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Comment by marshallp | Hacker News Reader

Children, old people, disabled people, unemployed people, many politicians, many lawyers, criminals, spammers, many landowners, trust fundies, members of royal families, many librarians, many teachers, many policeman etc. etc. We already have people who don't actually provide value to society. In Germany, about 60 per cent of people derive most of their income from government handouts. The trend will only increase and is actually a good thing (200 years ago, almost everyone had to produce value to survive - where would most people choose, today or 200 years ago).

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I think you are right. Over a certain period our society will Star Trek-like be able to provide for everyone without them doing any actual work. The biggest problem is the shifting time until then. How do you treat the 70% of people that won't find jobs because there ARE none that aren't done better by a robot or an algorithm. What is fair compared to those who are still required to work? Should (mostly creative people i guess) they be compensated as they would today?

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.

only a small handful from the list you gave is actually none-contributing.

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.

There is certain fallacy in that. I've never met a person who has ever thought he would like to mooch off welfare or what have you forever, or even a short amount of time. There are barriers that are difficult to see for many middle class people to see. The choice between welfare and work for many people is not between a welfare and a cubicle writing java code, but between welfare and humiliating treatment or backbreaking work in a restaurant/factory.

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.

we ought to be able to provide better opportunities for the unfortunate

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.

I've never met a person who has ever thought he would like to mooch off welfare or what have you forever, or even a short amount of time.

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.

why so much sympathy for the first world poor? because they are visible? I find sympathy for "poor" people living in fantastic conditions morally repugnant. humanity has serious problems to tackle.

Feeling sympathy for first world poor doesn't mean you can't also feel sympathy for the third world poor.

If I have a million dollars I care less about $1. If someone is being tortured I care less about someone working 12 hour days.

utility functions are not linear.

Definitions matter. The definition of "disabled" from a point of view of someone on the dole probably isn't what you envision.

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