Comment by preg_match | Hacker News Reader

Comment by preg_match | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Without a workforce there is no consumption, and therefore capitalism cannot exist. Yes, we would require a planned economy. Call it communism or whatever you like, but free market economics literally cannot exist in such an environment.

Capitalism is based on two simple, fundamental assumptions about the world:

- everyone works

- everyone consumes

1. Turned out not to be true. We have disabled people, elderly people. We patch it with legislation like SSI. That only works because everyone else is still working.

Our monkey patch solutions have held up well for a long time. But, if either of those two assumptions are broken in a large way, the entire system collapses. UBI is yet another monkey patch. As you know, it won’t hold if we bend the invariants of the system enough.

Eventually, a fully planned economy will not be optional.

Try to convince the majority of the western world that are consuming the equal of 4-6 globes that they are eligible for:

(1) National Park visit a year (3) RoboTaxi rides this week (2) Eggs for the week

Who will do the planning? Why would the population accept this planning?

You will in practice need full surveillance and control of your population and an agreement between every country that this is how we are going to do things.

At that point you can also ask the question what value humans provide at all. Why upkeep all of this when you can just expand compute, perform resource extraction instead of managing your cattle.

There will be a workforce, it just won't be human-based. Capitalism has always existed without 100% employment, in every example someone needs to work to support others who cannot. Humans have done this under capitalism to support their families and communities, but now we will need to find incentives for robots to do this. It might be as simple as just telling them.

Right but then the robots would produce wealth, but they cannot own it. So you need to redistribute the wealth. Which is, decidedly, not capitalism.

A little bit of wealth distribution exists within American capitalism, through monkey-patches like I mentioned. But full wealth distribution is a new economic system altogether.

Right I guess that was your main point. This would be a pivot away from capitalism. But it’s unclear what would be a capitalism-based proposal which addresses the issues. Has anyone seriously proposed one?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com