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Comment by larsiusprime | Hacker News Reader

If all labor is automated and nobody can earn anything selling their own anymore, all that’s left are the other two factors of production: capital and land.

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.

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Which is already happening. This is why stock buy-backs, IPO-less/private companies and private equity rule the future. This "wealth" will NOT come from government subsidies or UBI. It will stay where it is, with enough income doled out to the masses to keep the supply/demand economy chugging along.

The article asserts that as wealth has increased, so has spending on social programs.

I think what isn’t said here is that there was a lot of blood involved in getting weekends and 8 hour workdays. Labor strikes used to be violent, and social programs are pitchfork insurance for the global elite.

If the owners of capital control all means of production, all automated, they will control literal robot armies - we already see this developing with drones and the like.

It’s entirely possible that the global elite succeeds in fighting off the underclass and their reality looks a lot more like Elysium where the owners of capital do not have to worry about the angry masses reaching them.

Every time I say we are headed towards an Elysium-like world, it gets downvoted pretty quickly. Yet all signs are pointed to that trajectory! The rich are getting richer, they live in essentially their own world already--they're buying islands and building fortresses. They are more and more just selling to each other because the rest of us are essentially irrelevant to commerce. It's reasonable to assume we are moving towards a society where a mere 1-10M or so people live walled-off somewhere in luxury (not necessarily a space station) while the remaining 8B people are economically irrelevant, scraping by in the periphery.

Well , if that’s the case , it would be much easier to tax the land owners. Can have exponentially bigger tax so the more land they own, the more tax they have to pay until they can’t afford to own the land. They can’t run as they can’t bring the land with them . Socialism might work in that world

> Socialism might work in that world

Technically, what you've just described is Georgism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

The real question is, in a truly post-labor future, how do workers have enough leverage to negotiate for any particular change in the economic system?

Violence. Unfortunately.

In the times of the French Revolution that was enough, but I think technology is obsoleting us there too. If evil oligarch can make a bunker and ten million $100 kill bots, I don’t think the people are rising up unless existence is worse than death, and even then they might not win.

Back to feudalism, huh?

No, survival of the fittest. In this case, the people whose ancestors were better at hogging resources.

Survival of the shittiest?

Most of human history has been Survival of the Shittiest.

colonial revolutions tended to be fought by those for whom death was preferable to existence. i don't disagree that, in this age, the chance of success is slimmer, and will continue to shrink as such --- there's probably some critical mass of capital fortification which is unpenetrable without worker leverage

Socialism "might" always work in an immaginary world that does not take into account the reality of the human condition.

One of the many flaws of such immaginary worlds is thinking that people will be content to live in a system where they have no creative outlet left and nothing they do will have any ultimate meaning.

People in those conditions might burn down the system for the mere excitement of novelty. Even experimental rat utopias quickly degenerate.

There are a lot of functioning socialist states. You don't have to imagine them. They are happier, healthier and have better infrastructure than the United States.

Which ones?

If you’re thinking Scandinavian countries they are mixed economies. Most successful economies today are mixed economies.

All economies are mixed, save for North Korea, which is command economy communism.

On the sliding scale of welfare state socialism, Finland and Norway have the greatest degree of public investment. Angola would be on the other side of that spectrum, with almost no public services or redistributive programs offered.

When people want to introduce Scandinavian-like social programs to the US, it's "socialism doesn't work". When people point out that they work in the Scandinavian countries it's "Those aren't actually socialism".

When people want to claim that socialism works, they point at countries that aren't socialist.

Socialism is very well defined and it's made nebulous only to claim virtues it doesn't have.

Scandinavian countries aren't socialist. They themselves say they are not socialist and a simple google search for "are scandinavian countries socialist?" will show you that the consensus is that they are not.

Good news. The US can implement universal public healthcare and free university without fear of being socialist.

You don't even have to tax the monetary value of the land. You can require a percentage of the land, itself, over time. If we're really moving to a post labor world -- which I sincerely doubt -- I think the concept of private property is going to have to be narrowed only to things that have a limited lifespan.

> Well , if that’s the case , it would be much easier to tax the land owners.

No, the land owners have bought and paid for every politician. Not gonna happen.

That's why the tech billionaires buy islands. It's easier to protect the land in the coming conflicts.

Notice they’re building castles too. Look deeper you can even find insane sounding manifestos describing feudal style martial-loyalty oaths.

Reference for techno-neo-feudal loyalty oath please?

And the lords of the land fly their jets while asking the subjects to reduce their climate footprint.

Feudal lords, at least, had the wisdom to build their castles in the middle of their protected fiefdoms. In times of social upheaval, a doomsday bunker just becomes a particularly juicy oyster to shuck.

How many divisions does Zuck have?

How will they protect themselves from their own security forces?

Ah, that's the billion-dollar question. In most of the revolutions, the army, not the citizenry, was the one who went against the ruler. For example that's why Putin kept his army weakened and ineffective and had Wagner force(which still tried to revolt).

They're hoping AI and robotics will be capable of handling security by that time.

Treat them well enough, and they become the new middle class. Not rich, but not poor enough to revolt.

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