Alaric Snell-Pym 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.
Housing costs in Japan are quite reasonable, even in Tokyo. The Japanese
are able to do this by increasing housing stocks in parallel with the
population. Other governments might take a tip from the Japanese and
start planning for the population they have (and are likely to have)
rather than one they wished they had.
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.
Also, things that we need but don't believe we can have. As a species,
we have a lot of work to do in terms of figuring out how to live well on
this planet. We could work to solve wars, riots, sexual assault,
domestic violence, and acts of terrorism. We could work hard to figure
out how to live on this planet sustainably. We could work on learning
how to maintain our optimal physical, mental, social, emotional and
spiritual health, and how to engineer society so that we can all easily
and joyfully live wonderful lives.
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.
When we humans developed tools to help with housework, our standards for
cleanliness rose. As automation takes over more tasks, human attention
will turn to all the things we currently neglect in order to take care
of our basic needs. Lather, rinse, repeat.
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".
Universal basic income is palatable now. We are holding so much creative
energy down by insisting that everyone go out and hold miserable jobs in
order to survive. Once freed of that need, people will find other
worthwhile pursuits to fill their time.
Sure, some people will spin their wheels (at least for a time) and
others will engage themselves in pursuits that other people don't
approve of. Bringing a few really good ideas to fruition should more
than pay for the ones who waste their time and the ideas that don't pan out.
We have some serious distribution problems.
--hmm
