

Ask HN: How to welcome Technological Unemployment? - franciscop

As a society, being able to produce the same goods with less work is good news. The point where we can produce food for a whole country with 1% of the work required N years ago means that everyone can be fed. Same applies with all other basic resources and most of the advanced ones.<p>However, for the individual this means that &#x27;middle&#x27; and &#x27;low&#x27; skilled jobs are getting scarce as more and more things get automated. Only highly skilled and technical jobs (most people here probably) with many years of study and dedication are on the rise. Also, a single person working 8-ish hours a day can produce a lot more than 4 people working 2 hours a day so you cannot just make everyone work 10 hours a week. So my question is:<p>How can we grow as a society while making everyone able to take advantage of it?<p>Some notes and why this question is tricky:<p>- No one wants to do work they hate just so other people can take advantage of it. This discards the notion of open source, since most of it is <i>pleasant</i> or is done to scratch your itch.
- Preferably short-middle term, country-independent answers. This discards concepts like Resource Based Economy (highly automated cities) as they are long term.
- Basic income is a nice concept and basically I&#x27;m looking for answers in this fashion, but preferably not basic income on itself (since it&#x27;s also been widely talked about). However I think it gets its good reputation from being seen as a &quot;donation&quot; to the poorer. I am asking more about a fair system within the current society.
======
pknight
I wonder what it would be like if it were possible to add new dimensions to
the economy. If we reward ecological, service and aesthetic contributions in a
similar way we reward the exchange of scarce goods and services in the economy
today... I wonder if anyone has put serious thought into how that could be
done.

