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Comment by OgsyedIE | Hacker News Reader

The point of jobs is for those who don't own appreciating assets to sell their work in exchange for income in the form of payment from those who do own appreciating assets.

This article misses the key problem with the end of jobs. How else are 98% of the human population going to get income? With the coming of drones and old-timey 1900s chemical weapons they are probably no longer equipped as a class to win a military contest over redistribution against the asset holders.

Much like replacing religion with nothing has turned out, replacing jobs with nothing is going to be bad at best.

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> The point of jobs is for those who don't own appreciating assets to sell their work in exchange for income in the form of payment from those who do own appreciating assets.

As an obvious trivial counter-example, plenty of people have jobs doing lawn care for other people who's income also comes from a job.

>> The point of jobs is for those who don't own appreciating assets to sell their work in exchange for income in the form of payment from those who do own appreciating assets.

> As an obvious trivial counter-example, plenty of people have jobs doing lawn care for other people who's income also comes from a job.

That's not a counter-example, it's just nit-picking on the phrasing and missing the point: the lawn-care people get their income from "those who do own appreciating assets," just with a middleman or two in between.

Who needs jobs if you have food and internet entertainment in abundance?

Can't tell if this is sarcasm or not.

These don't magically appear - people have to create / store / distribute those things, and/or develop the science / engineering to do so.

People have to have the buying power to support the chain you describe. If the buying power of a population vanishes, such as by being made superfluous, they get a large population reduction whether they like it or not.

Can you imagine someone willing to do those things because of some reason other than monetary gain, as it would be in OP's world? How many people currently stuck in Jobs would work toward accomplishing these things with the idea of ending world hunger, because they _want_ to do it, instead of having to do it because they have student loans and bills to pay?

I don't think there's anyone out there working on solving world hunger because they have loans and bills to pay. It isn't a monetarily profitable endeavor.

And eventually all this will be primarily automated, with a few humans contributing because they love to develop things in science, engineering, etc.

Internet entertainment will be abundant on purpose.

Not sure about quality food.

Who said anything about quality? Preserved and processed foods are necessarily lower-quality but they sure are economically efficient.

Sufficient for you maybe

What food? You mean ultra processed garbage that will kill you?

A whole shit-ton of people in developed countries would not be happy with that, demonstrated by those:

1) choose not to simply coast on the social safety net, and seek out jobs for status and additional things than those. why do they do those when by historical standards they could be wildly comfortable without the bullshit work?

2) do coast (opting to just go on disability, say) but are generally extremely unhappy about it in ways that frequently cause problems for the rest of the people

3) opt out entirely from the social safety net and chose to try to live on the streets instead, whether for a desire for some sort of freedom or because of poor impulse control caused by addiction or similar (which also frequently leads to problems for the rest of the people)

Who is paying for the food (including delivery or transportation) and various streaming services?

Their point is there is not "nothing"

As an analogy imagine you had a 6 hour driving commute each day (3 each way)

Imagine if now you move next to the office.

Will it be bad you get those 6 hours back?

If 15->9 is good then 9->0 is even better!

The problem is adjusting to that at scale. Will we get addicts or people who never leave the home? Maybe.

That's a completely incorrect mischaracterisation of the analogy.

I'm not talking about replacing a block of time with nothing, people will still have 24 hours in the day. My worry is about replacing income with nothing, because most people don't have the power to seize any income that isn't freely available.

The public takes what they're offered and can't have anything that isn't on offer. If the offer of access to food is withdrawn, the public has no recourse.

Right lack of income has to be dealt with UBI, or worse handouts from big companies. Why do big companies hand out? Well... we get to a point where that is ther smarter thing to do than lose consumers altogether. The incentive to be rich is to have your ideas forfilled rather than to own a home and have security (as that can be provided for all).

If you think this is madness, the analogy (yes another) is you are playing uno with people you met. They have no money. You can say well never mind we wont play. Or you can just deal the cards because they are so cheap it costs you nothing just to do that. And that is more fun. This is what post scarcity could look like.

Under the K-shaped economy it's been reported extensively already that the consumption market share of the public is trending downwards with no side of stopping. The consumption numbers can be kept up entirely off a market adjustment for less food and water and more yachts.

Post-scarcity requires a political choice. Everybody with political power, regardless of affiliation or nation, stands to benefit from reducing the political power of others who may stand to make demands. The economically surplus humans can't make those demands upon the powerful if they aren't around.

It's kind of like at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when some in the US were saying that the US government should just forgive mortgage payments so the landlords could forgive everyone's rent. Instead the US government gave businesses loans so they could pay their employees (even though they weren't able to work) so those employees could then pay their rent and buy food, etc. It was (perceived to be) better to inject the money into the system to keep the current system running, rather than turn off / forgive the major parts of the system.

PPP loans were the biggest scam and giveaway ever. Many “businesses” bought cars and houses

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