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Call me overly cynical, but the future is looking even worse with ever increasing automation. There will most likely be a small elite of technocrats and wealthy

Call me overly cynical, but the future is looking even worse with ever increasing automation. There will most likely be a small elite of technocrats and wealthy while everybody else is living in shacks competing for whatever jobs are left. Most single millenial guys that aren't in tech or another high paying career are already living in shared housing indefinetely if they're in a big city. An excess of people having no purpose in society will result in such conditions unless there is a revolution and a technologically disadvantaged north korea where everybody has stuff to do suddenly doesn't look that bad anymore.

xapata 10y ago
Shared housing isn't bad in principle. It was only some decades ago that most people didn't own a single-family freestanding home. I hope that when I'm old I can live with all my friends in a big shared home, rather than a nursing home.
- fennecfoxen 10y ago
  Did you ever watch the cartoons growing up, like _Hey, Arnold_ on Nickelodeon? Remember how Arnold's family ran a boarding house, with shared common spaces and bunch of people renting rooms (for years at a time!) and a diversity of humanity to provide Humanity, different perspectives, and other such forms of Color for the show? Did you ever stop think about how weird that arrangement was? Do you know anyone who owns, operates, or lives in a boarding house? And yet it's not really all that weird by historical standards. It's only in fairly recent times that cities decided to get all Moralistic about how Home, Family and Neighborhoods Should Be Structured and started imposing zoning restrictions with super emphasis on homes, waging war against boarding houses and residential hotels and flophouses and other haunts of the poor and lower classes in the name of Progress and Class Warfare. Can't quite afford a place that meets the minimum square footage requirements independently? Well, don't worry, we can find a place for you in the crime-ridden public housing projects or on the streets. Kiss your remaining independence goodbye and welcome to the Bureaucracy, because you're never going to be able to get on the bus to a new town with $100 in your pocket and find a place to crash for a few nights until you get a new job. Who would rent you a place like that anymore? There's the YMCA... and that's about it, _period_. (Hell, a lot of the debates about AirBnB "abuse" end up rehashing these same problems.)
cobookman 10y ago
Look up what the kibbutzim are like in Israel. Those types of communities could easily be ported to work in America. Shared housing isn't all that bad if done right
k__ 10y ago
Not all jobs can be automated and there are a bunch of such in healthcare and social that are understaffed even now.
Synaesthesia 10y ago
Only if we let it. Technology could equally be used to let everybody work less, have more spare time, instead of enriching the wealthy and leaving the rest as useless extraneous people

xapata 10y ago

Shared housing isn't bad in principle. It was only some decades ago that most people didn't own a single-family freestanding home. I hope that when I'm old I can live with all my friends in a big shared home, rather than a nursing home.

fennecfoxen 10y ago
Did you ever watch the cartoons growing up, like _Hey, Arnold_ on Nickelodeon? Remember how Arnold's family ran a boarding house, with shared common spaces and bunch of people renting rooms (for years at a time!) and a diversity of humanity to provide Humanity, different perspectives, and other such forms of Color for the show? Did you ever stop think about how weird that arrangement was? Do you know anyone who owns, operates, or lives in a boarding house? And yet it's not really all that weird by historical standards. It's only in fairly recent times that cities decided to get all Moralistic about how Home, Family and Neighborhoods Should Be Structured and started imposing zoning restrictions with super emphasis on homes, waging war against boarding houses and residential hotels and flophouses and other haunts of the poor and lower classes in the name of Progress and Class Warfare. Can't quite afford a place that meets the minimum square footage requirements independently? Well, don't worry, we can find a place for you in the crime-ridden public housing projects or on the streets. Kiss your remaining independence goodbye and welcome to the Bureaucracy, because you're never going to be able to get on the bus to a new town with $100 in your pocket and find a place to crash for a few nights until you get a new job. Who would rent you a place like that anymore? There's the YMCA... and that's about it, _period_. (Hell, a lot of the debates about AirBnB "abuse" end up rehashing these same problems.)

cobookman 10y ago

Look up what the kibbutzim are like in Israel. Those types of communities could easily be ported to work in America. Shared housing isn't all that bad if done right

k__ 10y ago

Not all jobs can be automated and there are a bunch of such in healthcare and social that are understaffed even now.

Synaesthesia 10y ago

Only if we let it. Technology could equally be used to let everybody work less, have more spare time, instead of enriching the wealthy and leaving the rest as useless extraneous people