Life After Work

Land is scarce and cant be produced, so whoever already owns it will benefit after the change.

Capital can be produced, but what produces it? Labor. Even worse, capital depreciates over time so just owning some now doesn’t guarantee you an income in the post labor future.

In a fully automated world where human labor is truly of zero value it seems the main returns in the long run are to those who can gate keep valuable land, natural resources, and other fundamentally scarce assets.

No, that’s not how it worked.

Children were made to work in mines and factories to the point of exhaustion - so much so that, by adulthood, many were in poor health.

Prussia outlawed child labor and introduced public schools not because of Enlightenment ideas about human rights or education, but to train soldiers.

This idealization is not just a small historical omission; it’s the root cause of many core issues in the current education system. We take the current school system for granted - "either this or a lack of education" - but many features (e.g., teaching by age cohorts; the teacher as superior; everything organized in inflexible blocks of time; students expected to sit and stand on command, etc.) are not universal and are likely not optimal for growth. They were, however, very good for training infantry and factory workers - over 100 years ago.

The rest of the piece makes a lot more sense given the context that the author is temporarily divorced from the broader economy

From what money is that "ten-fold increase in revenue" coming from if no one is working? Is this a chicken/egg problem in the beginning in order to ramp this economy up? But even it it can get ramped up, the described scenario feels like a zero-sum game no? Like we're all just playing a continuous poker game with the same players and all the same money.

I do not know whether the outcome will be good or not, but it's good to recognize that wealth can increase even in the face of widespread automation.

This is sell-side idealist thinking and blurred view of reality. We're not approaching it, we're not even seeing metrics to suggest that any sub-division of any business is making serious progress there at all.

Too many people are hyping something that will not happen in our lifetimes and we risk looking beyond the terrible state of large global economies, poor business practice and human exploitation on mass scales to a place we will never see. It's more fun to try and shape future possibilities for large profit that we'll probably never have to justify, than attempt to deal with current realities, and thus go against the grain of investment trends today, for an uncertain benefit.

At which point, what will be the "moat" between the haves and have nots?

Ideally this sort of AI would completely flatten the inequality curve, because whatever edge you would have, the AI would equalize that for those at a disadvantage. Given that the AI is equally available for everyone.

This alone, brings me to believe that when we get there, there will be some built-in safety mechanism to preserve power for those that are powerful. Sorry if I'm being a bit too general with this discussion, but if we're going to face a scenario where AI becomes too powerful, obviously all humans will/should feel the effect.

Automation will collapse wages but raise living standards: As AI and robotics replace all labor, human wages will fall—but productivity and wealth will soar, leading to better health, abundance, and comfort.

Historical parallel—child labor’s decline: Just as industrial automation freed children from farm work and shifted society toward education, future automation will free adults from economic necessity, redefining “work.”

AI as the new labor force: Trillions of digital workers could multiply global GDP many times over, making each human comparably wealthy—like Qatari citizens supported by a huge migrant workforce.

Redistribution will likely spread prosperity: Past trends and political realities suggest wealth from full automation will be broadly, though unequally, shared through asset ownership and social programs.

Post-scarcity future: Humanity may enjoy radical technologies—mind uploading, fusion power, genome control, and disease reversal—ushering in an era of leisure, health, and creativity beyond today’s imagination.

One piece in the logic I don't get is this: why would (or should) the earnings done by those workers go into the pockets of humanity, who isn't doing the work, rather than into the pockets of the laborers, whether digital or not?

I already can see the slant that, this whole article is going to be about. Capital holders are going to be the only people matter. Everyone else is trivial. i.e. the top 5% who hold 80% of all wealth in the world.

>Consider Qatar as a point of comparison. Migrant workers make up roughly 94% of the country’s workforce, yet only Qatari citizens, who make up the remaining 6%, are eligible to receive most government welfare benefits.

My father was one among those 94%. Stayed away from my family for more than a decade, only visiting us for 2 months every 2 years. Leaving with tears in his eyes every time. Qatar shouldn't be a point of comparison for capitalism. With no way for naturalization, a strong monarchy, and Labor oppression. I think it's the opposite of free trade capitalism as preached by the west.

What I got from this article was. More money for me, and none for the peasants, but that's okay because they or their work don't matter anyway.

These are absolute assertions about the near future absent any rationale or reason whatsoever that contradict the minimal evidence that actually exists.

Is this the pinnacle of AI hype? Time will tell.

Selling a job by saying that soon we won’t need to work.. I think some connections were missed..

I can only believe that the former is a psychological reaction to the later.

Aside from the ability to cast a ballot, the only other power that normal people have in our political economy is the ability to withdraw their labour. If AI replaces all labour, that already vanishing power completely disappears.

I could see countries like Norway having strong enough institutions to ensure that the benefits get shared in a reasonable way.

In places like the US or Russia, I have a difficult time imagining anything other than the creation of a dozen trillionaires. The US can't even agree on basic universal healthcare. Do you think that President Vance or Newsom are going to divert profits from Google and OpenAI to give to normal people?

A far more likely scenario would be the growth of a permanent underclass. Silicon valley would rather see 150 million people living in tents than agree to a higher rate of taxation.

This would require a fundamental rewriting of Social Security funding law. Right now it's funded solely by payroll taxes. Read: mass automation will be utterly devastating for Social Security because there will be no paychecks to withhold taxes on.

If the author's predictions actually come to pass, it will look a lot like a wealth tax. The current political and economic elites are extremely allergic to anything resembling that.

> Progressive income taxation is a central pillar of government revenue in most high-income countries around the world. If the rich could effectively coordinate to eliminate income redistribution, they would have abolished this system long ago

Hopelessly naive. Rich people are rich because of their assets. Not their income.

> Historical precedent: child labor

amazing start. crushing it already

> Consider Qatar as a point of comparison. Migrant workers make up roughly 94% of the country’s workforce, yet only Qatari citizens, who make up the remaining 6%, are eligible to receive most government welfare benefits. As a result, Qatari citizens enjoy remarkable prosperity, with minimum pensions valued at over $5,700 per month and an early retirement age of 50.

consider: the upsides of doing slavery. a libertarian utopia of remarkable prosperity

> Future humans might gain entirely new senses, develop completely new ways to communicate, and expand our minds beyond recognition. From our present vantage point, we may become gods.

this is actually ripped directly from the closing paragraph of Don’t Create The Torment Nexus

> In basing the maintenance of these 150 acres on the Jersey average, requiring the work of three men per acre under glass—which makes less than 8,600 hours of work a year—it would need about 1,300,000 hours for the 150 acres. Fifty competent gardeners could give five hours a day to this work, and the rest would be simply done by people who, without being gardeners by profession, would soon learn how to use a spade, and to handle the plants. But this work would yield at least—we have seen it in a preceding chapter—all necessaries and articles of luxury in the way of fruit and vegetables for at least 40,000 or 50,000 people. Let us admit that among this number there are 13,500 adults, willing to work at the kitchen garden; then, each one would have to give 100 hours a year distributed over the whole year. These hours of work would become hours of recreation spent among friends and children in beautiful gardens, more beautiful probably than those of the legendary Semiramis.

> This is the balance sheet of the labour to be spent in order to be able to eat to satiety fruit which we are deprived of today, and to have vegetables in abundance, now so scrupulously rationed out by the housewife, when she has to reckon each half-penny which must go to enrich capitalists and landowners.

The work week has gotten much shorter since this was written, no doubt about that. But we keep aiming for ~5 hours a week with the profits of our higher mechanized productivity spread out among everyone and somehow we keep missing that one.

Promised before. It was a lie then, it will be a lie now.

Seriously though is this sort of stuff just nostalgia bait for people who were naive enough to believe it the last time?

Suppose 1000 people live in a town where half own homes and half rent. A home comes up for sale and assume all renters want to own a home. If every renter is receiving the same income, who gets the house?

In today's world, whoever pays the most money. In this future world, maybe still the same (so who has the saved the most and can pay cash), or maybe alternative payments / bartering on the side to sweeten the deal.

Either way it's not this utopia where suddenly everyone can afford scarce resources - the price will just go up to remain scarce

At the same time, a million people talk to chatgpt about suicide each week, there's an epidemic of loneliness, mental health issues, wars, famines, pollution, climate change and the list goes on.

Work is not just about earning wages. A lot of people find a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging, community, pride and joy in the work they do. For many it's also about the hierarchy, the title, the career ladder, etc.

I for one don't see how more automation / tech is going to fix the fundamental problems that the previous waves of automation have left behind.