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At current population growth, 'post-scarcity' will never come.

• giggles_giggles 10y ago
  Even if it does come, there's no sense in designing policy as though it's here or will definitely be here soon. In the modern day it's a utopian pipe dream and history is replete with societies taken from bad or okay to positively dystopic via utopian thinking.
  • sillysaurus3 10y ago
    The difference is that this time, there is no alternative. We'll be dragged there, kicking and screaming. Normally, it's easy to dismiss statements that are all-or-nothing propositions. Usually the person making the statement lacks imagination. Isn't there some alternative? Unfortunately, there seems to be a >90% likelihood that the answer in this case is no: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU Once you accept that there is no choice other than giving people money to survive, the focus can shift to accomplishing that goal rather than dwelling on whether it might lead to economic collapse. http://blog.samaltman.com/technology-and-wealth-inequality http://blog.samaltman.com/technology-and-wealth-inequality > However, if we cannot find a new kind of work for billions of people, we’ll be faced with a new idle class. The obvious conclusion is that the government will just have to give these people money, and there’s been increasing talk about a “basic income”—i.e, any adult who wanted it could have, say, $15,000 a year. > You can run the numbers in a way that sort of makes sense—if we did this for every adult in the US, it’d be about $3.5 trillion a year, or a little more than 20% of our GDP. However, we’d knock out a lot of existing entitlement spending, maybe 10% of GDP. And we’d probably phase it out for people making over a certain threshold, which could cut it substantially.