many good points but. about laundry, jed is right. But who own the machine ? future of work is just managing the capital... if the capital can do all the work, who work to install the capital? to make it? Anyway hand work and human contact will increase of value.
Note that if there is too much concentration, of real capital letting too many people starving, like with agrarian revolution, there will be a capitalist revolution to reset th allocation... anyway usually it is better done by technological revolution where former winner get overcome by new winner. It is well explained in "the Next Convergence" http://thenextconvergence.com/ another point is about debt : if their is huge growth of satisfied needs, there will be inflation, and debt will be extinguished... or if not and debt is unbearable, and people who benefit from it have a huge unfair advantage, it will be restructured. This happens often. about neoliberal storytelling, if there is competition, if price are not manipulated, there cannot be monopoly as said here. this happened in some midwest state with obamacare because the structure of the price was contrained, leading to many operator to flee, letting a single one in each place which then could make it's price. It seems the be the reason why this great idea is so impopular, because of it's implementation between regulated and fake-free-market. Too bad. BTW huge cost of US health system is because of complex incentives leading to high prices without moderation pressure. 2016-11-25 16:51 GMT+01:00 Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com>: > Alain Sepeda <alain.sep...@gmail.com> wrote: > > >> in fact robots make the value of the worker increase, as it always have. >> It is continuous substitution of work by capital. >> > > This cannot go on indefinitely. Sooner or later you run out of work. > > > >> washing machine makes the value of the laundry worker be higher, as he >> exploits capital invested in a machine. >> > > There are no laundry workers anymore! Practically no one makes a living > washing clothes. > > > >> What you describe is the tragedy of a worker who is prevented, by >> regulation or social barriers, to exploit some capital. >> The future of the laundry worker is not to work for a laundry boss with a >> thousands of machine. It is to own a thousand of machine, like a Roman >> citizen was owning slaves. >> > > The future of laundry is here already. We all have our own laundry > machines. The cost of the machines has fallen. No one makes a living doing > laundry anymore. > > In the 1980s there was still laundry service in hotels in the U.S. and > Japan. You put your dirty clothes in a bag and the hotel charged to clean > them. Today, hotels have self-service laundry rooms with coin operated > machines. This is much cheaper for the hotel guest. It is a little more > work, like self-checkout lines at Lowe's hardware, or buying things on > Amazon. > > - Jed > >