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For those with lower social skills, there are plumbing, home improvement (hard/risky for elderly or the ill), security guards, public infrastructure development

For those with lower social skills, there are plumbing, home improvement (hard/risky for elderly or the ill), security guards, public infrastructure development (welding, checking for leaks), household/public gardening, etc. There are a lot of needs which humans will be more cost-effective than advanced robots in the foreseeable future. If everything is perfect in a country, they can send aid to a foreign land for compassion, goodwill, and diplomatic relations. Always more work is available to do until.. When the whole world becomes like heaven and nowhere is left to improve, which is a long time to come, money would be far less important than it is now.

moonchrome 11y ago
My point is not everyone can be a plumber - at least not a competent one. If you're going to do it professionally, especially as we get more advanced we expect higher standards, markets get more competitive and middle man services like uber are going to become a norm in contracting - IMO - making it easier to filter out the bad contractors after a few botched jobs. And in most areas even if the job doesn't become fully automated it will get better tools that will either be trivial enough to use on your own or require skill to operate, or allow a smaller number of people to do the same job efficiently. Basically optimization. Automation will probably outpace demand growth especially considering the effect it will have on demand : a) it makes skilled workers much more productive and as we know in SW dev they don't scale by add more workers -> linearly increase output - a skilled worker working longer > two workers for the same job, so market get more competitive and value longer work hours = less time for consumption b) short term unemployment from automation = lower demand on low end And then you have a deflationary spiral basically. I don't see this "getting better on it's own" and despite all the cons I still think something like guaranteed income would create a floor + boost demand more efficiently than the current pump money into financials with negative interest rates

moonchrome 11y ago

My point is not everyone can be a plumber - at least not a competent one. If you're going to do it professionally, especially as we get more advanced we expect higher standards, markets get more competitive and middle man services like uber are going to become a norm in contracting - IMO - making it easier to filter out the bad contractors after a few botched jobs. And in most areas even if the job doesn't become fully automated it will get better tools that will either be trivial enough to use on your own or require skill to operate, or allow a smaller number of people to do the same job efficiently. Basically optimization. Automation will probably outpace demand growth especially considering the effect it will have on demand : a) it makes skilled workers much more productive and as we know in SW dev they don't scale by add more workers -> linearly increase output - a skilled worker working longer > two workers for the same job, so market get more competitive and value longer work hours = less time for consumption b) short term unemployment from automation = lower demand on low end And then you have a deflationary spiral basically. I don't see this "getting better on it's own" and despite all the cons I still think something like guaranteed income would create a floor + boost demand more efficiently than the current pump money into financials with negative interest rates