I'm all for automation reducing society's opportunity costs for making stuff. But if the market wage for the median person's labor drops to zero, they will be m

I'm all for automation reducing society's opportunity costs for making stuff. But if the market wage for the median person's labor drops to zero, they will be much worse off, and using wages to ration out the newly abundant goods (as well as living space) isn't going to work. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm weighs pretty heavily in my thinking as a plausible future, and we're just starting to see the first pebbles of the avalanche as grocery stores replace clerks with vending machines. "Grocery clerk" is a lousy use of human lifetime, but our treatment of the unemployable is currently even worse than that.