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Comment by rumcajz | Hacker News Reader

If, thanks to technology, 10% of people are able to produce all the goods, 90% won't get paid. With most people not having money, only 10% of goods will be needed from that point on. And thanks to the new technology, only 1% of people will be able to produce that. Which means only 1% will have money. Thus, less goods would be needed. And so on. The cycle ends when the last human being dies of hunger.

Options:

1. Ban the technology, Amish-style 2. Cut working hours 3. Introduce some new kind of re-distribution, such as basic income

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We've already been through waves of technology even more dislocating than the one you describe.

If you told a farmer in 1813 that, in the future, less than 5% of the population would be needed to grow all the food, he would assume that the other 95% would be mostly unemployed and starving. But he would be wrong, for the same reason that you are wrong.

As long as there are unmet desires, there is necessarily more work to do. When increasing productivity frees up capital and labor, it gets applied to create entirely new industries. Just because you can't imagine what they might look like (any more than our 1813 farmer could imagine what many of us do for a living) doesn't make them any less likely.

It is a logical impossibility that technology throws the bulk of the population into poverty -- either they have access to all the cheap robotic goods, in which case they are not poor in any meaningful sense, or they don't have access to the cheap robotic goods, in which case the robots are not competing with them in their ability to sell to each other.

You are assuming that people are able to consume 10x more to keep economy going. I would say there's a limit to how much a person is capable to consume. If nothing else you have only 24hrs a day to engage in consuming.

One problem is that work requires something to work on or with. For the most part, people don't really create out of nothing--they add to and build upon what already exists. They need land to farm, or materials to build with, or computers to work on. Even writers need languages to write in. As property becomes held more and more by fewer and fewer, and even intellectual property is becoming increasingly locked up there's less and less that is physically or intellectually available to build upon.

The problem is that with the current tech anybody should be able to live a simple yet good life with her basic needs fulfilled. The requirement that all people work and the poverty of most of those who don't (for any reason) and even of a lot of those who do is needed for capitalism -- at least the kind which is practiced now. Implicit hypotheses are made: market value is fair by definition (and when there even when there is no market, we pretend implicitly otherwise by continuing to state the prices are fair by definition and driven by value), infinite growth is possible, the "unmet desires" of some should define the model of society for all, the virtually infinite wealth (=> power) of few poses no ethical power just because they typically "created" a superior amount of wealth for the public.

IMO, all those hypotheses are utter bullshit and are the sign of a crazy individualistic society, but I admit this is mainly a question of personal ethics and values.

The most important things are education, housing, food and health. There is no reason not to unconditionally provide that to everybody if we can afford it, and when I say "if we can afford it" I mean even if that implies e.g. cutting the number of iPad by a factor 100 and increasing the price of gasoline by a factor 3 or 10 or whatever. Obviously, the ruling class does not want that kind of thing to happen, because that would mean impairment of the capitalist ideology, the loss of a big part of their power (perceived and real), and worst of all the loss of a perceived "way of life".

> It is a logical impossibility that technology throws the bulk of the population into poverty -- either they have access to all the cheap robotic goods, in which case they are not poor in any meaningful sense, or they don't have access to the cheap robotic goods, in which case the robots are not competing with them in their ability to sell to each other.

Irrefutable arguments are suspicious, and this one is no exception; you are not going to produce e.g. drugs yourself when you can't afford to buy one at "market"^W arbitrary prices, and the same is true for lots of products of today life.

And even if you could, that also starts with the hypothesis that people should work (or have an enormous amount of capital, but I'm obviously not very worrying for those kind of people) to be allowed to live a mainstream life. This is a point of view, but when technology make the alternative possible, I see no reason you should be allowed to impose it on everybody, especially when in lots of case this is done by creating artificial scarcity even when this involve waste...

If the 10% believe the marginal product of the 90% is precisely 0, they will provide nothing to the 90%. They might as well wall themselves off from society and ignore them. It's as if the 10% simply don't exist and the land they live on is impassable mountain.

Then nothing prevents the 90% from forming their own economy.

If 10% wall themselves off, they'll need only 1% to feed them. So the 1% walls themselves off the remaining 9%. But then they'll need only 0.1%...

So what prevents the 9% from forming an economy amongst themselves? This problem seems self correcting. Or your theory is wrong.

9% percent face the same problem. They need only 0.9% to feed them. So they leave 8.1% alone and make for themselves. But then only 0.09% is needed to produce all the stuff. Etc.

What happened to the horse population once its marginal product became zero? They got turned into glue. Mostly, except for the lineages which could be retained for entertainment value.

I'm not at all saying that we'll see that happen: I'm speaking to the fact that people's marginal utility really can drop to zero. And although we might like to console ourselves with thoughts that everyone can end up a productive person with enough education and self effort, that's just a pleasant fairy tale. I've worked in service jobs before, and the people in the underclass there, though often genuinely nice people, aren't capable of being independently productive.

Why can't they just form their own economy? Well, they will. In many places you can see what happens when the bottom rung run things: think the favelas of Brazil. Some level of cohesion with the broader economy, where it provides goods that for whatever reason are suppressed by the State in governed areas, coupled with rule by brute violence.

That's not how it works.

In the real world, some of the 10% would be slackers, and some of the 90% would think up ways to enable the slackers in return for some of their income. They, in turn, would need to employ more of the 90% to satisfy demand. Indeed, whole new classes of "goods" would be defined, such that only members of the 90% would be qualified to provide them. Of course, the 10% would strive to automate these away, only to find new classes arising of slackers with new demands to be satisfied by new entrepreneurs among the 90%.

As a particularly lazy member of the 10%, that has been my experience. Long may it continue!

The 90% will get paid.

Likely paid in digital currency for performing manual labor or creative work inside Virtual Worlds.

That's the question. Suppose you are part of 10%. You are a person with money. You spend 10% of your income to satisfy all your needs. How are you going to spend remaining 90%? Keep in mind that your needs are already satisfied -- you have to spend on something that you won't consume.

But their needs are not already satisfied. Maybe their physiological and security needs, but what about their needs for belonging, esteem and self-actualization? The more likely scenario is they'll spend the remaining 90% trying to fulfill those needs through philanthropy.

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