and from the article

> there’s not enough work to go around

I disagree.

There's not enough paid employment to go around, but there is an enormous amount of work that needs to be done!

Our entire society needs to be weaned off its carbon dependence if we want humans to survive the next century. This will involve at the very least the wholesale transformation of our transport and energy systems, and probably construction too. We should be putting massive numbers of people to work on solving and fixing this, and there's no point leaving people unemployed while there's still work that needs to be done. Whether we can organise society in time to achieve this is the real question. Once we've fixed the environment and created a truly sustainable civilization, then we can talk about labor that is surplus.

Other work that will be in increasing demand is healthcare and elderly care (especially given the aging populations of most countries). I don't see robots replacing humans for this any time soon, and we are far from the point where we have enough health / personal care for everyone. Plenty more examples of work that's needed but not currently being done can be found with a bit of creative thought...

Yes, and the government can compensate for unemployment by investing in public works, at least until the automation reaches a level where UBI needs to be implemented.

We could grow our economy by literally 1000x and still not have any worry of running out of energy coming from the sun.

Your comment sounds like someone who says we shouldn't bother doing anything due to the inevitable heat death of the universe.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Current_status...

The economy can grow by a million X before we start running into physical limitations on solar energy.

Edit: Also, while there seems to be a positive correlation between GDP per capita and energy efficiency, the most efficient nations in the world have a very low GDP per capita... I wonder why it is the case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_intensity#Economic_ener...

Yes, you can, practically speaking. The amount of energy needed to produce a given amount of value to humans is not fixed; it can be decreased, and in principle can be made as small as we like given sufficient advances in technology. That means the amount of value to humans that can be produced with a fixed amount of energy can increase, in principle as much as we like. That's what the parent to your post was saying.

Obviously it will be a while before we have technology advanced to the point where, say, the amount of value currently being produced per year on Earth can be produced with one tenth or one hundredth or less of the energy it currently takes. But we also have a while before we hit any hard limits of the sort you are referring to.

In the United States it will be the class warfare/starving thing. You don't deserve anything here unless you pay for it. Many people believe that taking unemployment compensation is shameful.

I think a lot of us will be fed in prisons.

EDIT: In some places you have to pay to not be vertical. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/18/defensive-ar...

> Sculptor Fabian Brunsing brought a satirical eye to the issue by creating the “pay bench”, an art installation of a park bench that retracts its metal spikes for a limited time when the prospective sitter feeds it a coin. Chinese officials, completely missing the joke, thought that this was a great idea and installed similar benches in Yantai Park of the Shangdong province.

So true. Even things like safety, cleanliness, education quality, etc. are things we must pay for here, in stark contrast to other countries in the world.

TANSTAAFL

We already have class warfare and mass hunger (the number of people who go partially hungry despite food-stamps and food banks is atrocious, let alone the number who would starve without such programs). The current answer from the lower classes has been the revival of organized labor among Fight for 15 and other movements. It's our job in the "higher" working class, having more education and leeway to operate, to throw out economic and political force behind both the social movements of the lower classes and behind "full unemployment" measures such as universal health-care and reduced working hours.

This is not true.

Total workforce participation grew radically through the last 100 years - esp. because the introduction of women into different jobs.

Demographics aside, we have really quite high participation rates - even after 200 years of automation.

Also - because of demographic changes, we're already at a stage of declining labour force participation (since 2000), and we already retire at '60-ish' and live another 30 years not doing a whole lot, but amassing massive healthcare bills.

So - people more than ever need to be 'gainfully and productively employed' while they can, in order to offset the fact they'll be hanging out for quite long time not creating direct value.

Until then, if there's not enough jobs, that's an artificially induced shortage (e.g. austerity).

* Excepting natural resources - e.g. "more" beachfront property.

That's the idea. Let's for the moment, just assume that AI and robots and some other technologies are ridiculously productive sometime in the future and we solve all sorts of problems and have the resources to provide everyone with everything they want.

At that point it's not a question of giving everyone jobs it's a question of whether or not we decide to distribute our plentiful resources (and a question of, should we?).

Of course, I don't think the time has arrived yet for all this to happen. But as mentioned earlier, I do think it is going to happen (if we don't have some horrible nuclear war or some other megadisaster that kills everyone first)

You can already decide to do this today, and the government will even reward you for doing so. What you're really talking about is redistributing others' resources.

I complained, and I was told that if I don't like it I can quit. I said that I would be going to the regulatory body, and I was outright threatened with physical harm: "Bad things happen to people who do that."

Automation is getting cheaper by the year, and more open. People will be able to benefit directly from automation after the transit period, and won't need UBI forever. At some point it's going to be free to cover the needs, especially if we can use raw materials that are in abundance in nature. After the first self replicating factory is going to be made, any country or region could bootstrap itself out of poverty.

Self replication is closer than AGI, it's just a matter of digitizing the industrial process and developing accessible materials. Human society, the ecosystem and the cell are self replicating factories too. We need to compile a factory in itself, to bootstrap the whole material process. Just like a DNA molecule is replicating all it needs to survive and reproduce, such a factory would be able to make "babies".

Hmm, that's interesting, I hope it's not true.

Prices for goods just need to keep dropping, as they have already been doing to.

If they keep dropping, then our existing welfare system will handle the rest.

If the percent money that society spends in welfare state the same, and goods get cheaper and cheaper, then that means that living off welfare will eventually be a pretty sweet deal, able to provide all your wants and needs.

Rent, food, energy, all the things you need to live are getting more expensive with inflation. The welfare system is lagging behind and the benefits need to be bumped a little every year or so or it gets harder and harder to live on them. Unfortunately we apparently can't always seem to afford to increase the benefits. For instance student benefits in Finland were "cut" by simply not increasing them in accordance with the index.

The current taxation systems nowhere pays for all the externalities. If a company made a dollar in a country, a fair share of it should get back to the state for providing the environment that made it possible. Education, security, infrastructure.

It's a pretty flimsy disguise though. If people are simultaneously complaining about bad infrastructure and high taxes, then they are simply saying that they want their earned money themselves more than they want to use it for shared infrastructure projects. People would just rather have the latest iPhone than good highways. :-/

Sure, and the American people picked Trump as leader because they thought he was the most qualified person in the entire country.

But if you want more than basic, then you have to perform labour of some sort. Want to take the trip to Mars? Gotta work for it.

Yes, there will be a difference between those who labour and those who don't, but I still think it would be a huge win if noone in society would ever struggle to put food on their table.

There's a struggle between retired pensioners and everyone else in society about how much retired citizens should get, but there's still an understanding on both sides that past labour has some value, but that that value is less than present labour, so there's a balance. I hope the same would be true in a post-labour society.

And, of course, the difference between the labourers and the not-labourers would be an incentive to reach post-scarcity where that difference is wiped out.

This is already a reality in many countries. It would be very easy to also make it a reality in the US. The resources are there.