Tons of people today contribute to society without having a job pay them to do it. It's called volunteering, parenting, caring for sick/elderly family members, organizing community events, running for local elections, etc. etc. etc.

The biggest lie of our job-based corporate society is the belief that, unless you're doing a "job", you're not working.

Assuming automation meets greater than 100% of material needs, people could serve society by creating funny GIFs and sharing vacation photos.

10% will be creating indie games, 80% will be doing "let's plays".

But seriously, if we have too much people to work why not make scientists from all of them?

1. Change education system with the assumption that the default career is experimental science.

2. Change the workflow so that you don't need to be incredibly smart to prove you can be allowed to measure stuff and write the results down.

3. pay all these people to do science instead if of paying them the guaranteed income.

If we have to waste money at least "waste" them on something useful. Imagine the progress we could make if 50% of population worked as scientists. Imagine how different a society would look.

Because the average IQ is, by definition, 100.

Irrelevant. Society made up by Einsteins would have average IQ 100 as well.

The problem would be real if society was mostly people that can't have any positive impact on science, but I don't think it's true, especially if we trained everybody with the listed assumptions.

> Society made up by Einsteins would have average IQ 100 as well.

Irrelevant. Which kind of "positive impact on science" would you expect from somebody with an IQ of 100 in the real world, as opposed to your hypothetical "society made up of Einsteins"?

I would expect them to carefuly do the assigned experiments and record the results. If they can be trusted with mounting cars they can be trusted with reading and writing.

Assign same experiments to 10 different teams all over the world to be sure. Would be actually better than unmotivated incredibly bright people hastily doing these experiments once.

Yes the way we do science would need to change but I think it's for the better. It's not like most of the work post-docs do isn't menial.

I think the words you are looking for are "lab technician".

Lots of people with IQs of 100 do science. Science is really simple. You can explain it in a single sentence. Children do science all the time.

There are (marketing) interns in my company who's work isn't far off doing that.

That's funny, because creating GIFs is what 9Gag does, and it requires very few humans. Actually admins create most gifs, give them 300 points, and reissue them every 3 months.

Nothing will require any humans at that point. But an economy can still form. Read "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Ki...

Bollocks. They were talking about computers taking our jobs 30 years ago when I was in School. Everyone seems to be working more hours these days rather than less.

> Everyone seems to be working more hours these days rather than less.

At lower real hourly wages. Which is the effect of automation competing with human labor, it doesn't outright destroy jobs, it just reduces the market-clearing price of the forms of labor it is able to compete with.

You could equally argue that it was down to women entering the workforce.