This would require a fundamental rewriting of Social Security funding law. Right now it's funded solely by payroll taxes. Read: mass automation will be utterly devastating for Social Security because there will be no paychecks to withhold taxes on.
If the author's predictions actually come to pass, it will look a lot like a wealth tax. The current political and economic elites are extremely allergic to anything resembling that.
> Progressive income taxation is a central pillar of government revenue in most high-income countries around the world. If the rich could effectively coordinate to eliminate income redistribution, they would have abolished this system long ago
Hopelessly naive. Rich people are rich because of their assets. Not their income.
> Historical precedent: child labor
amazing start. crushing it already
> Consider Qatar as a point of comparison. Migrant workers make up roughly 94% of the country’s workforce, yet only Qatari citizens, who make up the remaining 6%, are eligible to receive most government welfare benefits. As a result, Qatari citizens enjoy remarkable prosperity, with minimum pensions valued at over $5,700 per month and an early retirement age of 50.
consider: the upsides of doing slavery. a libertarian utopia of remarkable prosperity
> Future humans might gain entirely new senses, develop completely new ways to communicate, and expand our minds beyond recognition. From our present vantage point, we may become gods.
this is actually ripped directly from the closing paragraph of Don’t Create The Torment Nexus
What concerns me is that I don't think it's widely understood enough that there's a frantic, cultish mindset around the tech in SV and tech circles - a mindset that wants to see society upended in search of justifying the investments being made.
> In basing the maintenance of these 150 acres on the Jersey average, requiring the work of three men per acre under glass—which makes less than 8,600 hours of work a year—it would need about 1,300,000 hours for the 150 acres. Fifty competent gardeners could give five hours a day to this work, and the rest would be simply done by people who, without being gardeners by profession, would soon learn how to use a spade, and to handle the plants. But this work would yield at least—we have seen it in a preceding chapter—all necessaries and articles of luxury in the way of fruit and vegetables for at least 40,000 or 50,000 people. Let us admit that among this number there are 13,500 adults, willing to work at the kitchen garden; then, each one would have to give 100 hours a year distributed over the whole year. These hours of work would become hours of recreation spent among friends and children in beautiful gardens, more beautiful probably than those of the legendary Semiramis.
> This is the balance sheet of the labour to be spent in order to be able to eat to satiety fruit which we are deprived of today, and to have vegetables in abundance, now so scrupulously rationed out by the housewife, when she has to reckon each half-penny which must go to enrich capitalists and landowners.
The work week has gotten much shorter since this was written, no doubt about that. But we keep aiming for ~5 hours a week with the profits of our higher mechanized productivity spread out among everyone and somehow we keep missing that one.
yeah, blog at me after a few years of managing even a small fleet of robots
Promised before. It was a lie then, it will be a lie now.
Seriously though is this sort of stuff just nostalgia bait for people who were naive enough to believe it the last time?
Suppose 1000 people live in a town where half own homes and half rent. A home comes up for sale and assume all renters want to own a home. If every renter is receiving the same income, who gets the house?
In today's world, whoever pays the most money. In this future world, maybe still the same (so who has the saved the most and can pay cash), or maybe alternative payments / bartering on the side to sweeten the deal.
Either way it's not this utopia where suddenly everyone can afford scarce resources - the price will just go up to remain scarce
There are two possibilities: mass extinction, or the new elite isn't tiny. Everyone hopes for the latter and fears the former.
At the same time, a million people talk to chatgpt about suicide each week, there's an epidemic of loneliness, mental health issues, wars, famines, pollution, climate change and the list goes on.
Work is not just about earning wages. A lot of people find a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging, community, pride and joy in the work they do. For many it's also about the hierarchy, the title, the career ladder, etc.
I for one don't see how more automation / tech is going to fix the fundamental problems that the previous waves of automation have left behind.