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@my little brony to the thread, my little brony to the thread please.
yeah I know, I'm getting to it
I had a horrible debate with a client late yesterday afternoon about automation.
His theory was that when all labor is automated in xx years, capital will cease to exist and The State will benevolently take care of us.
Okok so he jerks off to Das Kapital so what, it's a fetish...
Who am I to judge?
I have a different theory.
I think humans need labor to feel worth.
Forget about capital and how we pay the rent for a second.
Consider Gene Roddenberry's Federation. They magically worked out capital and food and energy etc etc...
Thing about the Star Trek universe is, they have goals and tasks and productivity.
What about people in that universe who aren't graduates of Starfleet?
Is the post human world going to function chasing Pokemon?
There's a considerable brain trust at UF, many of you make your shekels lining up zeros and ones and helping to create this automated world.
What do you do when AIs write the code for themselves?
Is fishing and cooking and snowboarding enough to have a full life?
Is productivity necessary...
I think your client is going to an extreme that isn't supported by the trend. Maybe one day capital will cease to exist but it's unlikely to happen within our lifetimes barring some kind of cataclysm.
That being said I'll completely disagree on the notion that humans need labor to feel worth. Drawing parallel to Star Trek doesn't work because they live in a post-scarcity world where energy production is so cheap as to be virtually free to all and they have the ability to create, on the fly, almost any material they deem necessary. A building isn't something that takes months to design and assemble, it takes seconds with an industrial replicator. More importantly they can create food essentially out of thin air, something 3D printers won't be able to do for a long time.
We don't see much of people that aren't part of Starfleet but those we do are people who generally just do what they want because they love to do it. Joseph Sisko doesn't operate his restaurant because he has to, simply because he wants to. While we notice that no one really patronizes his place it doesn't matter, he can still operate a restaurant at an ostensible financial loss to the state because the energy requirements are so relatively low that it's like using the sun to power a calculator.
There are many who do feel value from their ability to generate value in the market and that's fine for them. Those people will still be essential in an automated world because while many jobs can be automated not all of them can be done so cheaply. Manufacturing, transportation, programming, medical diagnostics, legal discovery, even writing news and sports articles are all things already being handed over to machines or at least the intent is there in the form of massive investment into automation engineers. For some of those it already costs pennies on the dollar to have a machine in place of a human, in others it's still prohibitively expensive.
And that last part is the only part that really matters. It doesn't matter if anyone wants automation, it doesn't matter if society is equipped to handle automation. It doesn't matter if laws are written trying to stem the flood of automation. Automation will happens because it'll be cheaper to have a robot take one's fast food order than to ever pay a human. Doesn't matter if the minimum wage is 7.50/hr or 15/hr, the robot will do it for less than a dollar an hour. No human can ever compete.
So once that starts happening in large enough amounts something will need to change. Either we accept that millions of people will become unemployable through no fault of their own and do something about it or we accept an unemployment rate so high that we'll start seeing food riots in the streets. The companies in question will
not wait until their customer base is secure enough in their income in order to start automating and laying off workers, it won't matter if they know full well that mass unemployment means they won't have customers. They won't care about that because the transition will be slow enough that the short term thinking of most C-levels will push for as many cost savings up front as possible, to hell with the consequences.
Maybe new jobs will be created to replace them but there are multiple problems with this. For starters you can't exactly expect millions of people who are out of work to simply learn a new trade in order to respond to this issue. The vast majority of the population can't afford to do that now. Many people ripe for robotic replacement - cab drivers, for example - are older and less able to learn new marketable skills. And even if they do most companies will want to hire the younger ones that don't have families to support anyways.
Humans can do just fine when there's no need for labor. Hell,
most Americans work their entire lives with that very plan in mind, to retire and do nothing. Many who get bored volunteer or find new hobbies or, if they can afford it, travel. Some even go back to school in their golden years. What makes the retired population different from the rest of the population in that regard? For those who feel the need to have their days structured by someone else I have no doubt plenty of organizations can fill that void without necessitating that the work they do generate a paycheck.
Humanity does not exist solely as a means to turn labor into capital. People can find their value in many other ways that don't require trading their effort for the means to survive.
