20 years ahead projections are always wrong, sometimes VERY wrong.
It's just another case of "X will kill jobs" where X could be steam machines, electricity, robots, whatever... In the 80s my dad who worked in the automotive industry told me I should study IT because robots would eventually replace men. Today I'd say he was wrong: it's good to be in IT because of the Internet and mobile revolutions, which have nothing to do with robots.
The only sure thing is that we can't predict the future accurately.
Betting tremendous amounts that 60% of the population will be out of work in 20 years seems foolhardy to me. But so would be assuming that it can't happen. Building systems (and our understanding of how we can build systems) that can help, in those circumstances or others, seems like a good move.
Said people in the early 1800s. And early 1900s. Look, it's just not gonna happen. Jobs will change, but there will always be work for those willing to do it. You may not like the job - hell, you may not like your current job either - or it may be a better job than any that exists today.
Look around you, how many of the jobs you see people doing in your office existed 100 years ago? How about 50? 20?
Close to 95% actually. Customer service and sales existed since the introduction of money; and 50-100 years ago, our company probably would have required many more employees to provide a comparable level of service that we do today.
Maybe that's not true for a silicon valley office, but for the vast majority of companies out there, the sales, customer service and management still comprise the bulk of the employee force.
No there won't, the past doesn't predict the future and post scarcity is a different problem than past automation. If you're looking to the past for examples, you don't understand the problem being discussed because the whole point is that automation is at a level that even white collar jobs are no longer immune and most people simply aren't going to be able to compete with machines at anything they're capable of doing.
Yes, it is.
> it's a distant future that will lead to vast social upheaval long before it's actually achievable.
Retrocausality -- something causing something else before it even exists -- is also nonsense. Increasing productivity that is more limited by capital than labor, such that returns flow to capital, will cause much social upheaval, precisely because even as this occurs, scarcity of goods valued by people will still be present as an unalterable feature of life.
As long as there is an opportunity cost to anything, you aren't post-scarcity.
> The problem is long term structural unemployment numbers that will continue to grow until our current economic system is no longer feasible.
Yes, and that problem has nothing to do with "post-scarcity". Employment is only important for welfare because people, in our current system, need it for money to buy goods and services, and money, which is ultimately a rationing system, is only a thing because of scarcity.
It would be, if that's what I'd said or implied, but it isn't because something like post-scaricity isn't binary, it doesn't just occur at one point in time, we'll grow in that direction slowly and problems will arise long before we get there due to rising unemployment, but I think you know that and you're just being obtuse. We are not discussing post-scarcity, we're discussing the problems along the way there if/when it occurs.
You seem intent on pendantically ignoring points being made by re-framing them as strawmen. This is dishonest and not how to have a civil discussion. Since you seem unable to communicate rather than quibble over words you don't like, we're done.
It doesn't occur at all, and the problems you point to aren't problems that are even related to an absence of scarcity, they are problems stemming directly from scarcity.
> we'll grow in that direction slowly and problems will arise long before we get there due to rising unemployment, but I think you know that and you're just being obtuse.
No, we won't "grow in that direction". You seem to be be unable to comprehend the idea of someone disagreeing with your basic premise, so instead you assume that I agree with you and am being obtuse.
There's no route from here to there, and there's not even any there to get to.
We'll continue to progress toward greater abundance, but the basic economic problem that relative abundance does not alter the basic nature of scarcity will not be affected. Its sort of a perennial mistake to confuse greater relative abundance with the absence of scarcity.
It means we are living in paradise. There is nothing to be cleaned. There is nothing to be fixed. There is nothing to be repaired. There is nothing to be trimmed or maintained.
Like how Ireland('s landed gentry) was exported potatoes during the potato famine. There was plenty of food; the locals just couldn't afford it.
I dunno, this doesn't sound like what I learned in my official concentration at MIT.
Hey, how about a real argument, instead of one that doesn't rely on accusations of ignorance or appeal to credentials? That would be awesome.
> There might be things to do, but the owners would not be willing to pay people a living wage to do them.
The proper response is EITC or NIT. This takes the work that is below the worker's reservation wage and puts it above the worker's reservation wage.
Saying "there are no jobs available to 60% of the population" is a solution (BI) looking for a problem (no employment). If you were to actually come across this problem in the wild, where there was lots of work to be done but it was all below labor's reservation wage, the obvious answer would be to subsidize labor.
My living quarters could use a good sweeping, but I ain't doing it, and I ain't paying anyone to do it, even though I could easily afford it.
I guess I'm an armchair internet expert, but I don't see how a theoretical 60% unemployment or the 10-30% under-employment/poor compensation we have now means there's no work to do.
I know predictions could be off. But if in 20 years there are simply no jobs available to 60% of the population. What are they gonna do? Just all starve to death? BI is the inevitable step towards a post scarcity society. When majority of people not only don't want to work but that there are simply no jobs for most people yet there is plenty still to buy/consume because automation.
This has nothing to do with your 1980s example because there were still plenty of jobs to be had that needed doing.