I have done a lot of thinking about this. There are 2 things that keep sticking out to me: First, history. History does not make our future look good. Human

I have done a lot of thinking about this. There are 2 things that keep sticking out to me: First, history. History does not make our future look good. Humanity has gone through a few disruptive changes in the way society viewed work and societal contribution. The most recent was with the spread of factories and assembly-line production. The result of the adoption of those structures/technologies was not good. Society saw factory workers as 'not deserving' reasonable wages because 'the machines are doing all the work.' Factory owners were more than willing to pay their workers as little as they could get away with. And it turned out, that was very little. Entire families (including children) working 16 hour days 6 days a week and barely being able to feed themselves was commonplace. Society had to adopt many radical (in comparison to previous history and other societies, they don't seem radical now because we've kept them around long past any practical utility) changes to function like this. Everything from anti-sex attitudes, the creation of 'adolescent' as a distinct category of person, even changes in the architecture of lower class homes to give separate sleeping quarters for children and adults. And that didn't get adjusted for until the New Deal in the 1930s. Back when someone couldn't simply say 'socialism' and completely shut down all discussion, the New Deal was actually possible. People today don't realize how 'insane' the New Deal really was. Think of it from the perspective of the factory owner. Previously, you would get an entire family, say 4 workers, 16 hours a day, 6 days a week, and you'd pay them just enough to eat and pay rent. After the New Deal, you were expected to pay 1 worker for 8 hours of work 5 days a week such a (comparatively) titanic amount of money that they could raise an entire family on it comfortably. Let that sink in. From 96 hours of work from each of 4 workers each week, 384 hours total, down to 40. That increases your labor cost by nearly an order of magnitude. Society re-configured their notion of what work was worth to address the idea that regardless of what tools are being used, the value the worker creates should play SOME role in compensation. And the world did not implode. But could anything proportionally similar ever be imagined to be acceptable to our modern society? I would argue absolutely not. But there is good news. Maybe. See, this isn't our future. It's our present. Between 1950 and 1980, the median wage rose by 75%. Between 1980 and 2010, it rose by only 1%. Computers and automation technology caused average productivity to skyrocket since 1980. But wages were frozen. Not because of any economic reason, the median income of the top 10% rose by 475% during that 1980-2010 period. Profits grew and grew with greater acceleration, but all the benefit went to the owners, executives, etc. Society once again started feeling that workers did not deserve compensation where the value of the work being done played a role. The machine was doing the work. It just seemed too easy. You write some software and make the company $10 million, why should you get a "lottery winning payday"? Apple, Google, Microsoft, and similar employers that set the standards saw this coming and rigged wages in the computer market early on. This isn't a conspiracy theory, the FTC prosecuted them for it. They ended up settling for hundreds of millions of dollars in a huge class-action lawsuit a decade ago. But, really, you could argue it was inevitable. Society didn't see workers using computers as deserving of pay which increased alongside their productivity, so employers obliged society. But something is different this time. Factories and assembly lines are expensive. And computers are cheap. And distribution, the whole reason we MADE factories and big companies in the first place, is effectively a solved problem. While companies have been getting rid of pensions, doing away with annual raises that exceed cost of living increases, cutting vacation time, expanding the work week, reflexively laying off workers to meet quarterly projections, etc... workers have become more than able to out-compete them. The drawbacks of centralization, which for a century were papered over with the invaluable ability to solve the problem of distribution, are now showing through more and more every day. Employment is a two-way street. Employers pay workers because they create the value that is profit, and workers seek employment for things like a reliable income stream, the ability to settle down and make plans for the future, the ability to provide for their family. Except employers have welched on every single thing they ever offered to workers. They provide zero insulation from market fluctuations. They adopt practices that make it necessary for workers to jump jobs every 4-5 years just to keep up with the increases in cost of living. Etc. And it actually might have worked... if not for the fact that their ace in the hole, their one golden ticket, solving the problem of distribution (both of products and of work needing to be done, one to customers the other to workers) became worthless thanks to computers and the Internet. Society changes slowly, and it certainly doesn't abandon century-long traditions overnight. But we're barrelling right for some proper Big changes. We're going to end up with the 'tools of production' (as Marx, who I've never read, would I think call it) in the hands of everyone, with a global market on our desk with commoditized distribution. Eventually enough people will be out of work as automation enables corporations to "reduce their primary cost center" and just trying offering their services online out of desperation that someone will build an excellent marketplace that actually works. And once it takes off, it will hopefully happen so fast that large companies don't even have a chance to react. And I'm serious about that part. If they do have a chance to react... it could be uglier than you could possibly imagine. Wars have been fought over much, much less wealth. And things like the Internet are still primarily controlled at the last mile by large companies which will be directly and existentially threatened by this kind of thing. The government handed over a trillion dollars to make sure that the banking system didn't have to bear the consequences of their actions, what might they do if 50% of the Fortune 500 were facing insolvency?