Economists are revising their views on robots and jobs

Re:Economists are revising their views on robots and jobs by jordwest on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @06:29PM (#30079648)

Frankly I think we're already at the tipping point for that. If I think about it, how many jobs are actually involved in:

  * Providing food
  * Providing shelter
  * Providing healthcare

You could argue just about everything else is really a form of artifical scarcity, none of it is needed for survival, perhaps just for comfort.

That divide became a lot more clear in the past 2 years with the acknowledgement of "essential workers". Without Google, Facebook, or auto insurance, we'd be inconvenienced. Without essential workers society as we know it would collapse. And almost all of those workers are paid less than an entry level Facebook engineer.

So now the question is, are we already post-scarcity? And perhaps we don't know it only because it hasn't been distributed equally.

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Re:Economists are revising their views on robots and jobs by contingencies on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @06:40PM (#30079735)

Are we already post-scarcity?

Thanks to industrialization, in the first and second world yes for basic food, clothing and shelter, as well as other mass-consumed products.

Things that remain (increasingly) scarce in my view - globally - are broadly educated people, political/economic/behavioral freedoms, unspoiled nature and the temporal wealth and whim to access it regularly.

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Re:Economists are revising their views on robots and jobs by bnralt on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @07:09PM (#30079975)

This is an important point that gets overlooked. It's likely that we already reached something like "the singularity," but most of the extra productive output didn't go towards finding ways to increase productivity, it went towards things without a positive impact and often a negative impact on society (advertising, junk food, conspicuous consumption, regulatory capture, sales, etc.).

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