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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>The lesson I see from this: AWS hurts bad if you are using it heavily, but salaries... salaries kill. Automate, outsource and self-build as much and as long as you can possibly stand it, and then push on a lot longer than that.

Going off on a tangent here, but if (a) "software is eating everything" and (b) "salaries kill", wouldn't that mean a society of mass (30%+) unemployment in the future?

I wonder who would have the money to pay for stuff like Everpix or any other offering at that point...

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My theory is that when everything is automated, so will food production also be, assuming there is enough energy in the world for that. Then everyone will need very little money and Everpix can charge much lesser amount of money...thus still keeping number of users the same.

Sleeping inside and keeping warm might be an issue though?

Ideally, but who says things will be automated in that order?

The crazy thing is that when people are suffering, there is work to be done. If the 30%+ unemployed in that scenario could reorganize themselves into servicing each others needs, they would surely want to do that.

Unless all the automation is owned by a monopoly.

I do worry about that.

I also worry about centralization (of both government and corporate power) which get at the primary political problem to be dealt with in my opinion: how to mitigate the sociopathic element.

My best answer, at this point, is to break large states up into lots of small states, spreading the sociopathic ruling classes broadly and making it difficult for corporate interests to completely dominate a given political unit.

Within a given smaller and sovereign political unit, I hope that decisions will be made that encourage full, useful employment (since there is less room for both social services shenanigans as well as corporate indifference in a compressed society.)

> society of mass (30%+) unemployment in the future

basic income?

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