Corporations Don't Want Employees

Not just the corporation, but the owners. It's not as if employees and executives are blind to long-term thinking, but the higher up you are, the more dependent your salary and bonus is on your earnings report, and if the numbers don't satisfy the Street, they can kick you out.

The problem is that self-interested thinking doesn't often benefit the whole. Every corporation is in the right for cutting costs, reducing tax burden, and getting as much profit as possible (and keeping it!). Without a strong government to form and enforce public policy, the private sector creatively destroys itself and society every few decades, while the rich keep their cash.

Some on HN the other day speculated that the fiercely autocratic Asian governments are the only way to reign in the power of major corporations. I think there is a point to that.

I think we have lost touch with the reason we invented technology in the first place: which was to increase human productivity, not to remove the human from the equation altogether.

Well, then we're going to have all the data we need to see if a problem exists the quarter after that one.

It is very expensive to live as an independent Jeffersonian farmer these days.

> How would people get buying power if they are "drafted"?

Obviously, you get paid for your service - really, there is a long history in America of favoring 'payment for service' over social programs. Reagan gutted the civilian welfare state, while extending benefits for those who had served the military.

To be clear, I'm not saying I oppose a generous pension for those who have served in the military, really, for a lot of reasons, or even that it's unfair, because most government jobs pay pretty poorly, at least the government jobs I could get pay terribly compared to the private sector jobs I could get, at least if you don't count the pensions. I'm just pointing out that the military does function an awful lot like some sort of socialist state. Yes, yes, there are still hierarchies, with privilege accorded to rank, but the difference between the top and the bottom, at least if you count in money and not power, and believe there to be a difference between the two, is nothing compared to what you see in the private sector.

But, the main idea here is that in the USA, there is massive resistance to the idea of redistributing money to the "undeserving" - some people argue that it's mostly a race thing that defines 'undeserving' and I don't know if that's true or not, but I can say that I observe a lot more hatred for the "welfare queen" than of the banker, and that this resistance is quite often overcome by making it so that our social safety net is a reward for your service.

During the great depression, we really had the problem you all are talking about here.. there really were simply not enough jobs to go around. Something had to be done; even fairly conservative folks recognized that something must be done.

What was done? well, world war two, but before that, the WPA. To be clear, that wasn't involuntary, like a draft but the point being that the government can and did create jobs for people.

There's a lot of complaints about the WPA just digging holes and filling them back up again, and there's some truth in that, but there is also a lot of infrastructure still standing today that was built by the WPA.

Personally, I don't really have a horse in this race, but my observation of Americans is that there's going to be a lot of resistance to "healthy young bucks" as Reagan put it, collecting the dole.

Yeah one of the dangers of AI and robots taking jobs is that they don't have any customers left as in B2C business model. They will have to do a B2B model but then all of the people out of work will damage the economy.

What about the people who got old and or sick? With all the people going poor without jobs some might resort to crimes to make a living.

The draft can only take so much of the population. But our military uses drones a lot and might use robot soldiers that share memories and kill the enemy more than humans can and don't need any training. Is it murder if a robot kills a civilian?

The political class, which will still have jobs, will not be willing to give money away to people who don't work. So they'll be drafted and paid.

When we had an active draft, they were paid.

  Who will create the lab? Won't he be the most powerful ?

Every oligarch(if there are many of them, like there were many kings in medieval Europe) would need to have a lab. It will be specialized. Just like factories today are specialized. Today, one company might use factory to make phones, another one to make clothing etc. They all use different devices for different products.

  Can't these people genetically modify themself to not care about sex slaves (or even consumption, so no worker-slaves needed) ? Maybe scientists-slaves?

That's equivalent to suicide. You could do something similar today to eliminate sexual or other desires, but people aren't doing it.

  The truth(by my simple/short unscientific observation) is that most people don't give a fuck at all about anything other than themself so why should the lab-designer care about them (and share his tech)?

Care about who? Other oligarchs? If there are other oligarchs(which is not necessary, since it could be one king and few thousand people below him), then he would receive benefits from them and vice versa.

  What happens when you build you lab/fix-diseases and don't want to share them with the masses (you don't want their $$)(you just want to share with other lab-designers/scientists/doctors etc). They WILL try kill you. How to escape this ? Kill them first? Don't share at all (you supposedly want to share with other lab-builders)?

Who will try to kill them? Masses or other oligarchs?

  I think, the lab creator WILL have to also build crazy weapons to protect himself from "the others"? They just won't accept no for an answer.

What others? Other oligarchs with different labs?

  So you have to create your weapons first, then build the lab (or enslave others by using weapons to build the lab for you).

This is true. It could be a hierarchy where the top dog (king) shares some wealth with the lower ranked. Kinda like in medieval Europe. Most robots and lab-grown humans would be like serfs and those closest to the king would get all the benefits and practically unlimited wealth.