I don't picture a dystopian future. I picture a post-scarcity future.

So I am all for these experiments but judging them based on whether people stay jobless is missing the point of UBI in such a fundamental way it's hard to understate that.

I always think of Star Trek. It isn't really explored in depth but there isn't money and people don't have to work, transporter rationing is alluded to though. I guess in a world where everything can be made in a replicator, 'employment' becomes untenable. You still need some way of rationing scarce resources, and allowing people to 'vote' for what they want more of though.

Scarcity is beyond just stuff. Land for example is a finite resource.

If we are efficient enough in our use of land, the demand relative to the supply will shrink enough that it's no longer scarce.

I suppose lots of people enjoy owning their own land-- large tracts of it in fact, and not sharing it with anyone. That's a little tougher to conceptualize as post-scarcity as there's a limit to making land enjoyment more efficient with advanced technology. But in a world where other resources are less scarce perhaps we can think about colonizing other planets and terraforming as ways to increase supply.

Land will always be scarce because it isn't quantity of land (though that too can be a separate issue) but quantity coupled with positioning of land. Most people could afford to purchase four acres of land in Alaska or VT's north east kingdom, but four acres along central park is quite expensive because, due to the location of the site relative to all the services of NYC and the access to greenery, it is rather exclusive... and I don't believe (including references from all the SciFi I've ever read) that there is any situation society could be in that would nullify the difference in value of two parcels of land - Judge Dredd and Mega City one I believe come closest, even though land overall is much more of a limited supply, most of the inhabitable land is equally worthless - but there are still a few Oasis of dystopian high society around that have vastly different value.

If we draw even to Hitchiker's Guide's concept of built planets, and we considered the cost of making planets would eventually trend to zero... there is still the concept of locality that would influence price.

Presumably, if you have unlimited resources, you can create most, if not all, of what makes that land in NYC valuable. You could create enough city districts to meet demand.

There's lots of factors that go into the value of land. Available amenities, jobs, being near other people, quality of schools and other resources, transportation, etc. But those all seem to boil down to scarce resources being pooled in one area. If you could mass produce amenities, buildings, school supplies, etc, then NYC wouldn't have any inherent value, because its equal would exist everyone someone cared to plop one down where there was enough demand to fill it with people.

I don't know if post-scarcity must mean perpetual motion machine. I'm not certain if you're familiar with the societal concept of systems collapse but it may be that attempting to do that would result in a maintenance burden that's untenable... Also I think a large chunk of NYC's value is in its people and I believe there's always going to be advantageous positioning from rarity, maybe this eventual society still has a government that has a capitol building and people congregate specifically around that... or perhaps it's more artificial - if the whole world was a city perhaps it'd get less significant and value would come from living at exactly 0' 0' or 3'14" 15'92" and so on.

I think there's a bit of innate petty jealousy in human beings so land value differentials will always exist.

But, that angle is pretty thin, so maybe I'm just stretching the argument at this point. Quite interesting to ponder!

I think that the problem is that the time when technology causes dramatic unemployment is likely to happen long before the time when technology can provide unlimited resources. So the question is: what do we do in-between?

The idea of land ownership is as mythical as Thor's hammer. You don't own land - you own a right to do certain things on that land to the exclusion of others. Only sovereignty gives actual ownership of land - transferring it to another jurisdiction, setting up your own laws, destroying said land and doing whatever the fuck one would do when one is literally "law onto oneself".

Also - money is no longer representative of a thing you can hold. Money is a share of wealth of a nation, which includes trust, culture, people, land and buildings.

How is land ownership different from anything else, say like the Thors hammer I bought on ebay?

It seems to me that colonizing other planets would only be a viable solution if we first developed faster than light or at least near light speed travel; and those may or may not be physically possible. Otherwise we would just end up with a scarcity of planets within practical travel distance of each-other.

Not really. Even if we triple land use efficiency, population growth will increase the demand to compensate

Not at current fertility rates. If the current trend continues we're in for a world-wide population decline.

Other replies addressed the issues with assuming that population growth will continue as-is, but I also wanted to mention that humans are pretty creative so if we did continue to grow we'd likely start doing ecumenopolis things, deepening ocean trenches to concentrate oceans more and increase the usable land area on earth, start seriously considering the moon/mars for terraforming, building more vertically (above and below ground).

I don't think the volume of land will ever be an issue for humans, but I think that land will never be equally valued.

If you increase education, you'll learn that population will not grow that fast.

Population growth has been steadily slowing down since 1960s.

Broadly speaking, that is because we're approaching something like a carrying capacity, estimated to be somewhere around 10B.

If we increase land use efficiency dramatically, that effectively raises the carrying capacity and population growth can continue much longer

The population growth decline is not tied to the carrying capacity but to the development of the economy. Countries that are further economically developed have lower birth rates and vice versa. For example Finland is mostly a country of deserted forest, yet it has a very slow growth rate. The country could carry a population of 50 million easily, but is hardly growing anymore at 5 million.

It is and it isn't. Land in Manhattan is scarce. Land in the non-coastal western US or most of Canada or Australia is theoretically scarce too, but not so much in practice.

If humanity lived at the density of Paris (21,438/km^2), we could all live in an area half the size of Texas (695,663 km^2).

So if we're talking about material post-scarcity, land is more than plentiful.

If humanity lived at the density of Wyoming (5.97/mi^2), we would have to get rid of 50% of the U.S. population or 98% of the world population, because only 147M people could fit on the habitable land on earth.

So yes, it is and it isn't. The question is how many people want to live in Wyoming-level densities vs. Paris-level densities, given the elimination of any cost constraints.

> The question is how many people want to live in Wyoming-level densities vs. Paris-level densities.

Do they get a choice? I want to live in Disneyland, but there's sadly a distinct lack of real estate available.

That's sort of the definition of a post-scarcity world. If people want stuff but can't have it because there's not enough to go around, that's pretty much the definition of scarcity.

The idea of a "post-scarcity" world is silly. Some resources will always be limited. Land, diamonds, prestige, etc.

What matters is, how scarce are the necessities of a moderately-comfortable life? I would posit that people who live in cities do just fine. If some people want more space, well, you can still work for it. Not all jobs are going to disappear.

> Land in the non-coastal western US or most of Canada or Australia is theoretically scarce too, but not so much in practice.

If the acquisition cost is >0, it is scarce in practice as well as theory.

"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice but in practice there is."

Land in these places can be something like $500/acre. That's not zero, but compared to the land prices people are more familiar with, it's as close as makes no difference in practice.

> Land in these places can be something like $500/acre. That's not zero

...and thus economically scarce...

> but compared to the land prices people are more familiar with, it's as close as makes no difference in practice.

It's very cheap. But very cheap things are still scarce. Something that isn't scarce has no price and everyone (even the poorest of the poor) who wants any quantity of it will have as much as they want without sacrificing anything.

Land in the places you describe is cheap. The price may even seem negligible to people in the upper middle class in the developed world. It's very much still scarce.

The difference between scarce and not scarce is not a matter of price, it's a fundamental difference of kind.

Horizontally maybe, but not vertically.

So post-scarcity we should all join the Space Force and subject ourselves to the Captain's whims?

I'll take scarcity, thank you.

This isn't a dystopian future, it's a dystopian present.

Most of the work people do today doesn't really need to be done, but we force people to do it anyway for various reasons. https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ (there's also a pretty decent free ebook on the subject by the author)

The Expanse (books and TV show) use that idea pretty well

Amos was such a happy child :-)

Usually war served to reduce that surplus, but with automation in the military as well, this is uncharted territory.

The Black Death in the 14 century killed a third of the population of Europe, which lead to a surprising rise in wages and standards of living.

It's weird and uncomfortable how tragedy sometimes leads to very good things. Similarly in the opposite direction, automation should have been a good thing yet it leads to unemployment and poverty.

So Thanos was right all along, no?

In a sense, yes. But if he has that power, he could just as easily have doubled the resources in the galaxy, and that possibility never even occurred to him.

It seems like to him it's more a convenient excuse to kill lots of people.

Don't forget that all that bureaucracy is the source of thousands of good paying jobs that now also are worse off even when they get added to UBI. Also, don't forget that now that they have less money, their collective reduced spending means the business they used to patron will have to lay people off. Now those people also need UBI. This doesn't spiral to infinity but their is a huge ripple effect.

Yes, bureaucracy provides a lot of jobs, but they're not jobs that produce anything useful. You're just paying people to check if other people should also get paid. Just pay everybody and be done with it, and maybe let people do something more productive or fulfilling.

The overhead for condional basic income is huge, if most things are done by machine the cost of those will drop quite substantially whichmeans you need much less to get by.

Why not just optimize human output like China did and incentivize education in fields that provide large scale value to society (STEM primarily) so that children are likely to deliver commensurate value to society to their costs?

That's kind of missing the point, if theres 90% unemployment, unless you arrange is so people are in education or retirement for all but circa 5 years of their life, most won't get a chance to use their skills, and no one will have money to buy the things they make anyway.

In Finland there's no tuition and almost all students get financial aid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_financial_aid_(Finland...