Society must produce at least to feed itself, and people working is the way we produce. No country in the world has fully automated its food supply, no one is even trying! and the US has outsourced a lot of its food supply to third world countries. That is why you think people need to work less and less every year, because the US imports more and more every year. The minute the US stops working is the minute the rest of the world stops sending in food.
Of course.
> and people working is the way we produce.
We produce more per worker with every year as technology improves. It follows that we could do less work per person every year.
I'm talking about humanity as a whole, not the US in particular, so it doesn't really matter whether people in the US eat food that was grown in the US or elsewhere.
And I don't live in the US.
Not necessarily. We demand more every year.
I'd be fascinated to know what the people working on self driving cars think of that logic. Because the tech is very hard to get right. The problems are not merely sociological.
This gets less true every year. The only reason we can't have robots handling almost everything and people living lives of pure leisure (except for, say, mandatory menial tasks one day a year), is because we haven't yet figured out a way to do it fairly. And maybe the technology isn't there yet, but it will be soon.
The problem is that the people who own the robots don't see why they should give away the fruits of their R&D investment to everyone else for free. And they have a point! If you're saying "spend loads of time and money developing robots for us, and then we'll take them off you and you'll be no better off than anyone else", why would they bother developing them?
But in the long term, we need to move towards a world where automation serves humanity as a whole, instead of whichever particular corporation happens to own that particular piece of automation. I just don't know how to do it.