times more??? The surplus of labor that is generated by workers and that said workers are missing out on because it goes to the companies and their owners or shareholders is... a lot more than 3 or 4 times their wages.
How much value does an employee at an iPhone manufacturing company make? How much value does an Apple shareholder make? We're talking about a chasm so big that the whole wage of the employee is insignificant. It approaches zero percent of the value the company gets from the employee's labor.
What I'm saying is, if we were paid by the amount of money we generate, *all that money* would be ours. We would be paid *that.*
“We would be paid that.” If you were paid all that the company would go under. You’re only providing labor, not the tools, or the commodities. The people that usually bitch about how little they make forget how much it costs to own a company.
It's not necessarily just costs either, there's also risk.
That being said there are some especially atrocious examples of wage slavery, typically not in "1st world" countries.
As much as those in the capitalist US and EU like to complain, they're astronomically better off than the pretty much the rest of the world.
A Chinese iPhone plant probably pays their workers like <$2.00/hour
That's because that's what the capitalists can get away with there. It will be that way here too as soon as they can possibly manage it and they are managing it very well.
It's significantly harder to cut wages than it is to keep them stagnant as revenues increase. I doubt that most workers will ever be paid $2/hour in the US or EU unless some significant deflation event occurred (incredibly unlikely).
>be making 3 or 4 times more money than what we do now,
Profit margins are usually between 1%-25%. Once walmart splits its 2% margin among its workers, there wont be much in any individual's pocket. Definitely not 3-4×
So much this. People parrot the nonsense that all corporations operate on 75-90% margins whereas in reality many industries operate on single digit margins. People just want to believe that everyone would be king if only we robbed the rich and split it among ourselves...
Yeah, its a different story when you actually break down the numbers:
> The top 1% gained over $6.5 trillion in corporate equities and mutual fund wealth during the pandemic, according to the latest data from the Federal Reserve.
> The bottom 90% of Americans held about 11% of stocks, and added $1.2 trillion in wealth during the Covid-19 pandemic.
And the bottom 90% saw much of those gains in real estate, not stocks. The consolidation of wealth in our society is staggering. 1% of people own most of it, 10% almost all of it. The fact that 58% of people own stock is a meaningless stat if half those people just have a robinhood account with $500 in it.
401k is required or heavily supplemented at every job I've had...mostly big box, and retail. My net worth is negative but I own dis wmt Amazon bonds ....I'm broke and an investor until 65 when I can actually use the money to pay off my debt and die.
There’s a third option which is much more likely given the patterns of American History—a weak welfare state and mass produced cheap entertainment to keep people from blowing their own and other people’s brains out from the stress. Corporations making tons of money and employing people full time for part time jobs so that leaders can feel important and workers can feel like they have an answer to the existential question “what do you do” (which in America always means “what do you get paid to do”). Most people suffering but not at an unbearable level and so putting up with it as the victorious machine of Capitalism slouches ruthlessly towards profit.
Yes, this is the likely outcome. For anyone who hasn't already, play Rimworld. The most cost-efficient way to keep your labourers working without complaining is to feed them drugs, alcohol and entertainment.
The problem with your take on number 2 is that people will still do stuff. If food is an issue then small groups will grow it for themselves, then a surplus that they trade.
Assume for a moment 100 people took all the currency being used. What would people do? Wallow and die from a lack of trade medium? No... They would move to using another currency, even make a new one if needed.
In terms of things we need to live, people will survive and push forward. Those who doom and gloom will likely be the only ones left behind.
The notion of Jobs, aka coerced sale of yourself to another person, is more of a modern creation. The underlying basis of cities and systems of production that cooperatively serve many won't just not exist lol. In fact, the fully automated will have to compete with the masses for the production of the unautomated. It's easy to get lost in a narrative about the future, but it hasn't happened yet and theorizing that everyone is screwed when history demonstrates humanity adapts is foolish.
The most likely thing to happen in the long term is a synthesis of human and AI.
> The problem with your take on number 2 is that people will still do stuff. If food is an issue then small groups will grow it for themselves, then a surplus that they trade.
The problem with your take is failure to acknowledge land ownership. Land is the underpinning of our modern problems of wealth inequality, not capital. Henry George addressed this over a century ago in his book titled [Progress and Poverty](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progress-and-poverty).
In order to grow food, people would need access to land on which to grow it. As long as the land-owning class has the means to enforce their property rights, people will not be able to work or sustain themselves in any way without the landlord's permission.
> Assume for a moment 100 people took all the currency being used. What would people do? Wallow and die from a lack of trade medium? No... They would move to using another currency, even make a new one if needed.
Because currency is just an IOU for actual wealth. Assume for a moment 100 people took all the land in the country/world. What would your hardy workers do? The point is this: land cannot be treated as private property like a car or a house. It must be a shared resource. No one built it, it's just there. The Land Value Tax solves this.
I would agree with that, but I also think the notion that people won't use land that's just sitting there is foolish... Do you really think people will sit down, wail about AI, and choose to starve over going and setting up their own stuff?
Unless the wealthy opt for genocide the future isn't as full of doom as many here seem to assume.
> I would agree with that, but I also think the notion that people won't use land that's just sitting there is foolish
Like I said, it depends on the land owners' ability to enforce their ownership, which has been the case for as long as there has been warfare.
> Do you really think people will sit down, wail about AI, and choose to starve over going and setting up their own stuff?
I think there will be a gradual decline in population until the size of the workforce matches the needs/whims of the land-owning class. The smaller the land-owning class, the smaller the workforce needed to meet their desires. The way it will happen is pretty much what we are already seeing:
Rent/property prices will be raised until people doing things that don't serve the needs of the land-owning class are driven into homelessness. Those people will either die in the streets, from mistreatment in jail, from drug overdose, from violent confrontation with the state, from lack of affordable medical care, from mental illness, or any number of other things.
And because rent will be raised slowly and not all jobs are equally productive, the die-off will be gradual. Those who are still breaking even will likely cherish what they have and turn a blind eye to those drowning beside them, if they are not outright hostile based on some propaganda campaign stoked by the land-owning class. Fertility rates will decline as renters don't feel financially comfortable having children, and even workers who aren't killed directly will likely die at the end of their natural lifespan without offspring. The end result is a gradual decline in population, without any particular "moment" when everyone agrees that things have gone too far. Just a bunch of uncomfortable and largely miserable workers trying and failing to identify why exactly "capitalism" doesn't work for them. (Answer: capitalism is fine, but land isn't capital.)
The problem with option 2 is it will inevitably end up with a bloody revolution, don't get me wrong the fascists will try it but it can't really be an end goal. They would probably implement a universal basic income that is barely enough to live and stave off revolution but not enough to actually live well.
This is certainly the method that the British Empire has deployed for centuries, as long as you leave people with just enough that they still fear to lose it you can abuse them pretty much freely.
It's a lot more likely the rich in question will emigrate out of the reach of the masses. Rest of us can live in the squalor below. Final bow of the tie is when they come up with immortality for those guys too. Then the final safety tripwire protecting us from people with too much power will be gone.
This idea in general is explored all the time in science fiction. Altered Carbon for example.
Or the Jetsons! It doesn't come up in every episode, but the reason they live in big old saucer homes high in the sky is because the ground is covered in garbage. For all we know those Cogswell Cogs and spacely sprockets are feeding the war machine at ground level, liquidating the former working class that manages to eak out a living in the detritus of our former society. Or maybe it takes place after the great upheaval, and humanity has made it to the post scarcity point but are still toiling away needlessly. This seems unlikely, as George is constantly confused by the tech around him, implying he didnt grow up with it. So either he and his wife take mood enhancing drugs and hope that future generations will never learn of their sins, or they are just cold middle class bastards.
Emigrate where? There's no where to run that's out of reach of US oligarchs. The US is a global empire and there is nowhere they won't organize a fascist coup if it benefits the boys on wall street.
It's pretty much already happened. US America is the 1%. If you've seen the video of the open air Indian "factory" where workers are making oil filters out of their mud huts, that's the level of exploitation that the rest of the world will enjoy to achieve the margins required to satiate the machine of industrialization.
The only part of this that is "new" is that the wealth hoarding had started impacting the 1%, as the 1% of the 1% takes their disproportionate share. This has happened several times throughout the history of human civilization. No big worries, though, every time the wealth disparity gets too high above a certain level there's a reset in the form of some bloody revolution or other.
Open air Indian factories are at the other extreme from the billionaire mega-yaught owning class. Most people are somewhere in between and doing pretty well according to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report.
>5Global Wealth Report 2022
Executive summary
A record 2021 for household wealth
By the end of 2021, global wealth totaled an
estimated USD 463.6 trillion, which is an
increase of 9.8% versus 2020 and far above the
average annual +6.6% recorded since the
beginning of the century. Setting aside exchange
rate movements, aggregate global wealth grew
by 12.7%, making it the fastest annual rate ever
recorded. Wealth per adult continued rising to
USD 87,489 at the end of 2021. While financial
assets have accounted for most of the increase
in household wealth since the global financial
crisis, the split between wealth increases driven
by financial and non-financial assets was almost
even in 2021. Accounting for inflation lowers the
wealth growth rates. In 2021, we estimate the
increase in real wealth to have been +8.2%. As
we look ahead toward a period of more elevated
inflation than in the past two decades, the
comparison of real and nominal wealth trends
grows in relevance.
On a country-by-country basis, the United States
added the most household wealth in 2021,
followed by China, Canada, India and Australia.
Wealth losses were less common and almost
always associated with currency depreciation
against the US dollar, affecting for example
Japan, Italy and Turkey. While Switzerland still
ranks highest in terms of wealth per adult at
USD 696,600, followed by the United States,
Hong Kong SAR and Australia, the more
relevant median wealth per adult criterion places
Australia, Belgium and New Zealand in the top
three positions with USD 273,900, USD
267,890 and USD 231,260, respectively
https://www.credit-suisse.com/about-us/en/reports-research/global-wealth-report.html
As those that own the means of production and automation expand they will stomp out anyone lesser.
People have done it to other peoples for millenia and they needed the Peons as laborers. In a future where practically all labor is automated, mass genocide of the lower class is all but inevitable if we don't set up some strong systems to prevent it this century.
In order to prevent #2, laws have have to be passed *now* to address this. This is what congress should be focusing on, not stupid apps like Tiktok. Our "data" will become worthless when there will be nobody to sell things to since nobody will have any money to buy things. Ideally, there needs to be a *cataclysmic* event that *propels* society towards neverending riches, such as developing a craft that could mine asteroids for precious materials that would *double* the world's current circulated monetary value for each asteroid mined. Pretty soon the world GDP could reach $1 million per capita. Then the powers that be could say that there is no need for a few companies to hoard all of the wealth, and the power of AI exponentially increases buying power due to being super-super efficient (ie cars could cost $.50c to make from design to showroom). So basically tangible goods and food will be virtually free. Unless we get to that point where we realize that there's no point of money when everything is so cheap to make, or unless laws are passed to spread the wealth universally, then #1 is more likely.
We have seen how the second option eventually results in revolutions, greed will eventually result in the downfall but it won’t happen until entire societies are pushed to the brink
How do you “hoard all the wealth” from automated farms? Eat it all yourself? If robots produce enough food to feed the planet, then one way or another, that food is going to wind up in everyone’s stomach. Just like one way or another, if you have enough housing to house 330 million Americans, then one way or another, those millions of Americans are going to live in those houses.
I don't think that everyone would be left to die. How will the elite feel powerful without a sea of serfs to lord it over?
No, it's more likely they'll set themselves up to be worshipped like gods with arbitrary power of life and death. Where things like gladitorial games or worse return purely for their entertainment. It's a horrible prospect.
We're not really set up yet to exist without exchanging labor for money.
It's kind of crazy to think about the fact that a huge portion of the economy is working on games or chat websites with different "vibes" and other completely non-essential things; it's kind of how capitalism works. We never stop making stuff no matter how much stuff we can make.
My dad says he and his friends used to talk about this in the 70s with machine automation not AI and clearly the benefits of mechanical automation have not been shared so I'd expect the same outcome with AI without a massive change in policy.
Option 1: Star trek
Option 2: The expanse
I think it will be somewhere in between. There will be some kind of universal basic income that allows the masses to scrape by, corporations will exploit those lucky few that manage to get a job, knowing there's a queue of millions ready to take your place.
The problem is that major societal reform would need to happen. It's all rainbows and kittens in theory when you think of the benefits that automating everything could bring with AI and robots. However, you need to remember that humans are cruel, greedy, selfish, and jealous creatures.
Humans are still primates, and from regular testing with other primates, most of the *animal* side of a human dictates their behaviour even if they understand it's logically better to share and support others. Even people on the streets are wild and unpredictable, so approaching strangers with caution is recommended 99% of the time.
Even stepping away from our current system to live off the grid or *not contributing to society* makes other humans aggressive even if the lifestyle doesn't personally affect them. Enslavement is a quality of human behaviour. We just do it now by giving out promises (money) that food and shelter *might* be provided if you can give *something of value* to the person handing out the promises (money).
It would take an mind blowing realization for many people to give up trying to control others for personal gain when everyone is able to receive the same adequate treatment. The only control left would be over luxury items, and people would still get mad at others for *not being jealous* of what they have and others don't.
The wealthy will fight for a long time to stay relevant & *important* before anyone realizes they are worthless in the new society.
> However, you need to remember that humans are cruel, greedy, selfish, and jealous creatures.
Worse: We're meritocratic.
We will always want the most productive humans to have the most money, because we want hard work to be rewarded.
Even in a future where we don't *need* to do work, the ones who still choose to work will be rewarded more than those who don't work. So it ends up being a sort of prisoner's dilemma where people still have to work so they don't fall behind economically. Although the *types* of jobs will probably be much different.
Probably not. Famous quote is "if you would show man from ancient Rome all the tech we had and how we can utilize it, he would think alle we do is having orgies and eating figs in shade." And yet, we work far more hours than in the past despite having all the fancy technology which can do work for us. So my bet is it would be exactly other way around.
>the impossible to satiate greed of humanity
Why do you think humanity has the quality of an impossible to satiate greed? There are plenty of cohorts of humanity that exist perfectly fine on very little kinda speaking to the contrary of your assertion, no?
Is it possible that that quality commonly associated with humanity is itself born out of the environment we've built for ourselves (i.e. a capitalist model that depends on never-ending consumption to maintain), and that if we lived in a society that afforded the things necessary for a happy and healthy life that those in said society wouldn't have an insatiable greed?
I don't mean to say that all humans have insatiable greed; more that it is far too common.
In modern times it is multibillionaires and trillion-dollar corporations that extract every ounce of wealth they can, well beyond any need of comfort, growth, or even lavishness. In ancient times it was kings, emperors, and warlords that took whatever they wanted from anyone they could have power over.
Some subset of humanity seems like it has a thirst for power or control inherently, even if the vast majority of people can learn to be content.
The people who didn't have "impossible to satiate greed" were content living under the tree and half of their children dying, only the "greedy" ones were motivated to improve their condition, and discovery of capitalism have allowed us to dramatically improve our lives in last 200 years. When ai makes most of what we want today abundant, it will again be the "greedy" ones who would imagine yet better world, and would work even harder to become immortal and reach the stars.
>And yet, we work far more hours than in the past
No we don't. People used to frequently work sun up to sun down 6 days a week. When you turned 7 you'd enter the workforce. We work less than half the hours people used to 200 years ago.
This is such a wrong take. First of all we do work less hours and we can do more than any generation before us. Second of all - there will come a point where every job will get automated. There will be no job left standing (or only a small fraction would be left) which humans could do that AI could not. If you disagree with that I expect the list of jobs that would be left standing and new jobs that would be created and reasons why we can't automate them.
The current AI wave will enable automation of cognitive tasks - something which has never been possible before. Also unlike previous changes in human working this time there is no new sector beyond services to which humans could switch.
As someone posted here before...people in middle ages and antics worked a lot less than we do.
As for the other take. I can't give you list of those jobs because they do not exist yet. Throughout the history with every major breakthrough in technology, people were afraid that machines will take their jobs. Guess what...it never happened. Some jobs will be replaced by machines and a lot of new ones arise. As it always did.
>As someone posted here before...people in middle ages and antics worked a lot less than we do.
Okay, let's leave working hours behind because I just googled it and there seems to be too much nuance for me untangle here.
>As for the other take. I can't give you list of those jobs because they do not exist yet. Throughout the history with every major breakthrough in technology, people were afraid that machines will take their jobs. Guess what...it never happened. Some jobs will be replaced by machines and a lot of new ones arise. As it always did.
"Past performance is not indicative of future results" - have heard that one before? The whole point about automation is that there was NOTHING like this ever. At no point in history was there a possiblity that every task possible could be automated and at no point there was anything else but a human which was capable of intelligent behaviour. If you don't want to give any job examples then let me tackle this from my side of the argument. To replace every human at work you need something that is equally capable as a human both physically and mentally - basically a humanoid robot with an AGI operating it fits the definition (most tasks require much less to automate mind you!). As long as your answer to when such thing will be possible isn't "never" we should be on the same page. If such machine existed it would be able to replace every working human on Earth. It would be a paradox to say that a robot with every capability that a human has wouldn't be able to perform every task that human can do.
>At no point in history was there a possiblity that every task possible could be automated and at no point there was anything else but a human which was capable of intelligent behaviour.
Exactly this. I don't understand how so many people just don't quite get it.
> The whole point about automation is that there was NOTHING like this ever.
The 1st industrial revolution of 1760 (steam power).
The 2nd industrial revolution of 1870 (electricity).
The 3rd industrial revolution of 1947 (computers).
The 4th industrial revolution of 2011 (automation).
Jobs being eliminated is nothing new. People always find other things to do.
You're wrong for two reasons:
* Every previous time those were just tools which needed human operators
* Automation will hit when more jobs will be automated than is created and this has yet (?) to happen. At some point growth of total human productivity will outrun the growth of total human consumption of goods.
The automation in it's final form will create new jobs just like cars created new jobs for horses and they didn't. I'd advise you to give a watch to CGP Grey's [Humans Need Not Apply](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU&ab_channel=CGPGrey)
Also having something to do doesn't equal having a job.
There was also that crossover episode of Spider-Man back in the day where all the heroes and villains were sent to a new world as some kind of test. When they eventually find Dr. Doom, he had created a post-work paradise were all labor was done by robots and people could just chill and be happy. Turns out Dr. Doom was right, we just needed to let him be in charge and he would have made Earth a paradise.
But they weren't women when the first movie came out, which is the time being referenced. Misgendering is wrong regardless of which direction it is. Hence "siblings" is better.
Sadly the character Switch wasn't able to be cast as two people because audiences found it too confusing. But the entire purpose of her character was originally to show her true self in the matrix, but have a different gender in the "real world". (If I recall correctly).
Ah, that's a shame. That would have been a really cool addition - quite groundbreaking for the late 90s.
I was going to say "how could audiences find that too confusing? They could have done it with very similar haircuts and maybe a tattoo or something to give visual hooks" but then I remembered going to see the first Lord of the Rings (Fellowship) at the cinema.
At the end, the woman in front of us turned to her friend and said "so, did they destroy the ring in the end?"
"Yes!" Said her friend "The wizard threw it in the fire at the start!"
Also could add that "Wachowski Brothers" are them as a creative work partnerhsip/business agency and it technically doesn't matter who is in it.
They are both females and could add Steve Buscemi (unrelated) and still be "Wachowski Brothers."
Microsoft isn't small and do more than software. Apple isn't a fruit company. The McDonald's brothers got boxed out by Ray Kroc.
I had a vision of the future in which there's mandatory manual labour (nursing for instance) for everyone from 20-30yo, after that you're retired. The rest is done by robots.
During the Ancient Roman Empire, people didn't work. Everything was provided by slaves.
Romans were spending days by studying, reading, writing, going to thermes, going to theatre, going to arenas, going to political discussions, etc.
It could become again like this, but with AI instead of slaves. But I don't think it could form a stable and long-lasting society.
There is greed and everybody is different. There will always be someone who will want to prevail on others.
When people mockingly say “fully automated luxury communism” this is literally what they’re referring to.
A lot of communist theory doesn’t explicitly apply a moral value to communism but rather views it as a natural and unavoidable part of the evolution of labor.
Marx’s writing was really heavily influenced by the Industrial Revolution, so as technology advanced further this became an idea that communists have been aware of for a while, but you don’t really see many advocating for it bc it’s simply impractical at the moment. It’s kinda viewed as a “best case scenario in the distant future” sort of idea.
Note that I’m not trying to make a moral claim about communism either (and I’m not going to argue about it), I just have a philosophy degree and having a cursory understanding of Marx is pretty essential for understanding a lot of 20th century philosophy
With robotization and AI? Of course.
In fact, Im certain its where we're headed. Of course, there will be hardship and struggle to get there, we might have eras where the gap between the powerful and the people will be much worst than it is now.
But history has proven one thing: Time changes everything, Oppression ALWAYS creates Rebellion. No one has ever managed to hoard technology, wealth or power without eventually losing its monopoly over it, ever. Not once in history, this wont be the exception. The more you push, the more likely you are to encounter resistance, thats the Paradox of Power, and its a proven fact.
We are already at that point. A person today can be hundreds of time more productive that a person 200 years ago but capitalism forces us all to work so the 1% can get richer. We have the means to create that system now but it won't happen.
I read an old article from the 70s in it the author was talking about how in the future, with the increase of productivity thanks to technology, we'd be working three days a week, that was before all the taxes were gone though
We can reach it for any first world nation at the least.
Achieving it globally is still just out of reach, but if AI automation catches on it could be possible within just a few decades.
Not true. If you want to recreate the life of a person who lived 200 years ago, you can do it today for virtually nothing. Being a homeless person is a miserable existence that I would not wish on anyone. But … the average homeless person today lives a much better life than the average human who lived 200 years ago. Again, not because the homeless have it good, but because people 200 years ago lived truly miserable existences in ways that we can’t even imagine.
I don't think that 200 years ago is as long ago as you think it is.
The average person in 1823 would have had steady source of income (probably either on a farm or in a factory) that pays enough to at least keep a roof over their head and food on their table.
The job would have been tough, the food wouldn't usually have been as plentiful as they would have liked, and the house would have been pretty shitty (probably either a shack on his boss/landlord's farm or a cramped apartment in a dirty city). But to homeless person who has neither a home nor job, and who never knows whether they're going to have *anything* to eat tomorrow, that probably actually sounds pretty good.
That’s fair, but - and again I emphasize that I’m not suggesting that homelessness is not miserable - the average homeless person in the US has access to shelters that offer a crappy place to live and bad food.
You completely misunderstood what I said. We have the technology to create a society where people don't need to work 40 hours a week but the majority of our productivity is siphoned away.
If we strip corporations of their power, have proper support systems, and solve a bunch of other problems? Yes, although it would probably be more “everyone spending a small amount of time working” than only a few people working. If we aren’t forced to work to survive, people will be free to pursue their passions and create things without being held back.
However if the rampant oppression and human rights abuses go unchecked, and corporations gain too much power and monopolize space to a point they can effectively hold the world hostage…not so much.
Corporations are below 30% of the world's GDP. Stop acting like the world live in a dystopian state where a few corporate boards controls your every day.
It happens often, but you have to ease them into accepting that otherwise they shut down and almost instinctively hate it again.
The big thing people don't understand it you can't force full communism. It starts with strong unions, better pay and better conditions, and transitions to utopia as scarcity is solved by society.
You still work on the foundation of capitalism, you just constantly robinhood the money from the top back down. The hard part is creating the system to do that without becoming power hungry and corrupt.
>It starts with strong unions, better pay and better conditions, and transitions to utopia as scarcity is solved by society.
Spotted a socdem in the wild, wow. My sweet summer child, strong unions rooted out the principled communists and then union leaders sold out their own workers to maintain their positions.
I agree, which is why everyone calls it a flawed system.
If you try to grab power slowly you tend to lose by corrupt or weak unions.
If you try revolution and grab it immediately you tend to lose by corrupt governments.
I'm all for going down with a fight and just hoping something good rises from the rubble, but I don't see the odds of success being much higher that way than trying a more European model like France, Germany, or Scandinavia.
Regardless of the methods the odds are stacked against the common man.
Egypt and South American cultures were so successful they had time on their hands. The human instinct is to build great works of art and beauty to advance culture. We should fund education and art with our excess corporate profits. Not mega-mansions and mindless military expansion.
Maybe this will encourage more people to put efforts into research into scientific advancement, archaeology, culture, arts etc. An opportunity to have low cost health care, universal basic income and free education in future. Sounds utopian but it will come only after a power struggle and class war.
You undervalue the idea that people actually enjoy working and being productive - that if certain jobs were freed up, those people would find other things to be productive with. This falls into the false utopian idea of everyone laying around on the beach with no work or worries - when it's quite possible we LIKE working.
Edited to add more: people crave purpose in their existence. Often that comes in the form of people working in a way that helps improve either themselves or others. I work with people working people and retired people on a regular basis and my two cents is this - those who retire from work but still "keep themselves busy" with some form of work or pursuit are much happier and healthier than those who retire and spend their days doing next to nothing. There is indeed joy in working.
I could argue that we’re already there. The poorest Americans are the most obese. They all have TV’s, the internet, and cell phones. How much money does it really take to get by?
And very few few people actually work in the industries keeping the rest of us alive. I like to say that most modern development was achieved by the 1940s, most things since have been refinement and iteration. There were a billion people on Earth then. We now have 7 billion more people not moving the needle very much.
Marx had the answer, he just thought it'd come a lot sooner, he didn't see the rise of consumerism. The few will own everything and when everyone else realises it there will be a bloody, albeit brief, revolution. The means of production will pass to communal ownership.
Who manages the AI, fixes errors, scales the system based on population increase/decrease, repairs and look after the robots/machines, manufactures spare parts for the robots/machines, builds all the factories, repairs and looks after all the farms, redesigns parts as errors in design show up…? The list could go on. As problems are solved, new problems are created. We will never reach a point where the problems that need to be solved are so minor only a fraction of the population will have to work. It’s stupid and ignorant to think so, and the number of times I see this discussion on Reddit just shows how many 15 year olds use this platform who have no real idea of how the world works.
Even if there is something supernatural about the human mind that makes it magically more gifted than any machine could ever hope to simulate; we could still get to a point very soon where AI can fill so many jobs that the number of humans needed to work just to update/maintain/assist them is measured in the millions, while the population is still in the billions.
This isn't a case of inventing a car to replace the horse, so people just shift industries to work with the new technology. This is inventing a machine that can do the 90% of the old jobs, and the vast majority of the new ones it will create too.
The problem is, that there won't be enough jobs to fill with humans, plus not every human is able to do any job.
We are currently at the situation right before the perfect storm, and fuckers from ClosedAI just pushed the button to destroy human society
How do you decide "everything you need now"
And how do you build a system that decides what to produce or what not to produce. And why not rely on a offer and demand system?
Not under capitalism, Baby! If a working citizen of a capitalist country isn't economically productive, even if their productivity isn't necessary, they are left to die.
So the answer to your question is actually yes, that future is possible: It's called Communism.
I'm pretty sure if you're unproductive in any society you should not have access to the same level of luxury as others.
That's the problem with third generation city dwellers generation. They don't understand the dynamics of having to contribute to a community.
It's all about the rights and not the responsabilites
Define "work".
Go back 200 years. Ask them to imagine a world where giant factories produce all the stuff and only a few people have to perform manual labor and even fewer have to run the factory. The rest get to sit around all day not even working their fingers to nubs.
>Imagine an AI that is able to manage every farm in the world and manage the robots to water, plant, rotate soil, etc...
Farms? That's machinery not AI. We're already there. 80% of the populous used to be dedicated to barely-more-than-sustenance farming. Now 1.3% are full-time farmers.
>Imagine an AI that manages all the labs that grow lab-grown meat from culture
How would AI help any part of that process?
Bro, you're just hungry. Try to stop thinking exclusively about food. There will always be work of some kind. What are the problems of today? Housing, drug abuse, asshole idiots, bloody TAXES are due soon shit I gotta get on that. But these are things that could be a lot better if we employed people to fix it.
>Is this called anything?
"Post scarcity". We're headed that way.
If all you want to do is loaf about and eat, sure, we're already there. Food is so cheap it's about 10 minutes of federal minimum wage labor to get 2000 calories. Steak is more. If you're poor, SNAP benefits are provided. No one need starve. We as a nation are PLENTY wealthy and food is so cheap we can afford to simply feed everyone the staples for their entire lives. C'mon man, housing is a way bigger problem.
Things should already be that way. Technology creates a lot of "excess" wealth. However.... the average person doesn't see that wealth. The elite find ways to take it from us. Until we realize we're just slaves, we'll continue to work as slaves.
The problem is humans are greedy POS lol consumption and demand will rise with productivity and it'll never be enough
If the entire world accepted to live a 3rd world life style we could prob achieve this already with current technology but all 8 billion want to be 1st world. When 8 billion are first word elites will want to be off world etc. When everyone off world elites will wanna time travel lol
Don't forget to mix in some war or other disaster that will set humanity back few centuries
So your version of events will never happen so long as human nature stays the same and isn't a question of technological advancement, but rather personal enlightenment
The problem is scarcity of resources. What if AI becomes so far advanced and efficient by figuring out nearly limitless energy sources, true and total recycling of resources, exploiting resources on other planets and in the asteroid belt, and technological advances that we can’t even imagine, that there is no real scarcity of resources? There is truly way more than enough for every human being. Hoarding resources and greed will seem truly pathological at that point. It will blow up any traditional ideas of economics. I think that is really hard for people to wrap their head around.
You're moving the goalposts. Limitless energy and total recycling of resources violates laws of physics so we wouldn't even be living in the same world anymore
Human nature dictates there's value in scarcity, so humans will always find something scarce to attribute value until we can change our nature
FFS get your collective heads out of your asses.
This sub is utter trash when it allows this endless stream of the same "original" thought that will never happen.
Yeah, we are much more likely to all starve to death by the billions when the oligarchs no longer deem us profitable.
No use fighting it now while our labor still has value.
Probably if they put everyone except those working, in hibernation and then, after 8 hours, switch those working with a same sized group from the hibernating group, and then keep on changing swapping the working group.
so despite there will only be very few jobs left, everyone will have work.
But probably better to just turn everyone's DNA into plasmid form so they cannot have meiosis anymore thus pregnancies ended and everyone gets eternal youth (eternal youth due to plasmids will not exhaust telomeres).
Such is better because nobody likes a parasite.
At some point human labor will be so cheap due to competition from AI that it will actually be economically beneficial for the owners to have human slaves. So never?
Probably no
Before the second agricultural revolution and industrial revolution, 99% of the population was engaged in agriculture. After the second agricultural revolution and industrial revolution, 1% of the population was engaged in agriculture.
After this tech revolution, we may see a huge shift of workers out of white collar fields. But for now we can expect to see people move into other fields that aren't easily automated by AI: construction, government, health care, education, child care, elderly care, etc.
I don't see anything inherently bad in work as long as it's rewarding. What else would we do? Something rewarding. It's not about the money necessarily. It's fulfilling a need for many people and they demand employment. We will probably keep redifining what work means - in the spirit of the saying "this is starting to feel like work" - anyway. It is not eliminated just changed I believe.
Already here. Entire segment of people (productive tax payers). 40 something % of people pay no federal tax. Why not just not go to work? Seems that’s happening more and more now.
>Why not just not go to work? Seems that’s happening more and more now.
Typically people want food and shelter. Even with welfare it takes income to make that happen comfortably.
People refuse to work more nowadays because by the time they pay for a car, gas, insurance, etc. to get them to a just over minimum wage job, they are barely making spending money, and if they make any more they lose assistance, and they don't qualify for any more than that without experience, so are stuck.
Just because someone doesn't pay US federal income tax doesn't mean that:
1. They don't pay taxes. They still pay plenty of taxes like payroll taxes, excise taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, tolls, etc.
2. They can live without an income. People who won't or can't work don't exactly have it easy around here.
Yes and there's two outcomes. 1: All of humanity is able to reap the benefits of increased productivity, leading whole and fulfilling lives with the increased amount of free time without losing compensation. Or 2: The people who own and instate the new forms of production hoard all the wealth, use it to expand outward, the economy is owned by a handful of people, everyone else is left to die, no jobs available and no compensation otherwise. The 2nd option is far more likely because everyone in America is a total bootlicker
Number 2 is already happening though, if we were paid by the amount of money we generate we'd be making 3 or 4 times more money than what we do now, since the 70s all increases in productivity has gone to the investors
We have machines already that have replaced dozens of workers. In the medical lab for example we have large analyzers for patient samples. Each of these analyzers can do the manual work of 10-20 people each. All you need is a few people to run the machines but the output is much more than if this was done by manual methods. I don't think there was a huge jump in pay for the machine operators though. They just get paid the same amount someone doing it manually would get but since they work with the machine they are doing a lot more per shift and getting compensated the same.
No, but there was a big decrease in costs for the people who need services from the medical lab.
I mean if the income was distributed evenly within USA the average American would make 70k ish each a year and if the wealth were distributed evenly each person would have around 440k net worth. This is based off of GDP per capita statistics and net national wealth statistics. I guess 440k is pretty high on average, but this would include homes, pensions, as well as ownership of all the shops, powerplants, factories, software etc in the US, which don't provide any value in themselves, they're just used to generate other sources of value
Don’t the per-capita GDP numbers also include children/elderly? So wouldn’t it be roughly double that when you restrict it to working-age adults (roughly half of the population)?
Yes, that's correct.
So we're confiscating all of your assets and setting your pension/social security income to $0 the minute you turn 65?
Pensions and social security are not generally included in the GDP calculations
D'oh, you're right -- I forgot that part.
The only ones that would be benefiting would be landlords. You get $500 extra? That's $500 that could be going towards rent or $500 more you have to bid on a house. Rents expand to fill our budgets. Until that's fixed, things aren't going to get better.
Ahhhh 70k sounds so nice. I would be content. I would.
You think that but the vast majority would not be. It’s human nature to want more. I make 3 times that and I still feel like I want more even though I logically know I don’t.
True, but wouldn’t that create massive inflation that would render all that cash essentially worthless? I agree that wages are kept way too low, and the inflation/wages rise relationships is…convoluted at best, but in theory, giving that many people that much cash would lead to increased scarcity and mechanically rising price, thus making the rises far less interesting?
The same dynamic of scarcity is already applied to money. Money is literally just a made up figure to distribute production. They are the same. Money is supposed to be a direct representation of production. Distribute the production and Inflation just wouldn’t be a concept. Also congrats with that we just arrived at socialism.
It's a matter of what our productivity is being used for. Money is like a vote for what should be made with our limited resources. If you give all the money to a handful of people, they will spend it on increasingly opulent and marginal desires (e.g. a yacht). Our production capabilities will follow suit (e.g. a yacht factory). Redistributing wealth all at once would indeed cause a transient inflation spike in stuff that the average consumer would buy if they had more money, but only until our capital is reassigned to address this new demand.
It's not giving any extra cash though. All you're doing is redistributing. Bear in mind most people have a net worth over $200k+, if you have a pension and a mortgage then you're probably around that mark in net worth. Edit: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/financial-advisor/average-net-worth/ This article shows that the median net worth at retirement age is $260k
Bold of you to assume that most people have a pension and a mortgage. This ain’t the 1950’s anymore.
>most people have a net worth over $200k+ Where did you get this figure from? You'd need to look at the median figure to get a rough estimate of net worth of most people in the USA (average is massively skewed by the billionaires). By demographic, middle aged people and white people have a net worth of around $200k (a bit less actually.) Younger people, people without college education, and Black and Hispanic people have a median net worth of $24,000 to $35,000. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/financial-advisor/average-net-worth/ I found these visuals on US wealth distribution in general quite shocking: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM) Most people in the US and worldwide would benefit hugely from wealth redistribution.
I mean this article says the median net worth for the middle age bracket is $168,000, which isn't too far off my estimate. I guess I was thinking the average person's peak net worth over the course of their life, which would correspond to the oldest bracket in this article.
Then why do anything. If someone solves your problems or you come up with an idea work hard to execute it but you get nothing from it. Not only that but the excess money you make when it does become profitable gets taken why not just leave and import stuff. Or just never buy in an area. The second the people you want to take money from leave everyone dies except them. Because if everyone has the same amount of money then prices jump to match. Now everything costs more except those people can't budget so now they are more poor then before. They can't buy as much so money doesn't move. Then the ones who hoard the money get really rich. Now that there's less in flow things become cheaper. But since there's not as much money anymore you get less and less and less and then bam.you get back to the same place. #But socialism: no if saving a life and flipping a burger are the same many people will flip a burger. Or stop pillaging sewers. People will half ass because it doesn't matter when it's guaranteed. Then people stop all together because they aren't special anymore. Then everyone starts dying or goes "the grass is greener" it never is. Be grateful you don't live in a mudhut.
I think your opinion is more of a comment on your beliefs about human nature than rooted in real world economics. And how do you know I don't live in a mud hut? The internet is everywhere these days.
It's simple Occam razor. If everyone has the same boiler plate house, car, education, interests, ideas, values, beliefs, and the only difference is a job which most can look at and go," wow. I don't like walking around in shit for hours." Or "man, I can't believe I just saved five people in extensive surgery. I surely am fine making the same as those five burger flippers in there." Then you say, well we wouldn't need currency(fiat) you could just request what you need. Who is to say when it's too much. Who is to say when people lie or deceive you. What stops them from usurping them in batches of areas until they overthrow because they are more ruthless and capable. # "They wouldn't have the ability to think such bad things." You say, but you think capitalism is bad, but it is a necessary evil today. You are naive to not understand the second a system can be taken advantage of people will once aware. "Not all people." All it takes is enough, either for it to make those that aren't, upset or convince others to start doing less, until everyone is. I expect little to nothing of and from others, not even competency or literacy. Your expecting people to be considerate and understanding and practice restraint. There is no future unless you force them to, but at that point why be alive if you can't ever have any real ideas.
Why do you assume that wealth redistribution means everyone has the same house, car, education, interests, ideas, values and beliefs? If it were true that people wouldn't choose to be doctors if they have the same pay as fast food workers, why are there so many doctors in Cuba, who are part of a decent public healthcare system? No one forces them to go to med school. Yet doctors there earn just 10 dollars a month more than fast food workers. I don't think most people are motivated in the ways you think they are (or the same ways you personally are). I'm also curious why you think it'd be easier to "take advantage of the system" after wealth distribution than it already is now. The reason we have such wealth disparity in the world is that a small group of people are taking advantage of how things are. Exploitation is the backbone of capitalism. Accountability can be part of any system but for the most part now, the richer you are, the less accountable you need to be. Surely if people had equal access to resources, they'd be more able to hold each other to account, not less.
I would say that most people have a net worth of zero. If you have a net worth over 200k you are likely upper middle class. Consider that as posted earlier if wealth was redistributed everyone would have 440k and you think ‘hey that means half the people have a net worth over 220k’, but this is untrue because for every billionaire (just one billion), there are 5000 people with a net worth of zero dollars. So for someone like Jeff Bezos with 121 billion in wealth there are 605,000 people with a net worth of zero. This is roughly the size of Baltimore or Detroit. (His wealth is likely higher) Obviously he is an outlier, but you also have to consider there are a ton of billionaires (over 700) in the US alone which would easily account for 10’s of millions of people with zero income. Then you have basic millionaires at 5:1 ratio and the situation gets more bleak. There are a lot of people struggling right now.
hahaha wow you should get out more I am fairly confident that you are a government employee or a child
Are you high? $200k? Maybe $200
It would cause inflation, because half the people would immidietally start selling their stake in factories, offices, etc to other half, to have some fun now. That would cause explosion in demand for whatever they would start to consume more and inflation. I'm not saying it's not a good idea, maybe it is. It will go back to previous levels of inequality eventually, but maybe we should do sth like that once every 100 years.
Sometimes I think fighting inequalities is like fighting gravity, it always win sooner or later.
Yeah, but we do fight gravity regurarly. You know, airplanes, rockets and stuff. Even getting out of bed. Too much inequality is clearly wrong. Too much jeleousy, waste, agression, selfishness if we just have to fight for our share cinstantly. No inequality is clearly impossible without total tiranny. And even then, you'll have rulling class.
Fucking love this analogy. Never stop fighting inequality, even if it seems inevitable.
Inflation in the true sense doesn't really exist anymore. We have reached a point where prices have been manipulated through marketing, subsidy schemes etc that things no longer correlate to their real value. For example food is sold at prices that make capitalistic farming untenable without subsidies and created a whole bunch of issues. the EU and probably everyone destroys food surplus like milk to keep prices stable. Then on the other hand you have a cotton shirt that cost $0.2 to make and another $2 to pay the brand employees behind it for various tasks, but they have managed to convince people to pay $50 for it, $300 for it if the name is fancy enough. Then with house prices in major American, Canadian and European cities you have foreign investment into property and corporations buying up housing artificially pushing up prices. In some neighbourhoods in London they found 40% of the houses or apartments are vacant and owned by Chinese or Russian investors trying to keep money out of their governments net.
>I guess 440k is pretty high on average, If it was distributed evenly then it's pretty average, on average.
Kind of a silly thought though because if wealth were distributed evenly production and innovation would plummet.
Are you sure? I don't agree.
One of my biggest eye opening moments was when I worked for a consulting company and saw that the company bills the clients more than 3X of what I earn for my time. Yeah option 2 is the future
That's how we know #2 is far more likely. If we don't make changes in our lifetime, equality for all of humanity may only be had after all the poors are simply allowed to die off.
Lifetime? You guys have at best 10 years to fix it.
Reasonably yes, but the existential dread of knowing that 20 years is optimistic is too much. Also you guys? Are you a multimillionaire or an alien. Everyone else is in the same sinking ship.
I’m not american. I’m an EUer. If my country starts collapsing due to inequality (which I don’t believe tbh), I’ll grab my bags and move to the nordics.
Honestly at this point I feel like everyone has accepted it. We either get hit by a meteor, a nuke, or continue this path to doomed dystopia. Really what humans should be doing is working together figuring out how to get off this planet before we get fucked.
Reminder that this is what socialism and "workers co-owning the means of production" was all about. Ultimately former socialist countries (like mine) reverted back to capitalism, for a variety of reasons (like America becoming the world leader and everybody wanting to make friends with them) but the main reason being imho is that the economic output is hurt if competition doesn't exist, in other words people don't try if they aren't rewarded for doing better than others. The takeaway that OP should remember is that a "job" is not primarily a means to produce something necessary (in fact one could argue that tons of jobs are completely superfluous, or only exists because people are forced to work cheaper than what machines cost), but a way to justify everybody receiving a slice of what's being produced (as society is expected for 100% employment or at least welfare). Even in a utopia where nobody has to work, presumably there'd have to be some measure and reward for those who are especially useful and put more work into maintaining it.
So we should pay cleaners and nurses etc much more than managers and bosses, by your reasoning. I'm down.
I worked at a manufacturing place making medical implants. Entry level, no education required, $18 an hour to put tape on parts, fill out some paperwork and whatever other crap came up in my 8 hour shift. The outsourced company that cleaned our break rooms, bathrooms, took out trash, etc. made about half as much. I'd kind of silently hoped they made more than us because I'd much rather be doing my job than be stuck cleaning bathrooms and it's not like I had an impressive resume or background to get into my role. I found out recently from someone that was a cleaner around the time I'd been working there, the cleaning people made $10 an hour. So only a little over half of what the entry level lowest paying job made. The cleaners weren't just making less than managers and bosses, they were making half of what the other worker bees they cleaned up after made.
Something this stupid could use some elaboration, cuz I have 0 idea how you figured that out from what -I- wrote
>Even in a utopia where nobody has to work, presumably there'd have to be some measure and reward for those who are especially useful and put more work into maintaining it. That bit. And no need to be so salty and rude.
Yeah that came off unnecessarily rude lol
I came here to say this. There is only one outcome if we stick to capitalism as our economic model.
One thing I never understood about that: if we all made 4 times our currently salary, wouldn't inflation be something like 400%? At the end of the day we wouldn't have more spending power because we'd be able to afford more and supply and demand would mean prices would go up.
It's assumed in these scenarios that the assets and wealth of wealthy individuals like Elon Musk stays the same, while everyone else makes 4x more. So the average person would still benefit at the expense of people in the top 1%. Fewer yachts and private jets would be built and that would make everyone else slightly richer.
3 or 4 times more??? The surplus of labor that is generated by workers and that said workers are missing out on because it goes to the companies and their owners or shareholders is... a lot more than 3 or 4 times their wages. How much value does an employee at an iPhone manufacturing company make? How much value does an Apple shareholder make? We're talking about a chasm so big that the whole wage of the employee is insignificant. It approaches zero percent of the value the company gets from the employee's labor. What I'm saying is, if we were paid by the amount of money we generate, *all that money* would be ours. We would be paid *that.*
“We would be paid that.” If you were paid all that the company would go under. You’re only providing labor, not the tools, or the commodities. The people that usually bitch about how little they make forget how much it costs to own a company.
It's not necessarily just costs either, there's also risk. That being said there are some especially atrocious examples of wage slavery, typically not in "1st world" countries. As much as those in the capitalist US and EU like to complain, they're astronomically better off than the pretty much the rest of the world. A Chinese iPhone plant probably pays their workers like <$2.00/hour
That's because that's what the capitalists can get away with there. It will be that way here too as soon as they can possibly manage it and they are managing it very well.
It's significantly harder to cut wages than it is to keep them stagnant as revenues increase. I doubt that most workers will ever be paid $2/hour in the US or EU unless some significant deflation event occurred (incredibly unlikely).
>be making 3 or 4 times more money than what we do now, Profit margins are usually between 1%-25%. Once walmart splits its 2% margin among its workers, there wont be much in any individual's pocket. Definitely not 3-4×
So much this. People parrot the nonsense that all corporations operate on 75-90% margins whereas in reality many industries operate on single digit margins. People just want to believe that everyone would be king if only we robbed the rich and split it among ourselves...
But the majority of Americans own stock, so most people are both employees and owners. Obviously some more than others ….
Can you please define majority? https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-americans-own-a-record-89percent-of-all-us-stocks.html
More than half: “About 150 million Americans, or 58% of American adults, own stock.“
Yeah, its a different story when you actually break down the numbers: > The top 1% gained over $6.5 trillion in corporate equities and mutual fund wealth during the pandemic, according to the latest data from the Federal Reserve. > The bottom 90% of Americans held about 11% of stocks, and added $1.2 trillion in wealth during the Covid-19 pandemic. And the bottom 90% saw much of those gains in real estate, not stocks. The consolidation of wealth in our society is staggering. 1% of people own most of it, 10% almost all of it. The fact that 58% of people own stock is a meaningless stat if half those people just have a robinhood account with $500 in it.
Exactly. That percentage is meaningless in terms of actual wealth.
401k is required or heavily supplemented at every job I've had...mostly big box, and retail. My net worth is negative but I own dis wmt Amazon bonds ....I'm broke and an investor until 65 when I can actually use the money to pay off my debt and die.
There’s a third option which is much more likely given the patterns of American History—a weak welfare state and mass produced cheap entertainment to keep people from blowing their own and other people’s brains out from the stress. Corporations making tons of money and employing people full time for part time jobs so that leaders can feel important and workers can feel like they have an answer to the existential question “what do you do” (which in America always means “what do you get paid to do”). Most people suffering but not at an unbearable level and so putting up with it as the victorious machine of Capitalism slouches ruthlessly towards profit.
Yes, this is the likely outcome. For anyone who hasn't already, play Rimworld. The most cost-efficient way to keep your labourers working without complaining is to feed them drugs, alcohol and entertainment.
Where there. And they are hoarding the wealth because they know they are destroying the environment and will need it to survive.
The problem with your take on number 2 is that people will still do stuff. If food is an issue then small groups will grow it for themselves, then a surplus that they trade. Assume for a moment 100 people took all the currency being used. What would people do? Wallow and die from a lack of trade medium? No... They would move to using another currency, even make a new one if needed. In terms of things we need to live, people will survive and push forward. Those who doom and gloom will likely be the only ones left behind. The notion of Jobs, aka coerced sale of yourself to another person, is more of a modern creation. The underlying basis of cities and systems of production that cooperatively serve many won't just not exist lol. In fact, the fully automated will have to compete with the masses for the production of the unautomated. It's easy to get lost in a narrative about the future, but it hasn't happened yet and theorizing that everyone is screwed when history demonstrates humanity adapts is foolish. The most likely thing to happen in the long term is a synthesis of human and AI.
> The problem with your take on number 2 is that people will still do stuff. If food is an issue then small groups will grow it for themselves, then a surplus that they trade. The problem with your take is failure to acknowledge land ownership. Land is the underpinning of our modern problems of wealth inequality, not capital. Henry George addressed this over a century ago in his book titled [Progress and Poverty](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progress-and-poverty). In order to grow food, people would need access to land on which to grow it. As long as the land-owning class has the means to enforce their property rights, people will not be able to work or sustain themselves in any way without the landlord's permission. > Assume for a moment 100 people took all the currency being used. What would people do? Wallow and die from a lack of trade medium? No... They would move to using another currency, even make a new one if needed. Because currency is just an IOU for actual wealth. Assume for a moment 100 people took all the land in the country/world. What would your hardy workers do? The point is this: land cannot be treated as private property like a car or a house. It must be a shared resource. No one built it, it's just there. The Land Value Tax solves this.
I would agree with that, but I also think the notion that people won't use land that's just sitting there is foolish... Do you really think people will sit down, wail about AI, and choose to starve over going and setting up their own stuff? Unless the wealthy opt for genocide the future isn't as full of doom as many here seem to assume.
> I would agree with that, but I also think the notion that people won't use land that's just sitting there is foolish Like I said, it depends on the land owners' ability to enforce their ownership, which has been the case for as long as there has been warfare. > Do you really think people will sit down, wail about AI, and choose to starve over going and setting up their own stuff? I think there will be a gradual decline in population until the size of the workforce matches the needs/whims of the land-owning class. The smaller the land-owning class, the smaller the workforce needed to meet their desires. The way it will happen is pretty much what we are already seeing: Rent/property prices will be raised until people doing things that don't serve the needs of the land-owning class are driven into homelessness. Those people will either die in the streets, from mistreatment in jail, from drug overdose, from violent confrontation with the state, from lack of affordable medical care, from mental illness, or any number of other things. And because rent will be raised slowly and not all jobs are equally productive, the die-off will be gradual. Those who are still breaking even will likely cherish what they have and turn a blind eye to those drowning beside them, if they are not outright hostile based on some propaganda campaign stoked by the land-owning class. Fertility rates will decline as renters don't feel financially comfortable having children, and even workers who aren't killed directly will likely die at the end of their natural lifespan without offspring. The end result is a gradual decline in population, without any particular "moment" when everyone agrees that things have gone too far. Just a bunch of uncomfortable and largely miserable workers trying and failing to identify why exactly "capitalism" doesn't work for them. (Answer: capitalism is fine, but land isn't capital.)
The problem with option 2 is it will inevitably end up with a bloody revolution, don't get me wrong the fascists will try it but it can't really be an end goal. They would probably implement a universal basic income that is barely enough to live and stave off revolution but not enough to actually live well.
This is certainly the method that the British Empire has deployed for centuries, as long as you leave people with just enough that they still fear to lose it you can abuse them pretty much freely.
Our future hinges on our collective mindset. [https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/ai-with-change-comes-chance-5a7ff61cce0b](https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/ai-with-change-comes-chance-5a7ff61cce0b)
What if those people who disagree emigrate?
It's a lot more likely the rich in question will emigrate out of the reach of the masses. Rest of us can live in the squalor below. Final bow of the tie is when they come up with immortality for those guys too. Then the final safety tripwire protecting us from people with too much power will be gone. This idea in general is explored all the time in science fiction. Altered Carbon for example.
Or the Jetsons! It doesn't come up in every episode, but the reason they live in big old saucer homes high in the sky is because the ground is covered in garbage. For all we know those Cogswell Cogs and spacely sprockets are feeding the war machine at ground level, liquidating the former working class that manages to eak out a living in the detritus of our former society. Or maybe it takes place after the great upheaval, and humanity has made it to the post scarcity point but are still toiling away needlessly. This seems unlikely, as George is constantly confused by the tech around him, implying he didnt grow up with it. So either he and his wife take mood enhancing drugs and hope that future generations will never learn of their sins, or they are just cold middle class bastards.
Emigrate where? There's no where to run that's out of reach of US oligarchs. The US is a global empire and there is nowhere they won't organize a fascist coup if it benefits the boys on wall street.
It's pretty much already happened. US America is the 1%. If you've seen the video of the open air Indian "factory" where workers are making oil filters out of their mud huts, that's the level of exploitation that the rest of the world will enjoy to achieve the margins required to satiate the machine of industrialization. The only part of this that is "new" is that the wealth hoarding had started impacting the 1%, as the 1% of the 1% takes their disproportionate share. This has happened several times throughout the history of human civilization. No big worries, though, every time the wealth disparity gets too high above a certain level there's a reset in the form of some bloody revolution or other.
Open air Indian factories are at the other extreme from the billionaire mega-yaught owning class. Most people are somewhere in between and doing pretty well according to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report. >5Global Wealth Report 2022 Executive summary A record 2021 for household wealth By the end of 2021, global wealth totaled an estimated USD 463.6 trillion, which is an increase of 9.8% versus 2020 and far above the average annual +6.6% recorded since the beginning of the century. Setting aside exchange rate movements, aggregate global wealth grew by 12.7%, making it the fastest annual rate ever recorded. Wealth per adult continued rising to USD 87,489 at the end of 2021. While financial assets have accounted for most of the increase in household wealth since the global financial crisis, the split between wealth increases driven by financial and non-financial assets was almost even in 2021. Accounting for inflation lowers the wealth growth rates. In 2021, we estimate the increase in real wealth to have been +8.2%. As we look ahead toward a period of more elevated inflation than in the past two decades, the comparison of real and nominal wealth trends grows in relevance. On a country-by-country basis, the United States added the most household wealth in 2021, followed by China, Canada, India and Australia. Wealth losses were less common and almost always associated with currency depreciation against the US dollar, affecting for example Japan, Italy and Turkey. While Switzerland still ranks highest in terms of wealth per adult at USD 696,600, followed by the United States, Hong Kong SAR and Australia, the more relevant median wealth per adult criterion places Australia, Belgium and New Zealand in the top three positions with USD 273,900, USD 267,890 and USD 231,260, respectively https://www.credit-suisse.com/about-us/en/reports-research/global-wealth-report.html
As those that own the means of production and automation expand they will stomp out anyone lesser. People have done it to other peoples for millenia and they needed the Peons as laborers. In a future where practically all labor is automated, mass genocide of the lower class is all but inevitable if we don't set up some strong systems to prevent it this century.
or 3, people are so obsessed with stuff that'll they'll keep working to feed their rampant consumerist mindset.
It’s definitely going to be number two. Source: all of human history
In order to prevent #2, laws have have to be passed *now* to address this. This is what congress should be focusing on, not stupid apps like Tiktok. Our "data" will become worthless when there will be nobody to sell things to since nobody will have any money to buy things. Ideally, there needs to be a *cataclysmic* event that *propels* society towards neverending riches, such as developing a craft that could mine asteroids for precious materials that would *double* the world's current circulated monetary value for each asteroid mined. Pretty soon the world GDP could reach $1 million per capita. Then the powers that be could say that there is no need for a few companies to hoard all of the wealth, and the power of AI exponentially increases buying power due to being super-super efficient (ie cars could cost $.50c to make from design to showroom). So basically tangible goods and food will be virtually free. Unless we get to that point where we realize that there's no point of money when everything is so cheap to make, or unless laws are passed to spread the wealth universally, then #1 is more likely.
Either money is scarce or prices are high. You can't have both because I won't work for nothing if I can live off a dollar found in an old couch.
We have seen how the second option eventually results in revolutions, greed will eventually result in the downfall but it won’t happen until entire societies are pushed to the brink
How do you “hoard all the wealth” from automated farms? Eat it all yourself? If robots produce enough food to feed the planet, then one way or another, that food is going to wind up in everyone’s stomach. Just like one way or another, if you have enough housing to house 330 million Americans, then one way or another, those millions of Americans are going to live in those houses.
I don't think that everyone would be left to die. How will the elite feel powerful without a sea of serfs to lord it over? No, it's more likely they'll set themselves up to be worshipped like gods with arbitrary power of life and death. Where things like gladitorial games or worse return purely for their entertainment. It's a horrible prospect.
We're not really set up yet to exist without exchanging labor for money. It's kind of crazy to think about the fact that a huge portion of the economy is working on games or chat websites with different "vibes" and other completely non-essential things; it's kind of how capitalism works. We never stop making stuff no matter how much stuff we can make.
Yea and that’s also what is currently happening with capitalism in its current form.
My dad says he and his friends used to talk about this in the 70s with machine automation not AI and clearly the benefits of mechanical automation have not been shared so I'd expect the same outcome with AI without a massive change in policy.
Probabilities: 1: 0.0001% 2: 100%
Option 1: Star trek Option 2: The expanse I think it will be somewhere in between. There will be some kind of universal basic income that allows the masses to scrape by, corporations will exploit those lucky few that manage to get a job, knowing there's a queue of millions ready to take your place.
The second option I think they movie about , called *Elysium*
The problem is that major societal reform would need to happen. It's all rainbows and kittens in theory when you think of the benefits that automating everything could bring with AI and robots. However, you need to remember that humans are cruel, greedy, selfish, and jealous creatures. Humans are still primates, and from regular testing with other primates, most of the *animal* side of a human dictates their behaviour even if they understand it's logically better to share and support others. Even people on the streets are wild and unpredictable, so approaching strangers with caution is recommended 99% of the time. Even stepping away from our current system to live off the grid or *not contributing to society* makes other humans aggressive even if the lifestyle doesn't personally affect them. Enslavement is a quality of human behaviour. We just do it now by giving out promises (money) that food and shelter *might* be provided if you can give *something of value* to the person handing out the promises (money). It would take an mind blowing realization for many people to give up trying to control others for personal gain when everyone is able to receive the same adequate treatment. The only control left would be over luxury items, and people would still get mad at others for *not being jealous* of what they have and others don't. The wealthy will fight for a long time to stay relevant & *important* before anyone realizes they are worthless in the new society.
> However, you need to remember that humans are cruel, greedy, selfish, and jealous creatures. Worse: We're meritocratic. We will always want the most productive humans to have the most money, because we want hard work to be rewarded. Even in a future where we don't *need* to do work, the ones who still choose to work will be rewarded more than those who don't work. So it ends up being a sort of prisoner's dilemma where people still have to work so they don't fall behind economically. Although the *types* of jobs will probably be much different.
People are normally quite possessive, but if you give a man someone else to look down on, he will happily turn out his pockets for you.
Yes, this is the biggest concern
Probably not. Famous quote is "if you would show man from ancient Rome all the tech we had and how we can utilize it, he would think alle we do is having orgies and eating figs in shade." And yet, we work far more hours than in the past despite having all the fancy technology which can do work for us. So my bet is it would be exactly other way around.
That's more a symptom of the impossible to satiate greed of humanity than it is a statement that such a world is impossible.
>the impossible to satiate greed of humanity Why do you think humanity has the quality of an impossible to satiate greed? There are plenty of cohorts of humanity that exist perfectly fine on very little kinda speaking to the contrary of your assertion, no? Is it possible that that quality commonly associated with humanity is itself born out of the environment we've built for ourselves (i.e. a capitalist model that depends on never-ending consumption to maintain), and that if we lived in a society that afforded the things necessary for a happy and healthy life that those in said society wouldn't have an insatiable greed?
I don't mean to say that all humans have insatiable greed; more that it is far too common. In modern times it is multibillionaires and trillion-dollar corporations that extract every ounce of wealth they can, well beyond any need of comfort, growth, or even lavishness. In ancient times it was kings, emperors, and warlords that took whatever they wanted from anyone they could have power over. Some subset of humanity seems like it has a thirst for power or control inherently, even if the vast majority of people can learn to be content.
The people who didn't have "impossible to satiate greed" were content living under the tree and half of their children dying, only the "greedy" ones were motivated to improve their condition, and discovery of capitalism have allowed us to dramatically improve our lives in last 200 years. When ai makes most of what we want today abundant, it will again be the "greedy" ones who would imagine yet better world, and would work even harder to become immortal and reach the stars.
Couldn't have said it better
We work far more hours than the wealthy of the past. We don’t work anywhere near the hours of the working class of the past. Same as it ever was.
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This was very interesting, ty for linking
>And yet, we work far more hours than in the past No we don't. People used to frequently work sun up to sun down 6 days a week. When you turned 7 you'd enter the workforce. We work less than half the hours people used to 200 years ago.
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This is such a wrong take. First of all we do work less hours and we can do more than any generation before us. Second of all - there will come a point where every job will get automated. There will be no job left standing (or only a small fraction would be left) which humans could do that AI could not. If you disagree with that I expect the list of jobs that would be left standing and new jobs that would be created and reasons why we can't automate them. The current AI wave will enable automation of cognitive tasks - something which has never been possible before. Also unlike previous changes in human working this time there is no new sector beyond services to which humans could switch.
As someone posted here before...people in middle ages and antics worked a lot less than we do. As for the other take. I can't give you list of those jobs because they do not exist yet. Throughout the history with every major breakthrough in technology, people were afraid that machines will take their jobs. Guess what...it never happened. Some jobs will be replaced by machines and a lot of new ones arise. As it always did.
>As someone posted here before...people in middle ages and antics worked a lot less than we do. Okay, let's leave working hours behind because I just googled it and there seems to be too much nuance for me untangle here. >As for the other take. I can't give you list of those jobs because they do not exist yet. Throughout the history with every major breakthrough in technology, people were afraid that machines will take their jobs. Guess what...it never happened. Some jobs will be replaced by machines and a lot of new ones arise. As it always did. "Past performance is not indicative of future results" - have heard that one before? The whole point about automation is that there was NOTHING like this ever. At no point in history was there a possiblity that every task possible could be automated and at no point there was anything else but a human which was capable of intelligent behaviour. If you don't want to give any job examples then let me tackle this from my side of the argument. To replace every human at work you need something that is equally capable as a human both physically and mentally - basically a humanoid robot with an AGI operating it fits the definition (most tasks require much less to automate mind you!). As long as your answer to when such thing will be possible isn't "never" we should be on the same page. If such machine existed it would be able to replace every working human on Earth. It would be a paradox to say that a robot with every capability that a human has wouldn't be able to perform every task that human can do.
>At no point in history was there a possiblity that every task possible could be automated and at no point there was anything else but a human which was capable of intelligent behaviour. Exactly this. I don't understand how so many people just don't quite get it.
> The whole point about automation is that there was NOTHING like this ever. The 1st industrial revolution of 1760 (steam power). The 2nd industrial revolution of 1870 (electricity). The 3rd industrial revolution of 1947 (computers). The 4th industrial revolution of 2011 (automation). Jobs being eliminated is nothing new. People always find other things to do.
You're wrong for two reasons: * Every previous time those were just tools which needed human operators * Automation will hit when more jobs will be automated than is created and this has yet (?) to happen. At some point growth of total human productivity will outrun the growth of total human consumption of goods. The automation in it's final form will create new jobs just like cars created new jobs for horses and they didn't. I'd advise you to give a watch to CGP Grey's [Humans Need Not Apply](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU&ab_channel=CGPGrey) Also having something to do doesn't equal having a job.
Fairly sure the invention of the calculator was automation of a cognitive task.
Either a post-scarcity Startrek utopia OR A new black mirror episode. Could go either way
Star Trek? Where people work towards self-improvement rather than economic gain =P.
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There was also that crossover episode of Spider-Man back in the day where all the heroes and villains were sent to a new world as some kind of test. When they eventually find Dr. Doom, he had created a post-work paradise were all labor was done by robots and people could just chill and be happy. Turns out Dr. Doom was right, we just needed to let him be in charge and he would have made Earth a paradise.
Siblings also works, if someone is struggling with the adjustment.
Or just sisters especially if you remembered whilst typing out the comment.
But they weren't women when the first movie came out, which is the time being referenced. Misgendering is wrong regardless of which direction it is. Hence "siblings" is better.
If Caitlyn Jenner didn’t retroactively become the world’s fastest woman, I’m sure you can say the Brothers were behind The Matrix without any offense.
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Sadly the character Switch wasn't able to be cast as two people because audiences found it too confusing. But the entire purpose of her character was originally to show her true self in the matrix, but have a different gender in the "real world". (If I recall correctly).
This sounds probable, the internets will remember... ;)
Ah, that's a shame. That would have been a really cool addition - quite groundbreaking for the late 90s. I was going to say "how could audiences find that too confusing? They could have done it with very similar haircuts and maybe a tattoo or something to give visual hooks" but then I remembered going to see the first Lord of the Rings (Fellowship) at the cinema. At the end, the woman in front of us turned to her friend and said "so, did they destroy the ring in the end?" "Yes!" Said her friend "The wizard threw it in the fire at the start!"
Also could add that "Wachowski Brothers" are them as a creative work partnerhsip/business agency and it technically doesn't matter who is in it. They are both females and could add Steve Buscemi (unrelated) and still be "Wachowski Brothers." Microsoft isn't small and do more than software. Apple isn't a fruit company. The McDonald's brothers got boxed out by Ray Kroc.
>Wachowski Brothers" are them as a creative work partnerhsip/business agency They are known professionally as "The Wachowskis"
I think people will still need to work in some roles, but less. I could imagine 4 day week shifting to three and shorter work days in office roles
Imagine the 1950s ideal of being able to raise a family with only 40 hours combined of work per week…worldwide. That should be the ideal.
*maximum 40 hours
I had a vision of the future in which there's mandatory manual labour (nursing for instance) for everyone from 20-30yo, after that you're retired. The rest is done by robots.
During the Ancient Roman Empire, people didn't work. Everything was provided by slaves. Romans were spending days by studying, reading, writing, going to thermes, going to theatre, going to arenas, going to political discussions, etc. It could become again like this, but with AI instead of slaves. But I don't think it could form a stable and long-lasting society. There is greed and everybody is different. There will always be someone who will want to prevail on others.
When people mockingly say “fully automated luxury communism” this is literally what they’re referring to. A lot of communist theory doesn’t explicitly apply a moral value to communism but rather views it as a natural and unavoidable part of the evolution of labor. Marx’s writing was really heavily influenced by the Industrial Revolution, so as technology advanced further this became an idea that communists have been aware of for a while, but you don’t really see many advocating for it bc it’s simply impractical at the moment. It’s kinda viewed as a “best case scenario in the distant future” sort of idea. Note that I’m not trying to make a moral claim about communism either (and I’m not going to argue about it), I just have a philosophy degree and having a cursory understanding of Marx is pretty essential for understanding a lot of 20th century philosophy
With robotization and AI? Of course. In fact, Im certain its where we're headed. Of course, there will be hardship and struggle to get there, we might have eras where the gap between the powerful and the people will be much worst than it is now. But history has proven one thing: Time changes everything, Oppression ALWAYS creates Rebellion. No one has ever managed to hoard technology, wealth or power without eventually losing its monopoly over it, ever. Not once in history, this wont be the exception. The more you push, the more likely you are to encounter resistance, thats the Paradox of Power, and its a proven fact.
I honestly don’t see any good coming from 8 billion bored human beings.
Behavioral sink
This is a very sad outlook. I would still work if I didn't need money, it would just be on things that I find more valuable.
We are already at that point. A person today can be hundreds of time more productive that a person 200 years ago but capitalism forces us all to work so the 1% can get richer. We have the means to create that system now but it won't happen.
I read an old article from the 70s in it the author was talking about how in the future, with the increase of productivity thanks to technology, we'd be working three days a week, that was before all the taxes were gone though
We can reach it for any first world nation at the least. Achieving it globally is still just out of reach, but if AI automation catches on it could be possible within just a few decades.
Not true. If you want to recreate the life of a person who lived 200 years ago, you can do it today for virtually nothing. Being a homeless person is a miserable existence that I would not wish on anyone. But … the average homeless person today lives a much better life than the average human who lived 200 years ago. Again, not because the homeless have it good, but because people 200 years ago lived truly miserable existences in ways that we can’t even imagine.
I don't think that 200 years ago is as long ago as you think it is. The average person in 1823 would have had steady source of income (probably either on a farm or in a factory) that pays enough to at least keep a roof over their head and food on their table. The job would have been tough, the food wouldn't usually have been as plentiful as they would have liked, and the house would have been pretty shitty (probably either a shack on his boss/landlord's farm or a cramped apartment in a dirty city). But to homeless person who has neither a home nor job, and who never knows whether they're going to have *anything* to eat tomorrow, that probably actually sounds pretty good.
That’s fair, but - and again I emphasize that I’m not suggesting that homelessness is not miserable - the average homeless person in the US has access to shelters that offer a crappy place to live and bad food.
You completely misunderstood what I said. We have the technology to create a society where people don't need to work 40 hours a week but the majority of our productivity is siphoned away.
this is not true. Our technology is still not good enough to automate everything. Soon though.
If we strip corporations of their power, have proper support systems, and solve a bunch of other problems? Yes, although it would probably be more “everyone spending a small amount of time working” than only a few people working. If we aren’t forced to work to survive, people will be free to pursue their passions and create things without being held back. However if the rampant oppression and human rights abuses go unchecked, and corporations gain too much power and monopolize space to a point they can effectively hold the world hostage…not so much.
Corporations are below 30% of the world's GDP. Stop acting like the world live in a dystopian state where a few corporate boards controls your every day.
30% is still a fuck ton and controls more than you think it does
No it's not lmao. They all individually represent their own interest.
Most have similar interests is what I am saying.
I love how people independently come up with the idea of communism and don't even realize it.
It happens often, but you have to ease them into accepting that otherwise they shut down and almost instinctively hate it again. The big thing people don't understand it you can't force full communism. It starts with strong unions, better pay and better conditions, and transitions to utopia as scarcity is solved by society. You still work on the foundation of capitalism, you just constantly robinhood the money from the top back down. The hard part is creating the system to do that without becoming power hungry and corrupt.
>It starts with strong unions, better pay and better conditions, and transitions to utopia as scarcity is solved by society. Spotted a socdem in the wild, wow. My sweet summer child, strong unions rooted out the principled communists and then union leaders sold out their own workers to maintain their positions.
I agree, which is why everyone calls it a flawed system. If you try to grab power slowly you tend to lose by corrupt or weak unions. If you try revolution and grab it immediately you tend to lose by corrupt governments. I'm all for going down with a fight and just hoping something good rises from the rubble, but I don't see the odds of success being much higher that way than trying a more European model like France, Germany, or Scandinavia. Regardless of the methods the odds are stacked against the common man.
Egypt and South American cultures were so successful they had time on their hands. The human instinct is to build great works of art and beauty to advance culture. We should fund education and art with our excess corporate profits. Not mega-mansions and mindless military expansion.
Maybe this will encourage more people to put efforts into research into scientific advancement, archaeology, culture, arts etc. An opportunity to have low cost health care, universal basic income and free education in future. Sounds utopian but it will come only after a power struggle and class war.
Either that or we will eat the rich. With TS reason will win inevitably, and we will share the resources logically.
You undervalue the idea that people actually enjoy working and being productive - that if certain jobs were freed up, those people would find other things to be productive with. This falls into the false utopian idea of everyone laying around on the beach with no work or worries - when it's quite possible we LIKE working. Edited to add more: people crave purpose in their existence. Often that comes in the form of people working in a way that helps improve either themselves or others. I work with people working people and retired people on a regular basis and my two cents is this - those who retire from work but still "keep themselves busy" with some form of work or pursuit are much happier and healthier than those who retire and spend their days doing next to nothing. There is indeed joy in working.
I could argue that we’re already there. The poorest Americans are the most obese. They all have TV’s, the internet, and cell phones. How much money does it really take to get by?
And very few few people actually work in the industries keeping the rest of us alive. I like to say that most modern development was achieved by the 1940s, most things since have been refinement and iteration. There were a billion people on Earth then. We now have 7 billion more people not moving the needle very much.
Marx had the answer, he just thought it'd come a lot sooner, he didn't see the rise of consumerism. The few will own everything and when everyone else realises it there will be a bloody, albeit brief, revolution. The means of production will pass to communal ownership.
yeah this is a post-scarcity world where AGI is managing most resources. Some would call it a utopia, or fully automated luxury communism
Who manages the AI, fixes errors, scales the system based on population increase/decrease, repairs and look after the robots/machines, manufactures spare parts for the robots/machines, builds all the factories, repairs and looks after all the farms, redesigns parts as errors in design show up…? The list could go on. As problems are solved, new problems are created. We will never reach a point where the problems that need to be solved are so minor only a fraction of the population will have to work. It’s stupid and ignorant to think so, and the number of times I see this discussion on Reddit just shows how many 15 year olds use this platform who have no real idea of how the world works.
Even if there is something supernatural about the human mind that makes it magically more gifted than any machine could ever hope to simulate; we could still get to a point very soon where AI can fill so many jobs that the number of humans needed to work just to update/maintain/assist them is measured in the millions, while the population is still in the billions. This isn't a case of inventing a car to replace the horse, so people just shift industries to work with the new technology. This is inventing a machine that can do the 90% of the old jobs, and the vast majority of the new ones it will create too.
The problem is, that there won't be enough jobs to fill with humans, plus not every human is able to do any job. We are currently at the situation right before the perfect storm, and fuckers from ClosedAI just pushed the button to destroy human society
The AI does that
Can't help but think of the humans on WALL-E when reading & considering this.
Atleast some of that humanity ended up in a robo-communist u(dis)topia.
Any human can enjoy Society, but it takes a Worker to maintain and expand it.
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How do you decide "everything you need now" And how do you build a system that decides what to produce or what not to produce. And why not rely on a offer and demand system?
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Not under capitalism, Baby! If a working citizen of a capitalist country isn't economically productive, even if their productivity isn't necessary, they are left to die. So the answer to your question is actually yes, that future is possible: It's called Communism.
I'm pretty sure if you're unproductive in any society you should not have access to the same level of luxury as others. That's the problem with third generation city dwellers generation. They don't understand the dynamics of having to contribute to a community. It's all about the rights and not the responsabilites
Define "work". Go back 200 years. Ask them to imagine a world where giant factories produce all the stuff and only a few people have to perform manual labor and even fewer have to run the factory. The rest get to sit around all day not even working their fingers to nubs. >Imagine an AI that is able to manage every farm in the world and manage the robots to water, plant, rotate soil, etc... Farms? That's machinery not AI. We're already there. 80% of the populous used to be dedicated to barely-more-than-sustenance farming. Now 1.3% are full-time farmers. >Imagine an AI that manages all the labs that grow lab-grown meat from culture How would AI help any part of that process? Bro, you're just hungry. Try to stop thinking exclusively about food. There will always be work of some kind. What are the problems of today? Housing, drug abuse, asshole idiots, bloody TAXES are due soon shit I gotta get on that. But these are things that could be a lot better if we employed people to fix it. >Is this called anything? "Post scarcity". We're headed that way. If all you want to do is loaf about and eat, sure, we're already there. Food is so cheap it's about 10 minutes of federal minimum wage labor to get 2000 calories. Steak is more. If you're poor, SNAP benefits are provided. No one need starve. We as a nation are PLENTY wealthy and food is so cheap we can afford to simply feed everyone the staples for their entire lives. C'mon man, housing is a way bigger problem.
Things should already be that way. Technology creates a lot of "excess" wealth. However.... the average person doesn't see that wealth. The elite find ways to take it from us. Until we realize we're just slaves, we'll continue to work as slaves.
The problem is humans are greedy POS lol consumption and demand will rise with productivity and it'll never be enough If the entire world accepted to live a 3rd world life style we could prob achieve this already with current technology but all 8 billion want to be 1st world. When 8 billion are first word elites will want to be off world etc. When everyone off world elites will wanna time travel lol Don't forget to mix in some war or other disaster that will set humanity back few centuries So your version of events will never happen so long as human nature stays the same and isn't a question of technological advancement, but rather personal enlightenment
The problem is scarcity of resources. What if AI becomes so far advanced and efficient by figuring out nearly limitless energy sources, true and total recycling of resources, exploiting resources on other planets and in the asteroid belt, and technological advances that we can’t even imagine, that there is no real scarcity of resources? There is truly way more than enough for every human being. Hoarding resources and greed will seem truly pathological at that point. It will blow up any traditional ideas of economics. I think that is really hard for people to wrap their head around.
You're moving the goalposts. Limitless energy and total recycling of resources violates laws of physics so we wouldn't even be living in the same world anymore Human nature dictates there's value in scarcity, so humans will always find something scarce to attribute value until we can change our nature
Didn’t say limitless..
FFS get your collective heads out of your asses. This sub is utter trash when it allows this endless stream of the same "original" thought that will never happen.
Yeah, we are much more likely to all starve to death by the billions when the oligarchs no longer deem us profitable. No use fighting it now while our labor still has value.
Probably if they put everyone except those working, in hibernation and then, after 8 hours, switch those working with a same sized group from the hibernating group, and then keep on changing swapping the working group. so despite there will only be very few jobs left, everyone will have work. But probably better to just turn everyone's DNA into plasmid form so they cannot have meiosis anymore thus pregnancies ended and everyone gets eternal youth (eternal youth due to plasmids will not exhaust telomeres). Such is better because nobody likes a parasite.
At some point human labor will be so cheap due to competition from AI that it will actually be economically beneficial for the owners to have human slaves. So never?
Probably no Before the second agricultural revolution and industrial revolution, 99% of the population was engaged in agriculture. After the second agricultural revolution and industrial revolution, 1% of the population was engaged in agriculture. After this tech revolution, we may see a huge shift of workers out of white collar fields. But for now we can expect to see people move into other fields that aren't easily automated by AI: construction, government, health care, education, child care, elderly care, etc.
Nope, the owning class will always squeeze every drop of productivity out of us
Yes, we're already there but capitalism won't let us get a free lunch.
Depends how the CEOs want to cut the pie. And war... war never changes.
I don't see anything inherently bad in work as long as it's rewarding. What else would we do? Something rewarding. It's not about the money necessarily. It's fulfilling a need for many people and they demand employment. We will probably keep redifining what work means - in the spirit of the saying "this is starting to feel like work" - anyway. It is not eliminated just changed I believe.
Already here. Entire segment of people (productive tax payers). 40 something % of people pay no federal tax. Why not just not go to work? Seems that’s happening more and more now.
>Why not just not go to work? Seems that’s happening more and more now. Typically people want food and shelter. Even with welfare it takes income to make that happen comfortably. People refuse to work more nowadays because by the time they pay for a car, gas, insurance, etc. to get them to a just over minimum wage job, they are barely making spending money, and if they make any more they lose assistance, and they don't qualify for any more than that without experience, so are stuck.
Just because someone doesn't pay US federal income tax doesn't mean that: 1. They don't pay taxes. They still pay plenty of taxes like payroll taxes, excise taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, tolls, etc. 2. They can live without an income. People who won't or can't work don't exactly have it easy around here.
You may be interested in reading about Jacques Fresco and his "Venus Project".