Depends on price points.
Out in the middle east, fewer people needed to work period – all the important
stuff, right from building houses and hauling away trash to keeping the banks
running were done by people falling on the scale between immigrant (labourer),
skilled immigrant (person of color with suit and tie and qualifications) and
expat (white dude with much the same skills as a skilled immigrant).
That didn’t get too far at all – despite impressive levels of automation and
computerization.
On 19/10/16, 11:54 AM, "silklist on behalf of Alaric Snell-Pym"
<silklist-bounces+suresh=hserus....@lists.hserus.net on behalf of
ala...@snell-pym.org.uk> wrote:
On 19/10/16 06:50, Bhaskar Dasgupta wrote:
> only issue is, how much will you get paid to just walk around? If we
> want to take an example, see the wages of waiters…without minimum
> wage floors, its impossible to survive. flip side, who will pay for
> it? the average joe or mango man will have very little discretionary
> funds to spend on stuff like this. even micro-payments wouldnt help,
> you need a bare minimum to get some basics in place and the capacity
> or desire to pay for this has gone. Look at our smart phones. besides
> the phone itself, pretty much all the value add via the apps are
> free. If I look at my app and i look at my interactions, extremely
> little is actually being paid for to the creator. very very little.
> and that also goes to large corporates who can scale up.
Well, hopefully, this will happen:
1) The cost of living will decrease. Technology should make food,
clothing, and healthcare cheap - and everything else is a luxury apart
from housing, which is a trickier issue. There's a housing bubble in the
UK, and rising population won't help. I feel the problem is human (how
we pay for housing) rather than physical (the actual cost of housing
everyone), however.
2) Fewer people will need to work to do the "important stuff" (eg,
provide the essentials of living), thanks to automation. More and more
jobs will be in providing things we like, rather than things we need.
3) This will cause a change in ideology. Until now, we've had a dominant
notion that we need people to work. But with more and more work being,
basically, just for fun (be it somebody else's fun or your own), this
idea should erode.
4) At that point, the idea of moving towards a universal basic income
becomes palatable. As a society, creating an environment where people
don't need to fight for ever scarcer jobs to survive starts to seem a
valid use of taxpayer's money. People can choose to just live, rather
than between "live to work or work to live".
ABS
--
Alaric Snell-Pym
http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/
