if everything gets replaced by bots, how will the economy run given that much of it is because of employees getting paid and in turn spending that money?
Less disruptive: mandatory reduction in workweek to restore supply/demand balance in unskilled labor market.
Costly but traditional: Basic/minimum income. Expansion of traditional welfare programs. Society creaks along having found the minimum handout required to keep people from doing something about the problem.
Cynical: civic unrest, police crackdown, rinse, repeat, spiral out of control. We've all seen the movies.
If so, that's good news, because it means that your business is in a position to alleviate the economic nightmare scenario we are all worrying about.
FWIW I agree that the "communes of the future" will be businesses, but I disagree that the businesses of the present are the same as the proposed communes of the future. Current businesses are specialized and have customers different from their employees. "Commune" businesses would be relatively generalized and have employees as their primary customers. It's a substantially different structure and, I believe, one that provides considerably fewer opportunities to reliably deleverage large chunks of the human population.
The point isn't to eliminate trade, markets, capitalism, or even jobs. Just the opposite, I would imagine. The point is that a hypothetical "extremistan" future in which most people struggle to eek out a living presents a business opportunity which has historically failed to take off due to the limits of manufacturing technology. If someone can make this business opportunity work, it will act as a relief valve to alleviate extreme poverty.
Aren't those called "communities", i.e. towns and cities? More specifically, ones before the advent of railroads and cars, where trade was geographically limited to the immediate surroundings. Except in your "commune" version, everyone in the town works for the mayor, and they have to apply for membership before they can move in. Sounds like some form of distributed communism.
CGP Grey had a decent video explaining some of the points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
At the moment, the collective delusion that we need everyone to work 8 hours a day still stands, although we need more and more patches and stitches to keep it going (artificially-kept jobs, subsidies, etc.) It will soon become obvious for everyone that this has stopped being a valid paradigm, and then we will need to make some deep changes. If we don't want millions of people to starve even in fully developed countries, we will need to choose: either we all share the diminishing demand of working hours (i.e. we work significantly fewer hours a day, which is what has traditionally been done to compensate for the advances in technology) or we just accept that we don't need everyone to work and socially admit not working at all as a valid option, with a basic income. Curiously, both choices are traditionally associated with the political left (although some intelligent right-wing liberal economists, like Friedman, have embraced variants of basic income). The traditional right just doesn't seem to have an answer to this.
I'm personally in favor of basic income. Reducing the working week may work for a while, but as the set of jobs where humans are competitive gets restricted to very high-skill jobs only, it just won't do. As sad as it may sound now, there will be people who won't be able to do any really necessary job better than a machine, and we will need to feed them. Basic income will become a historical inevitability sooner or later.
Your job security is MORE guaranteed even more than before.
All the online MIT lectures still have a high bar in terms of understanding what they talking about.
You cannot just do quantum mechanics by watching some online videos.
The online materials ( Internet, Forums ), increases the size of your market.
Notice the exponential rise of cost of college education. Its driven because more people are understanding the importance of studying in Uni. You will be surprised by how many people in the world still do not know basic arithmetic, and are still growing potatoes.
Its the american idea that winner takes all but that is very false.
Its about raising the average.
If we took a time machine and transported you 200 years in the past your worth to society would be of less importance since people would think you are a crazy person or a witch.
As no one would understand your work, notation, etc.
This is why as more and more of the 3 billion people that still operate outside of the mainstream economy enter it the value of the people doing average work in the mainstream economy increases.
But politics is what we should replace first in my opinion :D
Side effect of free labour: prices going down a lot.
There will never be a scenario under any circumstances in which labor is free. It rests on a principle that guarantees that: energy will never be free, nor will all the other requirements such as materials, buildings, et al.
Human wages for a clerical role: ~$60,000 a year.
EC2 m4-10xl instance for a year: ~$13,000
The lack of a need for breaks, management, HR, bathrooms, kitchens, break rooms, lighting, HVAC, 60+ sq feet per employee... The costs for maintenance, energy and R&D are suddenly small peanuts; you can do a lot of R&D for the difference between the cost of a human and a machine.
Compulsory sterilization for those unable to fulfill the needs of their children is a thing even today.
Well, that or we could destroy capitalism as we know it. But only dirty socialists want that to happen here on Hacker News.
In ancient times (only a few hundred years ago, actually), peasants were ruled by kings and nobles. They owned next to nothing. They couldn't choose to change jobs or careers, couldn't choose to move to another place. It wasn't just difficult to find opportunity and turn it into prosperity--it was not allowed.
Then a few people decided that human beings had innate, individual worth, and that no one person was better or more important than any other. They realized that people should be able to determine their own destiny. They realized that no one sitting in an ivory tower or behind a desk should be able to rubber-stamp someone else's life out of existence. So now we have constitutions and democracies and capitalism. It's not perfect--people are still greedy and power-hungry--but it's a million times better than it used to be.
Then in some parts of the world, some people got the idea that the nebulous idea of the greater good outweighed what was good for any one person--the "greater good" being determined by a few intellectuals or bureaucrats--and that individual rights were rightfully trumped by the rubber-stamp of a government wonk. As a result, tens of millions of people were stamped out of existence, and millions died fighting wars over it. Some of those governments failed, while others linger to this day.
And yet, there are still people today who want to take us back into the dark ages, where a bureaucrat sitting behind a desk can tell you where to work, where to live, whether your illness is worthy of healthcare, whether you're eligible to live or die, whether you're allowed to have a family, whether you're allowed to seek a better education...
What is wrong with you?!
Someone needs to put together a multi-volume set of horror stories from those who have lived under communist and socialist rule. But even that probably wouldn't convince these leftists that it's a bad idea, because they always think, "Yeah, but we can get it right This Time." As if human beings--the ones who comprise the government--have changed for the better. The arrogance and hubris is off-the-charts, always thinking that they know how to fix the systems that have allowed the evil impulses of humans to flourish and slaughter millions of innocent people.
Maybe we should buy a few islands, throw them together, and let them fight it out to make their utopias. After a few decades, they'd be ready for freedom again.
Robots will do most of our jobs. For example, a robot will cook for you, a robot will make the laundry, or grow food, in other words, it will be a slave.
No such of problem if you own the robot and whatever it creates.
Again, most Romans did not work, and society worked well in the end for the owners.
We don't need jobs, we need the wealth jobs create.