Speaking to point 2, I think it's likely that with a large number of people no longer feeling work stressors, we will gravitate towards meatspace small communities not substantially different from tribal communities or villages.
Those models of living were both very successful during periods of human existence when there were fewer hours devoted to labor.
The outputs from those communities will mostly just be self existence and social cohesion.
There will probably be a renewed interest in philosophy, theology, math, chess or other stimulating intellectual pursuits that have no direct economic stimulation. I think it will actually be a fantastic time to be an academic.
Many humans are very good at avoiding boredom through intellectual or artistic pursuit and for the rest there is neighborhood gossip and/or skydiving.
I'm not sure modern cities work for that though.
It is pure guessing at this point.
Self organized social community isn't that hard, given the right factors it's an inevitable emergent behavior. All we needed was a shared space to inhabit and time spent in proximity. Order and non-commercial community relationships spontaneously resulted, you wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of random fish from the same species dumped together in a tank started schooling, human sociality hasn't evolved out of us yet either.
I'm not saying everyone will do it, I'm not saying that people who grew used to social isolation over the last few years will ever participate, but we aren't so removed from the tribal/village time period that those evolutionary tendencies have been weeded out. Dunbars numbers and all the extrapolated implications still hold in my experience.
The system will collapse on itself if most are jobless. You can't sell products if no one can afford them.
My biggest grip with UBI is it just redefines zero. The better solution would be to do away with capital entirely, have people democratically vote on what services they want, and then conscript if there aren't enough volunteers/robots/AI to provide those services. There seems to be this tendency to forget that labor is what matters, not capital. Capital is a means of exploiting labor, but if labor can be automated or democratically voted for than no one is exploited.
Second: UBI is a response to economic conditions, not a driver.
Once the machines can economically/productively outperform most of us, UBI is an alternative to just letting us starve in the street, or riot, or whatever.
The robots provide an economic cornucopia exactly by putting people out of work. Supply becomes effectively infinite but demand/purchasing power falls to zero (because everybody is out of work) so rescue the economy (and civilization) you just give people money.
The remaining farmers still need things like fertilizer, people who service machines, etc, and they still have to put in work themselves. In fact farmers are some of the hardest working people I know. But the trend is still true, there are less and less farmers who generate more and more output.
You definitely need some way to distribute those resources to farmers (and other industries) in a good fashion, and in history the market economy approach with pricing autonomy has proven to be the best way. So money will likely not go away in itself, but economy will be more about resources in the future than about work.
That being said, the economies of even the rich nations are still highly dependent on human output so it's still way too early to discuss about UBI, but if we should find ourselves in a situation where we have literally no use for the work output of large percentages of populations, then we really need to think about some way to distribute resources to them so that they don't starve/riot.
If you say that only millionaires should be able to live without working, then you should look at what makes that millionaire a millionaire: their 20 rental properties? worthless if nobody can afford them. Their 5 square kilometer fully automated farm? worthless if nobody can afford the food. Their 100 million investment into a big company? likely that company is also out of business if nobody buys from that company. Sure maybe yacht builders will continue to have a great time, but that's a fraction of the economy. A lot of current millionaires would be rendered quite poor in a non-UBI future, as a lot of wealth is generated from serving existing customers.
The quest for meaning is perhaps the lifeline for Meta's VR ambitions. If there's nothing left to do in the real world, people will get lost in endless generative content.
Humanity ends with people playing VR farming simulator.
2) In my own little bubble, no one I know is particularly fulfilled by creating crud API's and gluing together microservices. I'd bet that with guaranteed financial stability finding meaning in life would become easier, not harder.
Monarchies have a history of getting taken down (in terms of power). They held an absolute power and a tight grip.
You could see money as a proxy for power, but that's only true as long as it's scarce and you can buy real power with it.
I've been a follower of your thinking patterns regarding 2) for a long time.
Life will be easier, no questions. But that's different question from the mental health one. Feeling useless is a pretty shitty feeling and a primer for depression.
I see the point you're driving at but the democratic institution of the US has explicit guard rails against this. We force presidents to step down because we _know_ that voluntary relinquishing of power is unlikely.
I do see money as a proxy for power. If you make enough of it you can influence public opinion, enrich or destroy education, buy twitter, etc.
For some, that other thing will be another leisure activity.
For others, it will be something like what we now see as work in one form or another, whether that be helping people in ways that robots and AIs can't, doing research, or even just doing some work that robots can do, because some people like to do it, and some people like to have a human doing it for or with them.
For others still it will be art: painting, writing, creating video games, becoming an actor or comedian, whatever.
Humans are not well-adapted to having nothing productive to do. If a given human wants to continue to do purely leisure activities, it is often because they have been so exhausted and abused by our current system that their body and brain needs the time to heal.
It's not in the interests of capital to solve it.[0] Having high unemployment means cheaper labour. People have argued that capitalism should be replaced for more than a century, yet nobody's successfully displaced it.
[0] Obviously mass unemployment is bad for the economy in general, which would also ultimately impact capital, but for some reason that always seems to be a lesser concern.
But fewer consumers of your products who are also earning less which means you can’t make up for it via higher prices. Taken to the hyped extreme AI means total economic destruction for labor and capital. In fact, unless it achieves self generation and maintenance of all supporting infrastructure and industrial inputs before this occurs then it’s the end of AI.
This is a consequence of potentially collective, uncoordinated action. It's possible that every individual company says "it makes no sense to be paying this much for labor, i'm getting cheap AI/robots" and fires a ton of people everyone else be damned, and then runs into lower demand later because everyone else is doing it. So everyone acts in their immediate interest to be collectively worse off, not unlike... a bank run!
The rich will be living in their towers with the lucky few allowed to serve them and get paid a pittance, while the rest of us are starving in the streets.
There is no single capitalism but many different flavors (US vs European welfare states).
For owners, managers, others in authority, control is the daily game, not optimizing for some ideal commons. Violence is common and so are crooked lawyers and corrupt decision makers.
Unpleasant and low-paid work will continue and perhaps increase, as pleasant and stable breeding grounds deteriorate and are further embroiled in conflict and vice. Many capable people, for pressure reasons, will double-down on authority, control, security and law-enforcement. Trapping and tricking other humans for profit will increase. Indentured servitude via debt and other means, will increase. AI will be used for this.
It was usual to kill natives to take their land.
It was usual to own slaves.
Worker rights have not existed in any form until somewhat recently.
Schools are available.
Violence has declined constantly.
We take the environmental protection much more serious now than 50 years ago (you could argue it's not enough, I'm talking about progress)
Quick google search shows that it is getting cheaper in the long term [1]
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...
1) the profit is distributed to as many people as possible (say UBI)
2) we find things to fill our time with apart from work.
Problem one is likely solvable over the long term. Problem two may become a challenge for many. Work often adds meaning to peoples life. Feeling like you can't contribute anything meaningful to society may effect mental health. On the other hand, we may find time to take care of younger and elder people; spend more time with friends etc.
I think a big question will be, how fast the changes happen. A quick destruction of jobs without 1) or 2) will lead to negative consequences in the mid-term.