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Comment by Legend2440 | Hacker News Reader

The only reason we have the standard of living we do today is because of automation. I welcome more of it.

Only insofar as you were able to keep a job. If you lose your job to automation, and there are no more jobs left, what do you do? Where do you get the money to keep your standard of living?

Either we will invent new jobs, as we have always done in the past.

Or if truly all jobs can be done by machine, we retire and go live a life of fully automated luxury space communism.

I wish I could share your optimism.

Having jobs for the sake of having jobs sounds like living in hell.

From what I can tell your argument works out to be as simple as we can’t do this because we want to keep people working, which the vast majority of people hate doing.

There is a small minority of people who enjoy work. It seems cruel to enslave a people in mass simply to keep them busy.

The current economic system is based on people working in exchange for payment. They can then use it on their own life, including living space, food, health and entertainment. Those who do not work do not get such "luxuries."

I'm not arguing for forcing people to work. If we get to a point where no work is economically feasible for humans to do I would very much like some form of UBI or similar to take care of people.

Speaking of enslaving people, the billionaire class has started speaking of removing peoples right to vote if they do not pay taxes (e.g. if they do not work.)

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/why-did-154-bil...

I very much wish that people would no longer have to do busy work and that they would have time for family and hobbies, but being the pessimist that I am, I'm not very hopeful we'll get there any time soon.

No they haven't. That whole news article is based on one two-word tweet in a thread about how old people dominate local politics.

Someone suggested that pensioners shouldn't get a vote, and the Shopify founder responded with "good system".

That's it. That's the whole story. Somehow you turned that into "billionaires are trying to enslave us", probably because you already believe that anyway.

That's a very uncharitable take on what I said. A comment that I've written semi-sarcastically as a reply to someone accusing me of supporting slavery.

Now, I'm fully aware that it's just one guy. But technically, under the proposed system it would be more like 5 guys.

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