Surely doom us to a life where the robots do the work and we lead interesting lives of leisure
We'd like to think this, and maybe some would do "interesting" things, but the fact is that most people turn into couch potatoes. People who retire early tend to die early; stop working and so will your body.
> stop working and so will your body
Citation badly needed here.
I can tell you that before my peers joined the workforce, everyone was part of sports and clubs and community activities. After they joined the workforce, that stuff largely dropped away, because work is too time consuming.
Fair enough.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w24127
What I want to know is what happens at scale if people retire at 30 or 40, or maybe if they never work at all. The idea is that automation might free up people from work entirely. I don't think it's fair to extrapolate data from people who have been working for 30+ years and then had an "early" retirement.
That aside, a society in which no one supports himself but rather is dependent on the noblesse oblige of the state to survive is a dystopia I hope never to see.
50/50, dude. I will never stop working -- but I'd like to work not for money. I want to work on what I find interesting, and some of it can actually be very productive for society. The mere coercion to work or you die of hunger or freeze under a bridge is ruining people's desire to do stuff outside of work -- that, and the fact that work is too time- and energy-consuming.
I don't dispute that a lot of people turn into couch potatoes when they don't have to work. But must this doom everybody else who would do interesting and society-benefitting work if given the chance? Is it fair that this chance is taken away because a huge chunk of humanity would just be useless in front of a TV?
I don't think it's fair.
Plus, if we actually have an economy supported mostly by robots, who cares if those people are couch potatoes, really? If that won't cause an economic crisis then why would this phenomena be important?
Sure. That's pretty much what's going to happen. But mind you, I am not seeing things being much better now compared to that future. Democracy to me seems to work only on paper, while politicians, lobbyists, corporations et. al. do whatever the hell they want. But I am not willing to derail on this point, just sharing an opinion.
> ...a society in which everything is produced by machines and the average citizen receives everything he needs to survive from the government sounds like a dystopia to me.
As with everything else, it's a balance. I'd like to not think about utilities and rent and basic food needs, yes; on the other hand, I am okay with the idea that if I want that 75" QLED TV, or a car, or the best chair recliner on the market etc., then I'll have to work a bit for those.
One way to push people into working even with UBI in place is likely to make the places where food is distributed for free inconvenient or not very ergonomic; many people would like to avoid certain inconveniences or even forced social interaction so they're likely to work just to avoid changing their habits. And publicly funded places gaining bad entropy is pretty much a given anyways; nobody has to do anything, it just happens eventually, by itself.
> I don't trust the state to administer this prospective neo-Oceania.
Me neither, but not sure if for the same reasons as you. Governments are, in the end, hugely ineffective. That's basically their defining characteristic. The moment they have to do something mildly responsible they are very happy to outsource to the private sector, and things turn to shit in months. Government is only really concerned with gathering taxes. :(
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Overall, I believe systems like we are discussing can be made to work. But I am not sure I trust people to do it. And of course, there's going to be a world war before anybody remotely influential will allow a machine to call the shots in their place.