Very reminiscent of creative destruction from Joseph Schumpeter - the whaling industry was destroyed by the petroleum industry. The survivors are the ones who possess the skills that are in demand. As the demand shifts, skills need updating.
Why would new industries and job roles always spring up to replace ones which have become obsolete? I agree that historically this has happened but I see no reason that it should be a necessary consequence. We have to consider the possibility that a segment of the population will have no realistic options for producing marginal value.
Because the labor and resources freed up from automation and increased productivity allow us to pursue new things. There's always more to improve upon.
Why would this segment of the population not have realistic options for producing marginal value? Everyone is capable of learning new things.
Perhaps not quickly or efficiently enough, but even worse, it's not a given that there will always be enough valuable activities for everyone to perform and earn a wage.
This is particularly true when wealth is not evenly distributed. The needs that a small group of wealthy people have for human-created value is, well, small, and therefore wealth barely gets redistributed. Other factors compound this, like the fact that most of the proceeds from a market do not go to the (potentially many) people involved in producing the goods or services, but to those comparatively few with the capital to finance that activity; the chasm between the (so to speak) haves and the have nots grows bigger and bigger.
At that point, a significant segment of society simply can't earn a living, and society must adapt to become sustainable again.
It's not the kind of thing that happens overnight, but you can see how most forces are pushing in that direction, so without a fundamental change in the dynamics of production, market and compensation, it's not a question of if, but when.
Do they? Cause from my view, the role of capital is greatly diminished, even from 10 years ago. PG has acknowledged as much with their move towards smaller monetary investments in Y Combinator businesses.
pg is a pretty small part of the economy. Still, there is truth in what you are saying but when it comes to developing software there are barriers to entry much more substantial than capital.
Until it doesn't - how many draft horses do you see working now? Besides which, we've got over fifty years of history telling us that wealth concentration is happening faster and faster. If just that trend alone continues then within our lifetime most people would not be earning enough to sustain themselves.
We're such a small segment of history, though. We're just a blip on the timeline of the universe. Look at how our population has expanded in the last 100 years alone...some things are just unsustainable.
And when the day comes that available labor far outstrips the demand for labor? Your skill may be in demand, but how many will be willing to do the job at subsistence rates? Will the day come when 10s of millions (billion even?) of people be made redundant by technology? What will they do to eat? How will nations and societies deal with this? Grind the unemployed in to Soylent Green?, grand social welfare programs?, war?
I think your point is lost here. Most people here are self-made millionaires and entrepreneurs that believe everyone else just doesn't try hard enough.
That depends whether we work out hard AI. I am not sure in the past 50 years if we have made much real progress towards writing programs that will automatically produce programs of greater scale and complexity than themselves.
People are willing to pay a heavy premium for handmade goods, despite those goods often being physically inferior in every aspect to a machine-made equivalent.
Fundamentally, the economy is driven by demand, and demand is driven by culture. If it is perceived that it is distasteful to buy machine-made goods, then people will buy handmade.
Similarly, i assume that anything 'tailored' will become popular. If it is as cheap to produce a run of one as a run of 1 million (and this day is coming), then everyone will be looking for something tailored just for them. There's a huge opportunity for low-skilled labor there.
It will be within our lifetime, and unfortunately there is not a damn thing the human species can do about it. The machines will be our producers, and our destroyers.
We make them in our image, and they will do just as we did.
Exactly! We just raise corporate taxes so high that the money collected can support unemployed masses, thus reaching the long sought after ideal of work being the option and not the necessity. Each person will have the choice to either work towards elevating his social status (via creating his own invention/company/piece of art/...) or just collect the state check.
I agree with the raising taxes part...but corporate taxes are a terrible vehicle to do so. Aside from the terrible distorted incentives that corporations face due to corporate taxation (Hey dumb shareholders....buy me this jet! Otherwise you'll just spend the money on taxes!), inference studies have shown that increases in corporate taxes disproportionately affect those at the bottom of the corporate tax structure.
Since corporate earnings exist for the benefit of the shareholder, it makes far more sense to raise taxes on shareholders than on corporations. Shareholders don't get to benefit with trying to justify their personal spending as a tax deductible business cost.
Dreamdu5t was just making the point that every person owns the products of their labour; and one's failure does not grant any right to take from others.
> I don't owe you anything simply because you exist.
I have an opposing opinion. Let me explain my thoughts.
In a fair system everyone would have access to the same amount of land once he is born.
He could then farm the land build a house and provide for himself.
But this system would not be very efficient. We as a society do better once we start specializing. As a necessary result some people / companies have to own more land than others.
Now if someone is not able to make a living because his skills are not in demand, I think we as a society have the obligation to help this person, simply because he suffers consequences from a system, we as a society profit from.
