To me, both moving jobs to lower-income countries and allowing illegal lower-income labor to pursue domestic jobs are not exactly what I would call technological progress.
I wouldn't be as concerned about jobs that pay low salaries that need hardware + software to automate. I'd be more concerned about jobs that pay high salaries that take just software to automate. I wouldn't be concerned about manual labor vs non-manual labor, I'd be concerned about routine jobs vs non-routine jobs, jobs that don't require empathy and unstructured creativity vs those that do. As for the question of what will happen, notwithstanding the capitalistic fetish of work as intrinsic value, people will adapt and change to new demands, and they will spend less time doing things they don't like doing. This question is the same as anybody would have posed to a farmer in the 19th century. The economy now is a series of "value-add" services placed firmly above physiological needs, and I imagine the same will extend out for the next century, if not longer. The future will be even better if the focus of the next century will be on the scientific and technological progress that drives human fulfillment, economic prosperity, and security, and not people selling each other useless s**t, or accruing material wealth well past the marginal utility of wealth. There are so many unsolved questions from how the human mind thinks, to the fundamental elements of our universe, that one can't help but be romantic about what would happen if it became humanity's priority and guiding principle to attack these fundamental questions. In between though, a lot of jobs are going to be lost, and a lot of cultures that are moored to 20th-century work as self-fulfillment will lose their grounding. Ultimately, those cultures will need to be replaced, but this is not an abstract concept. People will be hurt by the cultures they are trapped in unless there is a strong safety net to catch them. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/395294/ The structural shock that will result is something nobody talks about, and I don't think current economic or political structures are particularly well-suited to the task. https://www.wired.com/2016/04/office-technology-assessment-congress-clueless-tech-killed-tutor/ Ultimately I ardently believe the debate about technology's effect on society will be the centerpiece of 21st century debates.
In the 1960s, people were essentially individual spreadsheet cells, tasked with manually recording transactions and interactions with data. Any organization with some level of complexity in their data might have had to hire hundreds of people. Now, Walmart's data team deals with petabytes of structured and unstructured data, a logbook of every individual transaction rich with associated metadata with the world's largest retailer, millions upon millions of records, with a team of 13 people. (I spoke with them at Strata + Hadoop). It's mind-boggling to think about.
The best answer is the guaranteed basic income. If not then we will have great problems with deflation due to insufficient demand. Having a ,01% or similar having all the money will create this. You need to give the masses enough money to buy things with.
We're going to come to the realization that everyone is some type of artist, and no one is a garbage cleaner or factory employee or banker. These jobs are below us as humans and we only have to do it through this transitional period where we're eliminating the remnants of monarchial ideology. Not to say there aren't garbage cleaners who do their job with dignity and respectability, but ultimately no human should be doing that for another human. We have the technology to eliminate it, but those who worship wealth above humans have decided to funnel our money towards weapons, soldiers, recreational technology to keep the middle class hoping, inheritance for their children who haven't earned a dime, and of course their own artistry or vices. Building an economy based on selling part of your living life for long periods of time to people who did not earn their wealth is a stupid, stupid idea. No employer would hire an employee if the employer wasn't winning that deal. It's the same principle under which casinos operate - the house always wins overall. This is where communism, socialism and capitalism have failed and need an evolution.
Wow that's a hyper optimistic outlook on humanity. I would argue that you simply don't know enough people if you believe this to be true. The reason Communism and Socialism failed and will always fail is because they have the same type of hyper optimistic outlook on humanity that simply isn't realistic. It's why it always works on paper and always fails in practice in the long run.
Not sure how it's optimistic. I'm talking about centuries from now, and I'm not talking about some kind of utopia. Maybe it read that way or you imagined it that way? There would be problems for sure, as there always will be with humans. They just won't be these particular problems. Everyone is an artist, that I know for sure. Whether they nurture it or not depends on them and their environment. Every employee needs time off or vacation or drugs to soothe their friction with what they do. Artists never burn our from practicing their craft. They may burn out from the business side of their craft and from the pressure of consumerist economy, but no painter gets burnt out from painting, no writer or ballerina or guitarist gets burnt out from their craft no matter how much they practice it. That's something we should not take for granted, and it's something as entire nations we can ride to success. All our money should be dedicated to putting everyone in equal opportunity to practice their personal preferred craft. That's the most efficient use of our resources.
Sure but I'm saying that unemployment is not up overall. There are just different kinds of jobs. Now maybe many of these people dropped out of the labor force. That's a possibility, but I don't think such a link has been proven
Sorry to bump this thread, but it appears that Elon Musk agrees that it's going to happen. http://www.businessinsider.com/elon...tm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer-ti
Musk's question about what's your meaning is key here. My solution is job sharing. If it takes 40 hours to do my job today I will work 20 hours and someone else 20 hours. The difference will be made up by UBI but we will both have meaning and more leisure and family time. This is a good thing right now people are stressed overworked long commutes not enough family time. What a wonderful society we could have if this is addressed properly through less work hours and UBI.
This is an interesting thread, so I don't mind the bump. There are some good posts in this thread. Judo has an excellent one, as do others. Heck, even I have a good post in this thread, if I can be that immodest. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that this thread is a good example of how discussion by a group of disparate people can be educational, whether one agrees with everything, or not. Kudos go to the OP!
What will happen is that some enterprising laborers will carve out a niche where they make things by hand the old fashioned way. It will be the rage in hip Brooklyn neighborhoods, and Silver Lake in Los Angeles. There will be a pocket of folks in the Montrose area in Houston that will nourish the niche market as well. Then the it will end up being more genuine and under the radar in Houston. For every one "old fashioned" hand made item boutique that succeeds, a dozen will fail because many places don't really have the market and some shops won't uphold the quality of the successful shops.
There is a slightly dated science fiction novel on the subject, that won awards when it was new: Beggars In Spain The Soviet Union and the ComIntern sucked ass for everybody who was under its thumb. But to those living outside of it's umbrella, one thing that the era of the Soviet Union brought to the world was that the super-privileged were afraid of the great teaming masses - the ultra rich willingly gave up advantage and privilege to the hoi polloi for fear that if they didn't give up something, the hoi polloi would rise up and take everything. After the fall of the Soviet Union it took a while for a visceral understanding of the new environment to really sink in among the truly rich, but it seems that in the last 20 or so years, it really has. There is an old stock market adage that the only thing stronger than greed is fear. That adage applies pretty well to every day life as well, and right now, the super wealthy aren't afraid of anything at all. The era of the robber barons is back on. There will need to be another shift in that equation before any form of basic income becomes possible.
