If, at some point in the future, so many tasks get automated so quickly that there aren't enough jobs for the majority of this planet's featherless bipeds, we might finally get a chance to rethink the age-old rule that a person must work in order to survive. Work might become something that you only do because you like it, or because you want a higher income than whatever the default is. I only hope that outdated ideologies won't get in the way of such a paradigm shift.
At least on farms/agriculture, we get a chance to be outside with nature, and stay healthy/fit (even though it is much harder work). What have we got to show for modern day cubicles? :(
At one time (just 20 years ago), your statement would have been fairly accurate. People still walked beans to get weeds, baled square bales of hay and straw (on hot summer afternoons, with indoor barn temps reaching 110+), manhandled livestock, and had to do a lot more manually with equipment.
Those days are fading, though.
The present and future of crop farming are GMO crops (with spray resistance traits, or plants producing their own pesticides/herbicides) and (near future) UAV-style robotics for tractors and combines operated from the house (or corporate HQ).
Livestock farming does remain more hands-on. However, a lot of confinement ops are automated to ensure proper and timely weight gain and less stress. And before people start complaining about confinements, many of those are popping up due to regulatory requirements based upon head count.
Times they are a changin'.
i m a stern believer that people has to produce value. And until a person can produce value merely by living, people will have to work to survive. Value right now is measured by money, and money has a limited capability in measuring things that are very subjective (how do you measure the value a nice person brings to a community?).
But i dont believe there ever will be a day when a person can live without outputting an iota of value as measured by the standards of the day. At least, not until we have a source of free, and unlimitd energy.
1) Will there ever come a day when people can produce value merely by living? That really depends on what "value" is, and as you said, the standards of the day may differ from ours. Under some circumstances, merely being a consumer might be enough to contribute to some overall good. If energy becomes cheap enough, even a tiny benefit might be enough to offset a person's energy consumption.
2) Should we let a human being's survival be taken hostage to whether or not he or she produces what other people perceive as value, provided that there is leftover capacity to give them a free ride? This is more of a moral question, and your answer may vary according to your ideological commitments.
2) The real question is, whether the left over capacity could be put to better use, instead of keeping alive those not pulling their weight (when they could've). Would science and tech be that much more advanced because there'd be money to put into research and development? Would infrastructure be better because money isn't "wasted" on people who otherwise make no contributions? Sure, morally, you gotta help those in need. But a line ought to be drawn - people who could otherwise have worked, shouldn't be given free handouts just because the enocomy of the country _could support them_.
As for #2, the thing with social policies that they have long-term effects on a much larger scale. For example, one could plausibly argue that a robust "safety net" encourages people to take adventures, making it easier for kids from poor families to innovate even if they know that 90% of startups fail. This allows the society as a whole to benefit from the small number of startups that actually do succeed. Handouts, in that case, would be a sort of investment.
Also, this thread is about a hypothetical future society where there is a surplus of human labor due to automation. If you're going to pay people to carry out meaningless tasks that are not necessary in the first place, what's the difference between that and just giving them a handout?
Or so goes the argument. It's harder to prove that in reality. Also, if you care deeply about fairness between individuals, as in your other comment, I can understand why you might object to certain types of handouts.
Also I would have to say that number 2 bakes in a position which imposes a morality and value system onto others, and singularly undervalues the complexity and edge cases(sets/groups/communities) present in the human condition.
Also its worth keeping in mind that social safety nets (i assume thats what you are referring to) may keep some people who don't pull their weight, but also keep alive people who would never had a chance to do so.
How can you have a capitalist economy without consumers to signal prices? I think I just don't understand your point here. Consumers obviously create value to my mind, because the knowledge of what they're willing to consume is itself valuable. How do you understand differently?
Science fiction aside, even if you can produce everything 10-100x more efficiently than me, it is still worth us trading.
Millions of people are already doing just that, and have been for decades, with the assistance of various government programs.
Is there a point where we can safely assume that everyone that has work is glad about it to a point where they won't need more than what the government provides for free?
People talk here about people pulling their weight, but from all of my customers the only people won't be so easily replaced are the creative designers, songwriters, etc.
The rest, law firms, translation specialists, server admins, myself(web developer)... are in jobs that i imagine to have atleast digital competition if not completly replaced in the next 100 years.
So what do we do when suddenly the majority is out of work? There will be a point when creating major patentlawsuits won't keep lawyers busy anymore, where feeding everyone won't keep farmers and production workers busy...
What does pulling your own weight mean, if all the necessary jobs for keeping society running are gone or done by robots? Not everyone can be a waiter for people that are into restaurants with human waiters. Not everyone can be a cutting edge scientist.
My best prediction is that we'll become a very inward faced society, taking care of each others emotional needs will be our main task in such a future. To say it simple, you'll finally visit your parents more often as you've promised.
The 60% of the people that derive income from gov't handouts are leeching off those who do actually work - tell me how that is fair? Disabled people/old people are dependants, but they not a majority, and as for children, they _will_ create value when they grow up. I m talking about abled bodied people who choose to get a gov't handout instead of doing work to sustain their own life. The world would be better off if those people weren't given handouts.
Society has sent men to the moon, photographed galaxies billions of light years away, put millions of transistors inside a square inch of sand = we ought to be able to provide better opportunities for the unfortunate.
I have. I currently live in a town where, due to the recession, a large percentage of people are living on social welfare. The thing is that a shockingly large number of them (that I know personally) have no ambition to do anything else. Some of these have been on welfare for five years already. I mean, why work when the government will just give you money, right? Another shockingly large number of young couples are having children because they see the extra child benefit money - someone that I know personally who already has two children under the age of four and wants a third one recently said how much easier their life would be with the social welfare benefits of a third child... I'm not sure if they ever considered that 1) children get significantly more expensive as they get older and 2) how unfair it is to the children to bring them into a low income family. But thats besides the point: my main point is that I do, unfortunately, know people who are happy to get handouts and have no ambitions to change any time soon.
The trade-off of course being that the more growth we experience, the better quality-of-life gets for everybody in the future. On the one hand, everything is way better for most everybody than it was 200 years ago- on the other hand, like that did a whole lot of good for the dirt-poor of 200 years ago.
utility functions are not linear.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
Still, this article disturbs me and I will be making more effort to shop locally (I am lucky to live in a massive city however, where I have access to most things a short metro ride away).