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Your question is based on a false premise. There is plenty of work, we just haven't figured out how to monetize most of it yet. Mental health, filmmaking, video

Your question is based on a false premise. There is plenty of work, we just haven't figured out how to monetize most of it yet. Mental health, filmmaking, video games, quality food, cultural maintenance events, general caretaking, career development... we're not producing anywhere near the quantity of those things that we actually need. There are lots of reasons why the markets are currently failing to monetize the demand in those areas (there are incentives for corporations to leave demand on the table), but there's no reason why those incentives should be seen as permanent. If you think the selection of products and services we buy should be locked in the 1950s then it will look like there's not enough work, and automation will eat what work there is. But the catalog of services that people are purchasing is growing rapidly as we learn how to hack the market blockages, and it will grow exponentially as we approach the complete information liquidity event which is coming in the next decades. We're just starting to achieve widespread realization that you can offer a service and pay your bills using only Instagram. We're coming from a world where there were only mass-market channels for advertising (newspapapers, broadcast TV, etc), so there was only a limited information space for a small number of brands. That's why we think there are only a handful of job categories, the number of brands was tiny and a brand can only support a finite number of job categories. A decentralized system like Instagram can support infinite job categories.

groestl 10y ago
Maybe I did not phrase it clearly enough, but I know that there is plenty of work, just not paid work. That's why I used the word "jobs". Companies leave the demand for mental health on the table, because the metally ill don't have anything to offer to them in exchange. But I certainly hope that the future is so bright as you describe it.
- amonette 10y ago
  It's already paid work for some fraction of forward thinking people - a friend has three income-generating houses, the first of which was financed by virtual coal trading in RuneScape in the early 00's.
  - VLM 10y ago
    A microeconomic reply to a macroeconomic problem. What bank will finance the mortgage on his incoming generating properties via 30 year mortgages when almost everyone is unemployed? Does the existing massively overgrown and under automated FIRE sector downscale to only 1% of the population having all the income and wealth? If it doesn't downscale, perhaps it doesn't operate at all, then how will he finance his real estate purchases via loans? He will have to pay cash and instead of 1/3 down on each income generating property he'll have to pay 100% for one property. Or prices will have to collapse by a minimum of 2/3 to clear the market. His properties are not income generating if the renters have no income. The purpose of the discussion is what do we do when essentially no one has income or net wealth anymore? The phrase incoming generating property means nothing if there's no rent to collect because no one has jobs or income or wealth anymore. Someone without power today can trust the courts and cops to protect his three properties because "everyone owns property or at least half of us or so". How does that break down when no one has any money? If there's only one landlord in the city who owns almost all property and he asks the cops to lean on him to sell his three houses, or squatters take over and there's no government support, because private property as we know it today is obsolete when no one owns anything, what does he do? Assuming the above is somehow fixed, lets see if its sustainable via replication. How do you get money from trading runescape coal in 2040 if no one playing games has any money? My kids have no money because they're little kids. Assuming they continue to have no money, how many games of tic tac toe do they need to play to afford three houses each if the net profit off each game played is $0 because no one playing has any money to lose? The future being unevenly distributed, being a slumlord today in Detroit is kinda like being a suburban landlord in 2030 perhaps, or an urbanite landlord in 2040, assuming you believe in new urbanism which is very popular here. The 50th percentile landlord will impact reality like a bug hitting a windshield long before the 90%th percentile landlord, which is a whole nother topic. Eventually only the top 1% of landlords will be in on the game much like only 1% of the population will have old fashioned jobs or participate in the old fashioned economy via pay and wealth, which brings us back to the original macroeconomic problem. Surely you can't be implying that 99 landlords will rent their 297 houses to the one guy who still has an old fashioned job?
    - 10y ago
- erikpukinskis 10y ago
  > Companies leave the demand for mental health on the table, because the metally ill don't have anything to offer to them in exchange. No, companies leave mental health on the table because a CEO can only manage a handful of labor categories, and there are plenty of healthy people to fill those roles. Mentally ill people could profitably fill other roles but the CEO doesn't have the bandwidth to manage a system of the level of complexity that would be required to support those roles. We need a decentralized system (contractors fulfilling stock HR microcontracts) to release that economic value. Most CEOs are not even able to intelligently manage the 10-20 stock labor categories they currently staff, let alone the millions of categories we need. I think most managers max out at 5-10 roles.

groestl 10y ago

Maybe I did not phrase it clearly enough, but I know that there is plenty of work, just not paid work. That's why I used the word "jobs". Companies leave the demand for mental health on the table, because the metally ill don't have anything to offer to them in exchange. But I certainly hope that the future is so bright as you describe it.

amonette 10y ago
It's already paid work for some fraction of forward thinking people - a friend has three income-generating houses, the first of which was financed by virtual coal trading in RuneScape in the early 00's.
- VLM 10y ago
  A microeconomic reply to a macroeconomic problem. What bank will finance the mortgage on his incoming generating properties via 30 year mortgages when almost everyone is unemployed? Does the existing massively overgrown and under automated FIRE sector downscale to only 1% of the population having all the income and wealth? If it doesn't downscale, perhaps it doesn't operate at all, then how will he finance his real estate purchases via loans? He will have to pay cash and instead of 1/3 down on each income generating property he'll have to pay 100% for one property. Or prices will have to collapse by a minimum of 2/3 to clear the market. His properties are not income generating if the renters have no income. The purpose of the discussion is what do we do when essentially no one has income or net wealth anymore? The phrase incoming generating property means nothing if there's no rent to collect because no one has jobs or income or wealth anymore. Someone without power today can trust the courts and cops to protect his three properties because "everyone owns property or at least half of us or so". How does that break down when no one has any money? If there's only one landlord in the city who owns almost all property and he asks the cops to lean on him to sell his three houses, or squatters take over and there's no government support, because private property as we know it today is obsolete when no one owns anything, what does he do? Assuming the above is somehow fixed, lets see if its sustainable via replication. How do you get money from trading runescape coal in 2040 if no one playing games has any money? My kids have no money because they're little kids. Assuming they continue to have no money, how many games of tic tac toe do they need to play to afford three houses each if the net profit off each game played is $0 because no one playing has any money to lose? The future being unevenly distributed, being a slumlord today in Detroit is kinda like being a suburban landlord in 2030 perhaps, or an urbanite landlord in 2040, assuming you believe in new urbanism which is very popular here. The 50th percentile landlord will impact reality like a bug hitting a windshield long before the 90%th percentile landlord, which is a whole nother topic. Eventually only the top 1% of landlords will be in on the game much like only 1% of the population will have old fashioned jobs or participate in the old fashioned economy via pay and wealth, which brings us back to the original macroeconomic problem. Surely you can't be implying that 99 landlords will rent their 297 houses to the one guy who still has an old fashioned job?
  - 10y ago
erikpukinskis 10y ago
> Companies leave the demand for mental health on the table, because the metally ill don't have anything to offer to them in exchange. No, companies leave mental health on the table because a CEO can only manage a handful of labor categories, and there are plenty of healthy people to fill those roles. Mentally ill people could profitably fill other roles but the CEO doesn't have the bandwidth to manage a system of the level of complexity that would be required to support those roles. We need a decentralized system (contractors fulfilling stock HR microcontracts) to release that economic value. Most CEOs are not even able to intelligently manage the 10-20 stock labor categories they currently staff, let alone the millions of categories we need. I think most managers max out at 5-10 roles.