My worst fear, the Worst Case Scenario that I see as being depressingly possible, is that the spread of automation will result in nonsense jobs. That our socie

My worst fear, the Worst Case Scenario that I see as being depressingly possible, is that the spread of automation will result in nonsense jobs. That our society is so completely wedded to the idea that everything of value must be gained through suffering and that this is the right and proper course of the universe that companies will be compelled to employ certain numbers of human workers despite there not being any actual need. 'Having a job' is not a natural, or necessarily fundamentally desired, state. Not for the individual, or for wider society. It was a purely utilitarian solution arrived at in the past when pressures were different. When pressures change, social practices have to change too, or the result is always bad. Concentrating on making sure everyone has a job while arduously fighting to ensure that workers are paid as little as possible can get us back to the era before the New Deal. I see nothing that would prevent that. Entire families, youth included (though likely not children, but certainly adolescents), working 16 hours a day, 6 days a week, and barely being able to feed themselves. When all of society is willing to say "they don't deserve more pay, the machines are doing all the work" including the workers themselves, and 'being employed' is seen as some sort of moral imperative that is more meaningful than a paycheck and totally detached from actually producing value... things can get bad. We should always remember history, and that those people were not fundamentally different from us. They were willing to bear it. We will be too. And while they didn't have a century of fighting against 'socialist' policies so were willing to discuss the New Deal, we are in a different situation on that count. Such a solution would not be discussed seriously, much less attempted. (But, I don't fear this too much. The fact is technology is cheap and has made people so productive that its far more likely they will realize that companies no longer provide any tangible benefit compared to working directly for customers online, especially once the software is there to facilitate it.)