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Comment by mfoy_ | Hacker News Reader

Assuming that everything menial can be automated, we're left with very few "real jobs". So where do the non-creative non-entrepreneurial types land?

Do they live in some dystopian future where they have to dig holes for the sake of "having a job" then filling them back in again? Or do you argue for "mincome"?

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Yes, and also -- where do the really creative types land? Do we get rid of art? (we are doing a great job at that these days) If our public education systems serve mainly to train "workers" or increasingly "soldiers", we aren't educating toward the future. we have been educating (in public school) toward the past for a long time. That means we favor what had been practical in the (increasingly distant) past and devalue ( really have zero idea or vision concerning) what skills will be useful in the future. It turns out that it doesn't make sense to train kids and people to behave more like robots when we are building an army of much better, tireless robots. Our public education systems in the US avoid intellectualism, creativity, and the arts (shaping the arts for the future isn't an option- we just cut them from the curriculum).

There is an optimistic outcome you are missing.

Here is an analogy. Do you pay for the air that you breath? No. It is free, because air is so abundant, so avaliable, that nobody would possibly charge for it.

Imagine if the qualities that apply to air, apply to other things. As they are already doing so. There are tons of free software, for example.

Now, imagine that food and housing became so abundant, so available for anyone to take as much as they want, that nobody would even think to charge for it.

Such a society is still capitalist. It is just full of abundance.

Not arguing for anything, was just noting that those arguments are not new, being central to Marx's theory.

Yes, we speak of robots and AI now and the rate at which jobs are destroyed has certainly surpassed the rate at which new jobs get created, but the means of production being in the hands of the few (the bourgeoisie), along with automation, these have been happening ever since the dawn of the industrial age and is what animated Karl Marx.

Read "The Communist Manifesto", it will ring a bell.

But all this has given us communism, with disastrous results. And yeah, there are always people arguing that communism wasn't "implemented right", which is what you get with any rotten theories.

So what I'm proposing is:

(1) awareness that these arguments are essentially Marxism and

(2) be prepared to defend them by coming up with a theory for why it could work this time.

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