Yes, but we are in a world of abundance. Most people carry around what would be in 1980 a 10 million dollar supercomputer in their pocket.

10 years from now we might have the equivalent of what today costs 10 million dollars today. Automated farming means what today we consider high end and expensive produce becomes almost free. Automated transportation means that food gets delivered to you for almost nothing. Imagine you had a 95% off coupon on Uber Eats. Does that sound terrible? If so why? Because it also means that Jeff bezos gets a 2000 foot yacht?

Edit:---------

I'm getting a lot of doom and gloom respones. And you all are right, there are a lot of people who do not have food/shelter/cheap colleges. But what you all probably are not aware of is that 100 million people have risen out of poverty in India over the past 15 years. Your word view is being warped by the doom and gloom media. I would suggest reading just the beginning of the book factfulness. It will totally change your view of the world and probably make you much happier.

>Yes, but we are in a world of abundance. Most people carry around what would be in 1980 a 10 million dollar supercomputer in their pocket.

Most people also don't have $1000 for an emergency, live hand to mouth, and are dead scared of the cost and impact of a potential health issue. They are also overworked, underpaid, and with raising expenses, and sick of it, with depression levels skyrocketing. Having "a 10 million dollar supercomputer in their pocket" is not that comforting compared to that.

We've killed old style job security, cheap college education, affordable housing, the middle class and decent working class jobs, public infrastructure, and many other things (not to mention the environment), but in return we can have a rectangular gadget to access "all of the world's information in an instant" (which practically is just used to distract ourselves to death). Hurray!

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/more-americans-are-using-b...

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/19/56percent-of-americans-cant-...

> Most people also don't have $1000 for an emergency

This has been debunked many times. The source is misleading to the point of being deceptive, it is pushing a narrative. Per the US government, the median household has $1000 per month leftover after all ordinary expenses. A very detailed breakdown of this for each income decile is available from the BLS.

You can’t square “most Americans can’t afford a $1000 emergency expense” with “median Americans can afford to light $1000 on fire each month without impacting their standard of living”.

It's the debunkings that are pushing a narrative (and reading the BLS numbers in whatever way fits it).

And it would be news to million struggling to pay the bills and rent (and not because they buy expensive lattes or new iPhones) that then can "afford to light $1000 every month without impacting their standard of living".

Especially for people whose standard of living is already working their ass off, perhaps in two jobs, and still scrapping to make it and not even thinking of affording to sent their kids to school, or can't even dream of ever being able to survive a need to stay off work for a month for medical reasons...

What are the figures by year? Is 2021 an outlier?

I fear you haven't spent much time in the places in this "world of abundance" where people live in abject misery. I'm currently in Brazil, where some 20% of the population lives on less than $5.50 per day and 30% of families don't have enough food. And it's not for want of agricultural production.

> Yes, but we are in a world of abundance.

We have an abundance of inessentials. Housing is still scarce and food is volatile. Health care and education are expensive. Many people are sleeping on the streets or falling into lifestyles of despair.

Progress has been applied unevenly and most critically not to the factors of life that form the base of Maslow’s hierarchy.

Housing isn't scarce, it's not evenly allocated.

Lots of properties being kept vacant so as to drive up rents/prop up property values, and it's difficult to get low-income housing built because of NIMBY.

“Cornering the market” results in real scarcity and the housing market has been permanently cornered.

The problem is, even with automation we are still burning up to 10 calories of petrochemical energy to get 1 calorie of food energy.

We are going through 2.5 earth's worth of non-renewable resources each year in order to maintain our current lifestyles --- this simply isn't sustainable.

Let's turn things around:

- under what circumstances should a person be allowed to use more than 1/7 billionth of the solar energy which the earth receives each day?

- under what circumstances is at acceptable for a person to create more heat than 1/7 billionth of what the planet is able to radiate out into space on a daily basis?

I hear ya bud, and I think you have the right take. This will ultimately vastly improve the lives of quite a lot more people than if it never happened. If we survive the coming years of turmoil and AIs or social unrest dont destroy the world, we are looking at post-scarcity future of so much plenty that the powers that be would have to do something particularly obviously evil and nefarious to keep that wealth from spreading to everyone. As the cost of mass production of basic needs, housing, etc etc all drastically lower, the excuse for why they're not being spread gets more and more ridiculous - even as people's individual power lowers as they become redundant. (Though reminder: the current chess champion is a human with AI assistance, not a pure AI. Humans copilots may still be semi-relevant a while longer!) Wealth Inequality might very-well still skyrocket, but overall this should still uplift everyone's quality of life and effectively allow for mass retirement - even in the third world, eventually.

IF we make it through...

What good is abundance if we haven't used it to minimize suffering? It's a good laugh whenever people think AI will democratize things. Summer children and their little daydreams.

The 100 million people in India who are no longer in poverty do not matter?

Obviously the target number of starving children is zero. But the reality is that we are not going to get that number to zero overnight. It takes incremental steps.

I do not think we live in a world of abundance. In the US there are more vacant housing units than there are homeless people but we can't home them. We throw away food in dumpsters and toss chemicals on it rather than feed someone. More people would likely garden or raise chickens if HOAs didn't have such an iron fist as to decide what color of paint is allowed on your house. Those are problems we could solve but choose not to. And then there are the resources that we do not have in abundance because we fight wars over them, or will.

New creators have success all the time, as will new software engineers.

But you’re right, the more level the playing field, the greater the competition.

> while the lucky ones that got in early and made it rake in the profits

In my niche(s), I still see new Youtubers pop up all the time that gain large followings and turn Youtube into a full-time job. Sure, they don't all become rich, but many have started earning enough to drive Teslas, so it's definitely not pennies.

Entertainment has winner-take-all / power-law dynamics due to cultural cohesion and limits on human attention (I want to watch what other people, and my time is limited), which is why a relatively small number of them make a good living.

Software development, as an employment opportunity, does not have these same dynamics.

I think the Youtube comparison is a good one up to a point. It's a niche product. Everyone wants to be part of it, competing for a very very limited resource which is our attention. While with technologies like GPT or whatever comes next we empower anyone to excel in any area and create whatever (for now non-material things).