True expertise in fields like medicine, engineering etc. generally takes at least a decade of experience to acquire. Societies need for, and ability to utilize, such highly skilled labor is only increasing as we automate simpler tasks.
People who never aspire to such professions might be spared long working years, but some portion of people will need to put in the long hours and years to keep the lights on.
Oh I agree.
In the absence of a profit motive those fields would be taken up by the most dedicated, eh?
> Societies need for, and ability to utilize, such highly skilled labor is only increasing as we automate simpler tasks.
Again I agree. I think that one obvious benefit of automation is that it frees up humans for important things that only humans can do. Mark Miller has an adage "Moore's law means that humans are becoming exponentially more valuable from the CPU's POV."
We're not talking about forcing people to retire after two years. We're talking about eliminating drudgery and wasteful processes.
> some portion of people will need to put in the long hours and years to keep the lights on.
No, that's the whole point: no one has to put in long hours anymore thanks to the knock-on effects of the invention of the transistor.
Just like farming went from ~90% of the population to ~3%, so will our industrial space-age civilization, if we let it.
Bucky Fuller pointed out that we could apply technology to solve our problems efficiently and wind up with a two-year career. You would work for about two years and that pays for the rest of your life, you can retire or do whatever.
(FWIW, this is the context within which I think UBI makes sense, and we are not there just yet.)
Really it's a choice (at least in theory, maybe we are strapped in but I like to think we can affect things at least a little.) We can't un-invent the transistor.