People used to work 6 days a week, 12 hours a day. One of the effects of the industrial revolution was the 40 hour work week.

It takes less man-hours to create physical products than ever before. A man and a horse used to be able to work an acre a day, a man and a tractor can do 150 acres in a day, and the tractor drives itself.

That's a 15 000 % increase in productivity.

Clothing production has seen similar increases in productivity, so has mining.

We as a society are literally making work for the sake of it.

They have been completely neutralized since, especially on the "asking better conditions for everyone" front (a perfectly valid strategy when you think about it, companies will in the short term, especially for low skilled workers, make less money (that's ignoring the positive externalities from working less of course) ) hence why you don't see better living and working conditions.

Also, there is more mainstream media penetration, which leds people to be more exposed to the "working more is better" ideology.

But people don't need to retrain. What they need is an economic system that allocates their time usefully instead of declaring it worthless and wasting it.

The amount of work that needs to be done and can't yet be automated is almost infinite: infrastructure improvements, simple renovations, community projects, recycling - the unused pool of potential is huge.

I'm not entirely sure that's the case.

But these jobs are subject to the same pressures as driving, cleaning and apple-picking. They're being increasingly automated and the technicians replaced by one person to operate the fluid-handling robots.

Edit: maybe I misinterpreted and you're saying that people don't need above-average intelligence to be an actual research scientist, perhaps on the non-tenure track level. Maybe that's true. But, it requires a strong interest and years of training, hence the long apprenticeship of the Ph.D / postdoc.

Software development is devilishly complex (as in multi-dimensional, multi-disciplinary) to do right. It takes years to master it.

However, it would take less than the total amount of time I've been building software to do what I do, because my path to my job took me through all sorts of software development I don't do anymore. That includes 8 years of higher ed, of which I apply only a tiny fraction on a daily basis. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't trade all that education for the world. I draw upon it in plenty of indirect ways. I just know there are more direct routes for someone who simply wants to become an application developer.

I know this, because I know plenty of people who have taken less than a year to get into the industry, and are now productive developers. One of my friends even wrote about how he did it in detail [2]. There's a fantastic episode of Software Engineering Daily interviewing a guy who landed a lucrative job at AirBnB little more than a year after doing a dev bootcamp [3]. My own brother has been in the industry less than a year after coming through General Assembly and is doing quite well. I interview people all the time who have similar stories. They're not unicorns.

Developing software isn't easy. But it's also not that hard. At least the sort of software most of us build. You only need a couple people at the typical enterprise who are capable of doing architecture and the most technically intense stuff.

[1] http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/61/6175.html

[2] http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2013/11/2012-my-yea...

[3] http://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2016/07/11/salary-negoti...

I know plenty of highly educated Greek engineers or other professionals (e.g.: archeologists) and not being Greek myself I met them through international working groups, so I suppose they qualify as "educated-enough" outside their own borders, too.

On top of that, the current economical situation of Greece is due to some decisions taken outside of Greece itself and it is debatable if the current state of Greece was really the only possible outcome for them.

I know some Greek expats and they told me about this problem and the dilemma that they're facing now between returning to the country and facing the mounting challenges there, or staying put and watching their country go through this difficult time from faraway.

So, certainly Greek people is not a low-educated populace or whatever he/she said.

I am an (Italian) expat myself, so I know the dynamics very well.

So, blaming all the shortcomings it wholly on education or culture in general is unfair and misleading.

And I'm not sure why you feel the need for a throwaway, seeing that HN user has a pretty big biased for basic income.

Also, I don't think your question quite hits the mark, for several problems. For one "runs out of money" is a pretty vague concept and you have to define it more strictly: seeing that money is merely an abstraction for our economy, do you mean a situation where privately owned automation/capital would mess up the economy as we know it (ie. money can't be used, massive inflation etc.), or do we run out of wealth (goods), or something else? In a magical-land of socialist/communist with state-own automation and capital, the first case isn't really a thing. If we run out of goods, then apparently the automation isn't enough and human needs to start getting to work again.

Jobs by itself is merely a proxy for productivity, and productivity is what we want/need. Trying to keep job AND reduce productivity isn't just solve any problem (since someone else will ignore it and blows you out of the water).

Your post has a lot of hidden assumptions -- on top of the fact that the issue itself is a hard one. I mean, if in the end there isn't enough resources to sustain the human population that we have right now, a whole lot of us is gonna die, in one way or another ...

It's actually going to be closer to 10-12 years. And that's only going to get them to maybe a community college graduate level. They still won't be doctors or software developers or engineers.

Also there's also the simple, but unsolved problem of people just unwilling to learn. You can't make the horse drink and all that.

2/3) Consider AI, what with all the STEMS ? Also, how many stems do we really need ?

4) As soon as everything is automated, capitalist "win the game". No money will flow back. You have to abandon this at some point.

4) What if the government runs out of money ? Same things that would happen now, increased taxes, or a bankrupt state. In a pure socialistic state this would translate in: you will have to do with less (not money, but luxuries).

Good luck getting anyone to take it seriously though.

Good luck getting anyone to take that seriously though.

http://trendintech.com/2016/08/19/will-china-lead-us-into-a-...

Look at this Graph for the US as an example.

http://www.cbpp.org/sites/default/files/styles/report_371px/...

Social Security 24% Health Care 25% Safety Net Programs 10% Benefits for Retirees 8%

Social programs according to this consist of 67% of the total budget.

Where is the money going to come from?

Also, you know what happened to France when they hiked up their Tax rates? They moved to London. Where did the Russians go? They moved to London. Where did the Greek millionaires/Billionaires go, probably London.

The rich in the US have already started making plans on where to go, there are a lot of places for them to live.

If you think Basic Income is going to be the solution. I'm very sorry to tell you. It's not!

Expatriation tax (for existing wealth) plus sales tax (for new income). It doesn't matter where they live if the money is taxed at the source.