There are lots of reasons why the markets are currently failing to monetize the demand in those areas (there are incentives for corporations to leave demand on the table), but there's no reason why those incentives should be seen as permanent.

If you think the selection of products and services we buy should be locked in the 1950s then it will look like there's not enough work, and automation will eat what work there is. But the catalog of services that people are purchasing is growing rapidly as we learn how to hack the market blockages, and it will grow exponentially as we approach the complete information liquidity event which is coming in the next decades.

We're just starting to achieve widespread realization that you can offer a service and pay your bills using only Instagram. We're coming from a world where there were only mass-market channels for advertising (newspapapers, broadcast TV, etc), so there was only a limited information space for a small number of brands. That's why we think there are only a handful of job categories, the number of brands was tiny and a brand can only support a finite number of job categories. A decentralized system like Instagram can support infinite job categories.

Companies leave the demand for mental health on the table, because the metally ill don't have anything to offer to them in exchange.

But I certainly hope that the future is so bright as you describe it.

What bank will finance the mortgage on his incoming generating properties via 30 year mortgages when almost everyone is unemployed? Does the existing massively overgrown and under automated FIRE sector downscale to only 1% of the population having all the income and wealth? If it doesn't downscale, perhaps it doesn't operate at all, then how will he finance his real estate purchases via loans? He will have to pay cash and instead of 1/3 down on each income generating property he'll have to pay 100% for one property. Or prices will have to collapse by a minimum of 2/3 to clear the market.

His properties are not income generating if the renters have no income. The purpose of the discussion is what do we do when essentially no one has income or net wealth anymore? The phrase incoming generating property means nothing if there's no rent to collect because no one has jobs or income or wealth anymore.

Someone without power today can trust the courts and cops to protect his three properties because "everyone owns property or at least half of us or so". How does that break down when no one has any money? If there's only one landlord in the city who owns almost all property and he asks the cops to lean on him to sell his three houses, or squatters take over and there's no government support, because private property as we know it today is obsolete when no one owns anything, what does he do?

Assuming the above is somehow fixed, lets see if its sustainable via replication. How do you get money from trading runescape coal in 2040 if no one playing games has any money? My kids have no money because they're little kids. Assuming they continue to have no money, how many games of tic tac toe do they need to play to afford three houses each if the net profit off each game played is $0 because no one playing has any money to lose?

The future being unevenly distributed, being a slumlord today in Detroit is kinda like being a suburban landlord in 2030 perhaps, or an urbanite landlord in 2040, assuming you believe in new urbanism which is very popular here. The 50th percentile landlord will impact reality like a bug hitting a windshield long before the 90%th percentile landlord, which is a whole nother topic. Eventually only the top 1% of landlords will be in on the game much like only 1% of the population will have old fashioned jobs or participate in the old fashioned economy via pay and wealth, which brings us back to the original macroeconomic problem. Surely you can't be implying that 99 landlords will rent their 297 houses to the one guy who still has an old fashioned job?

But regardless, rent-seeking can't support the economy. People won't be "employed" as landlords, they'll be employed as property managers. There could easily be a billion property managers added to the global economy. Just imagine everyone starts expecting their homes to be professionally taken care of, every window frame refinished, every outdoor space professionally managed as a farm or native ecology. We could literally employ the entire human race doing only that work.

Because the details of property management are different in every culture, and every neighborhood, and those details are based in vague cultural norms, AIs will never be able to do the long tail. A robot could manage the 50% default "I don't care what my house looks like so long as it's nice-ish" market, but not the other half, "I want home to feel like home" market.

Sure, but this is not work that is useful or necessary to society. It is only possible for some people to get rich by skimming off the top of useless activity given that other people are producing food, electricity, maintaining infrastructure, providing healthcare etc.

No, companies leave mental health on the table because a CEO can only manage a handful of labor categories, and there are plenty of healthy people to fill those roles. Mentally ill people could profitably fill other roles but the CEO doesn't have the bandwidth to manage a system of the level of complexity that would be required to support those roles. We need a decentralized system (contractors fulfilling stock HR microcontracts) to release that economic value.

Most CEOs are not even able to intelligently manage the 10-20 stock labor categories they currently staff, let alone the millions of categories we need. I think most managers max out at 5-10 roles.

Money, today, is not in sync with a world made of matter and with the needs of a changing world. Your city needs to build a new bridge, a subway station or a new hospital? It has the engineers, the architects, the workers, the machines and the materials needed, you can begin construction right now, but if there is no "money", nothing will get done.

How absurd is that?

I just came back from the dollar store and the amount of energy, time and resources that went into the production of useless crap is absolutely mind boggling.

UBI is inevitable, but for something like this to be possible, our use of money will have to change. It will need to be in sync with the real world and right now, the resources of this world are diminishing and its environment is being degraded. Meanwhile, real human needs are not met.

We cannot artificially maintain a life style of over-consumption and wastefulness with a UBI. Things have to change. The population growth will need to be controlled. We have to stop wasting resources. No more planned obsolescence.

There is no way to "save" money for the retirement, without also making sure the economy fares well as you age. If your country's economy does not produce anything at the point of retirement (and no other country is sending you their products, either forced, because your society projects military power, or freely, because their society thinks it's inhuman for your population to suffer), your saved currency is worthless.

Sorry, but robbing Peter to pay Paul does not strike me as a viable long term strategy either. Much like the current brain drain from other countries to the West, the reverse could easily occur; the talented and wealthy could leave for other countries and find success there.

A saner approach would be re-defining full-time employment to 35 hours or even 30 hours and vigorously enforcing overtime pay requirements, to spread out employment among more people, and taking strong measures to get the cost of living under control enough that single-income households become viable again, so that people can take care of their families and have more time to rebuild the social bonds of their community.

And those governments could suddenly realize there is nothing really protecting these people and then tax the hell out of them or just take their stuff. America and the world would be too busy dealing with the mass unemployment of its middle class, no one's going to notice some rich kids getting robbed on an island country.

Of course that's not a viable long term strategy. The viable long term strategy is Peter giving away decent food and shelter to Paul freely.

The smart Peters of the world do that already, because they know: if we ever reach the point where a majority of Pauls need to rob Peters for food and shelter, they might not stop at food and shelter alone.

> ...to spread out employment among more people

I'm with you here. Whatever is left in terms of human employment, it better be distributed as wide as possible.

Never going to happen, how are you going to make fun of the French otherwise for having a life ? :/

The problem is that many who approach old age are not trained in technology