"Giving someone work experience is progress for her."

Is it, though? If you spent 8 hours a day pouring soda in to cups would that be progress? We have this absurd fetishization of "work" as though any task performed in exchanged for money is inherently virtuous. Imagine a world where that person is given their wage, but a robot does the job for them. Is that world any worse off?

> If you spent 8 hours a day pouring soda in to cups would that be progress?

It's not exciting, but proving you can show up on time every day isn't nothing. There are plenty of great jobs that mostly involve being professional, congenial, and available. It's the work history equivalent of building a good credit rating.

This is an important point. Just being punctual and efficient and not stealing is a bar many people can't clear because they didn't start in a low paid job and get experience.

So artificially increasing the demand for automation is bad, but incentivizing people to have more children and artificially increasing the population is good?

> Giving someone work experience is progress for her.

Progress is getting to the point where people can have technology provide the essentials, so that these repetitive jobs are just for fun, rather than a means for survival. It's like in DS9 where Sisko's father runs a restaurant--for pleasure. If he'd been sick or no longer interested in working, he wouldn't have to worry about starving or finding a place to live.

Do you want employment and consumer spending or do you want automation and progress?

They're mostly mutually exclusive, and we'll have to face up to that fact.

I don't see how they're mutually exclusive. Automation frees people from menial work into higher level jobs that can produce even more automation.

What we currently have, though, is a poorly designed system which doesn't make this transition easy and doesn't reward actors properly. I'm talking about things like free training for programming and technical skills, conditional support for the unemployed so they can have time to re-train and re-insert in the job market (while maintaining their health and spending), and means to make income distribution little flatter (automation can concentrate income to a degree that gets counterproductive).

I want automation and technology to fuel progress, and provide for people so they can "spend" without the need for employment.

"Our infrastructure provides you with X to spend every time period. Spend on what you'd like. Earn more if you'd like with a job/tasks/work of your choosing."

For an illustration of how this could work, see Manna by Marshall Brain.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

His "solution" at the end was some thinly veiled communism. His proposed economy didn't even make sense. There was nothing stopping people from accumulating wealth and basically taking over.

It's not clear that there is any other solution besides something you could call "thinly veiled communism." Either everybody gets some ownership or share in the productive capacity we're increasingly turning over to machines, or some people just get left out not because they're unwilling to contribute but because there's no labor market left.

I guess here is one of the big problems with these solutions. Post scarcity is not even a thing. There will always be finite amounts of different resources or creations.

So even if we live in crazy robot utopia world people will be creating things that will still exist in finite amounts that they will trade for other objects that exist in finite amounts. In fact we really already do live in crazy robot utopia world and this is already happening. Almost no one is starving in america and millions of people live primarily on the dole. Those people living on the dole are living better than like 90% of the human race that has ever existed, they are just living relatively worse than the people who are employed or making a living.

In project australia or whatever it sounded like there were easy ways to consolidate resources because people still owned things and could barter them and eventually they would have all the resources and the monthly credit allowance would once again be welfare. I'm not even really sure what is wrong with capitalism as a system because life is getting better for everyone over time, and as long as ownership/monopoly isn't taken to its extreme things continue to work out.

> Almost no one is starving in america

In 2013, 49.1 million Americans lived in food insecure households, including 33.3 million adults and 15.8 million children. [1]

> Those people living on the dole are living better than like 90% of the human race that has ever existed

How is this a metric we should be measuring on?

[1] http://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/impact-of-hu...

Thanks! Purchased the Kindle version!