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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

You need to go to the next level. People automate things not to eliminate jobs (that's not the whole point), but to save money. So now the product is cheaper.

So the buyers of the product have extra money to spend - which opens whole new fields of products and services for them, which will (at first) be run by humans and have jobs.

It's a cycle that repeated many many times in history. It's just happening faster now. So if you want to always be employable (and you are not particularly skilled) be flexible - don't get stuck in a single field, but be willing to constantly learn new ones. (This is hard for some people, but some extra funding for adult vocational school should help.)

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The customers as a whole don't have more money, because half of them just got automated out of their jobs. Maybe enough new jobs come around that it isn't a long term problem this time, but there will come a time when essentially every job could be done by a computer. What then?

Artisan economy? But it can't be monetarily based because only the few remaining capital owners and their very few labor jobs will have all the money.

My artisan economy I mean handmade paintings, handmade food, plays with actors instead of CGI movies, musicians, bars...

The artisans can create their own currency (even a digital one, call it ArtisanCoin) and only use it among themselves.

If that point in time comes, and the computers still "obey" humans, yet still have enough control so that there are no wars between different computer groups, then nobody will have a job and we'll just ask robots to make us stuff and they'll mine other planets and make stuff for us, and we'll live in outerspace in spaceships and relax a lot.

WALL-E?

hopefully we won't be obese though. Because science will have solved that problem by then.

That's not really how things end up working, though; if you're living hand to mouth you end up spending all you make. If you're wealthy, you save much of your wealth.

Yes, people have more money to spend, but no, trickle down economics doesn't really work out for the jobless.

> So the buyers of the product have extra money to spend ...

Until they get spooked and cut back discretionary spending just in case. So-called service economies are not stable.

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