I think we all deserve to make progress on things like retirement instead of making arguments like this. Sure, retirement hasn’t always been a guarantee, but can we agree that this isn’t a good thing?
We never question the desire to innovate in how to make money, but we’re often very quick to dismiss the idea that we can also dream to innovate society in a way that’s decoupled from profit, which is sad.
I agree with this, but the problem is that there is no guarantee of work being available to everyone. With the rise of AI and hyper-specialization of work, that problem is only going to get worse.
And yet, here we are with people still working many hours on average and many jobs going unfulfilled. I personally think it’s a problem with our relationship to work, rather than limited opportunity for work. Humans seem to have an insatiable apple for more, which requires continued amounts of work to be done. I think the bigger problem is getting people to have the skills to do the jobs that will still need to be done.
The key here is to make sure that automation and cost efficiencies make it through to the production of necessities, and we don't prop up artificial scarcity.
There are an effectively unlimited number of jobs that employers would pay someone $0.01/hour to do. Not as many that employers would pay $100/hour to do. So if you need to make $100/hour to afford housing and medicine, that's a problem. But if we reduce the artificial scarcity and regulatory overhead in these industries, so you only have to make $5/hour to afford them, we're in a much better place. And all the better if lower costs allow someone to make a living at $2/hour.
AI and automation can help to reduce those costs. As long as they're in the right places (i.e. production of necessities) and we don't have regulatory capture preventing it from happening there.
This doesn't get you out of zoning restrictions but could allow you to recover from their historical effects more quickly after zoning reform is achieved.
That said, some assemblies have become pretty common, I think preassembled roofing trusses are frequently used in favor of framing on site.
This gives me a different idea and I wonder if it's worthwhile.
There are industrial robots that e.g. mass produce cars. Suppose you make one to mass produce housing, but instead of putting it in the factory you put it on the truck. Put it on the construction site. It takes a pile of lumber, cuts it to length and turns it into walls, puts the pipes and wires through the walls etc. This is the kind of thing that existing industrial robots can actually do if you program them appropriately.
Then you send it across the street to put together another building. Assembly line, but the products are big so instead of moving the products to the next station you move the robots.
Houses are made out of wood and tolerances are measured in centimeters if not inches.
But for many retirees, they have never developed the mechanisms to continue being a productive member of society without structured work. The net result is a general drop in well being and health in their “golden” years.
Also, i made a comment where I think our relationship to work needs to change. I think that speaks to your point. I don’t think a false dichotomy between “working for the capitalist overlord” and “doing whatever I want” is what I was after.
People, if you disagree, that's fine, but make some kind of a (polite, rational) counterargument rather than abusing "downvote" to express your visceral disgust at becoming aware of an opinion that differs from your own.
I forgot which, but one of the more popular economists of the last century believed that, with productivity gains, people would be working much, much shorter work-weeks by now.
He was only sorta wrong: the productivity gains did actually happen, but we decided to use the extra time to do more work, not do the same amount of work and take the rest in leisure.
There's nothing that says that we as a civilization couldn't decide to slow down and relax more. I know that this won't happen; capitalists run the world, and they'll never accept this sort of arrangement. But it's not like this is some sort of inherent natural must-do state of existence.
Why? Retirement is a very recent phenomena. The idea of someone earning enough during their working life to then fund several decades of non-working life is a very modern thing, maybe only the last sixty years or so. Only a very rarified few were ever wealthy enough to actively stop working prior to becoming physically unable to work. And then, for most all of human history, those too old to work lived out their remaining few years being taken care of by their children. I'm would not casually assume any "right" to the modern concept of retirement.