Why would there be nobody left to buy the products? And what does it have to do with replacing workers? I imagine that if they are producing something, they are doing so because of a demand. Once the demand is gone, they most likely will stop producing.

demand for consumer products is driven by consumer confidence, i.e. by surplus in worker wages after cost of living is accounted for.

if the workers are having trouble getting a decent wage, where does that surplus come from? what happens to consumer confidence, and aggregate demand if people are losing their jobs?

If we can figure out a decent economic system, then there won't be problems giving people a decent wage. Sure, if we keep doing things the way we are now then nobody will get a decent wage, but that's a very fixable problem.

It is not a fixable thing.

You don't fix thousands of years of human evolution overnight. Or one generation.

It will take several thousand years to fix that.

Are you actually arguing that it will take several thousands of years to change our economic model? I find this argument hard to take seriously

My guess is five to six thousand years before humans move away from the "winner takes it all" scheme ( or alpha behaviour)

In twenty years we pretty much will know who is right.

I'd rather buy shares of companies then hoping for a sudden change in human behaviour.

We can change human behavior. We do it all the time. We just need to incentive it differently like we do with other systems. In 20 years we won't know "who is right", we'll just know that we went with system X instead of system Y.

Funny because there have been societies which have not been that way in the past. Also there's pretty much 0 evidence that that's a component of evolutionary psychology vs just the social norms in our given society.

>if the workers are having trouble getting a decent wage, where does that surplus come from? what happens to consumer confidence, and aggregate demand if people are losing their jobs?

Probably not a lot. Automation headlines are probably going to take a back seat to Trump administration headlines for a good long while. Just from feeling, it seems to be happening fast enough to be a real concern, but not fast enough to cause panic, draw attention, and quick action.

My guess is that if robots put enough people out of work then the ability to pay will impact the demand

Basic income is the only future, truck drivers will be all out of work by 2020 for example

In 3 years all truck drivers will be out of work? We don't even have fully autonomous trucking released now (beginning the early adopter part of the technology adopter cycle)... so that seems a bit far fetched.

Trucks can drive a well studied route, self driving cars are much more complicated

The road is not predictable. A deer running across, a car cutting you off, rain, snow, a tire blow out, any number of random events can happen. It just occurs less often on a freeway than the city. You still have the solve the same problems, however, if you don't want a human in the car.

>Basic income is the only future, truck drivers will be all out of work by 2020 for example

This has become the refrain in the comment section for every article dealing with automation I've seen, of late. Some of the articles, I suspect, are being posted by basic income proponents.

Even accepting the premise that a basic income would be needed in the case of near-universal automation, there are plenty of us who are yet to be convinced that we're heading in that direction.

I don't think most of the people talking about basic income are the proponents. I'm a strong believer in that you should be paid the market rate for your work, so if you want to make good money, you must make smart choices about your education and career. That makes the whole system more efficient. I do however think that basic income is inevitable, because of the automation on the scale we've never seen before. Inevitable, because the other option is to let the unemployed starve. So not really an option.

I'd like to think that letting the unemployed starve is not an option, but it is. People can be extremely cruel when they don't have to take responsibility for the outcomes of government policies.

They lean on "those people should have worked harder/planned better"

It wasn't that long ago that poor people who needed critical medical care were kicked to the curb to die on the street because they couldn't pay.

Ok, you're right, it is an option in third-world countries. I don't see it happening in the EU/US/AU/CA or even China (even considering their past human rights violations). But if it does happen on a large enough scale, hungry riots will just take over the means of the food production (mostly robots and other machinery these days).

> It wasn't that long ago that poor people who needed critical medical care were kicked to the curb to die on the street because they couldn't pay.

Healthcare is a separate issue. What you're describing is still happening all over, including the US. I've been looking at the US health insurance premiums, and I have no idea how an average person can afford something like that.

Idk if it's right, I'd like to see other options. And those proponents you speak off usually aren't talking about themself either. They want it for others. The people who would be receiving it are against it

Read "The True Believer" and see if you come to the same conclusion.

"It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the “new poor,” who throb with the ferment of frustration. The memory of better things is as fire in their veins. They are the disinherited and dispossessed who respond to every rising mass movement."

In most of human history, we didn't have basic income. Instead, societies either let the working classes wither away to reduce in size naturally, which came with the risk of revolution as people would resist to accept their fate, or sent them to war, which had the side-effect of increasing national cohesion and possibly result in the gains of territory or resources as spoils.

Basic income is an expensive band-aid for overpopulation where far more productive, albeit less compassionate solutions exist.

Basic income is a solution that assigns value to human life outside of its ability to build widgets in exchange for pay. An economic system which values productivity over all and which totally devalues human life is disgustingly cruel and inhumane. I would not want to live in such a world, even with a guarantee that I would be among the productive elites and not the unproductive masses.

There must be some solution that doesn't involve letting more than half of us starve to death or die in meaningless conflicts.

The difference is, modern wars are either extremely deadly or not at all.

That solution won't work anymore.

How about going to space instead?