Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Yes, in the worst case scenario we wind up with basically nobody having jobs. I mean, when humanoid robots get sufficient dexterity, they can even come for the skilled trades folks as well, as far as that goes.

Look, I don't know if any of this is actually going to to come to pass or not. But it seems at least a little bit less like pure sci-fi now than it did a decade or two ago.

Anyway, if we play along with the thought experiment of asking "what happens to our society when a very large swathe of the human population is no longer needed to exchange their labor for wages?" it really leads one to wonder what kind of economic system(s) we'll have and if we'll find a way to avoid a straight up dystopian hellscape.

View on HN

> in the worst case scenario we wind up with basically nobody having jobs

Call me optimistic or whatever, but isn't that the best case scenario? If having a full-time job is basically just for the 0.1% or whatever, then we must have figured out a different way of distributing goods and solving peoples needs, that doesn't involve "trading time for money" (a job), and that sounds like it can be a good thing, not "worst case scenario".

We live in a system the prioritizes profits over everything.

> Call me optimistic or whatever, but isn't that the best case scenario?

The gains of technology are mostly captured by those with capital, not those with labor. Look at wage growth over the last few decades as well as productivity growth to have confirmation.

There’s no reason to believe given the current trend that benefits will be evenly distributed to the 99-97% of wage earners.

> We live in a system the prioritizes profits over everything.

Right, but in this hypothetical future where "basically nobody have a job", would we still live in such a system? If so, where do the money come from if people don't work for it?

Yeah, that's sort of what I was getting at when I said

> it really leads one to wonder what kind of economic system(s) we'll have

It's not clear how a future economy works if nobody has a job. If nobody has a job, how do they acquire food, shelter, clothes, etc? And if people don't have money to buy "stuff" then what need is there for factories to produce "stuff", or stores to sell "stuff" and so on? So does economic output just drop to zero? Or near zero?

Of course there are proposals around UBI and what-not and maybe one or more of those is the answer (if all of this comes to pass in the first place). But it seems to me that there are still a lot of questions to answer.

> Call me optimistic or whatever, but isn't that the best case scenario?

Fair enough. I should have said "worst case, in the context of the system (as it is today) where a job is the primary way we have of gaining income to support ourselves (food, housing, clothing, etc)".

So yeah, if the day comes when nobody has jobs AND we can work out a social/economic system that doesn't leave people destitute and starving in the streets, then it could be the "best case". I'm just not sure how we get there, at the moment.

Or we just have the vast majority of people homeless and starving and helpless against the robot armies.

Again, probably the optimist in my shining through, but hardship seems to (at least where I am) trigger people to react against it, and go out on the street to protests. Clearly, it isn't the case everywhere, but I do believe (or maybe hope) that if we ever get to that point, people won't give up until their life gets at least "Good Enough".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com