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In the future, there won't be enough work for everybody to do. Technology won't just produce cars. Technology won't just produce our food and our clothing. Te
by Aqueous 13y ago
In the future, there won't be enough work for everybody to do.
Technology won't just produce cars. Technology won't just produce our food and our clothing. Technology will do everything. Technology will make the allocation of resources very, very efficient, including the allocation of wealth. Technology will take electrical energy and convert it into wealth. In the middle-distant future, the wealth that technology produces will be enough for a whole society of humans to subsist on without doing much work. However, in the beginning this wealth will be concentrated with the people who write the software, make the robots, and otherwise are technologically proficient.
The inescapable conclusion that I'm coming to is that this technology has the possibility of transforming society economically. It has the capacity to lift everyone out of poverty. But we need to adjust our fiscal policy so that the wealth doesn't become so concentrated with so few people. In the future we will be able to afford a safety net for everyone, where everyone is guaranteed a minimum quality of life, without much effort.
We need to go about setting up a Rawlsian framework where inequality is accepted, just as long as the least well off person is still reasonably well off. We can do this by paying for people's health care, paying for their food, paying for their housing. Self-interest and capitalism will still be the paradigm, but it won't be so brutal.
If we do it right.
- ajuc 13y agoIf you go back in time to 1913, and told someone about all the machines we have in 2013, he would say "surely there are no jobs for even 5% of your society". Even not counting that in 2013 bigger percentage of women work than in 1913. But then, how could he predict that there will be these billion-dollar industries that do things not even invented in 1913. Huge majority of what people do in 2013 just didn't needed to be done in 1913. I don't doubt people will invent something to waste our time on ever greater scale.
- Aqueous 13y agoI'm not sure I agree. The technological revolution hadn't happened yet in 1913. We saw an increase in new types of jobs over the course of the 20th century because any innovation that occurred still required a significant amount of human labor. I believe we will see a slow acceptance that we are not going to see a high level of full time, high paying, high skill jobs. After the recession, employment has slowly creeped up again but you can see that the types of jobs that people are working now are different than they were in the early 2000s. More jobs might have been created, but they are of a lower quality in terms of hours, pay, benefits, and the amount of skill they require. We are at a point with technology where any conceivable manual task that we do will almost certainly be automated away at some point, and many tasks requiring high degrees of skill - including intelligence tasks - will also be automated away. It will be increasingly hard for us to find pockets of value in areas that we can offer the marketplace that it hasn't already seen. I do believe the decline won't be rapid - our expectation for full employment will slowly but steadily fade away - but over the course of decades I think we will come to the idea that we are all entitled to a minimum quality of life, regardless of our ability to hold a job, and that we will have to be guaranteed such in order to maintain a stable society.