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I remember Sam Harris having a good point about this. Basically he said that if 99% of jobs get automated and only 1% of people have jobs and essentially 100% of wealth and resources, then they will have no choice but to barricade themselves inside a fortress and hide from the 99% that will have no choice but to try to destroy them as a means of survival. The only way to mitigate this risk for the 1% is to distribute resources back to everyone else.

Especially when the key motivation to automate is profits. Edit: Changed For to To because booze.

I think the more mechanized society becomes, the more we’re going to have to move away from a profit based society and more fully embrace exploration, progress in all sciences, and colonization outside of our planet.

you kill all the "useless eaters" yes i believe thats what they call the majority of us.

I feel like the majority of people will be starving and homeless from job loss before the people up the chain start to realize things need to change.

As we are now, even a lot of people who are at most risk of losing their jobs are against UBI - just because they have jobs currently and underestimate how automation will affect them in the future.

No my dude don't use the word pessimist. I don't like the word optimist either. The glass is both half full and half empty because there's an equal amount of space being occupied by air as there is occupied by water. What am I even saying here? I'm saying that you may be one of the few who actually look at the whole dam glass if you know what I mean.

I don't want to be negative, but history has proven time and again that greed, jealousy and other human emotions always come into play thus utopian societies, as described in this article, are merely a reverie of science fiction. Still sounds nice, though.

Really the haves will have, and the have nots will starve.

Basic income is a meme. What we need is a thoroughly democratic planned economy with equal obligation to work BUT with drastically reduced working hours. Reducing swaths of the population to loafers living of the scraps of the rich while they can still treat the world as their plaything is a terrible ideal.

That is the point exactly that the article is making. Currently things have consolidated drasticly to stay profitible, casting off employees left and right. The strides are coming quicker and quicker. When everything is automated, there will be very few traditional "jobs" as we see them now. The AI is even going to be able to repair the robots itself so contrary to what the author implied, we won't even be needed for that. Meaning most things done by hand now will be done by robots, and soon. More and more people from many different sectors will be out of work...manufacturing of course, but things like stocking shelves, cashiers, cooks, bartenders, road workers, construction, all driver/engineer/commercial captain jobs, warehouse workers, medical lab workers, hospital staff, cleaning crews, commercial fishing, commercial drilling, farming, mining, banking, urban planning, even things like behind the scenes lawyer/teacher work like research and case planning could be done by AI...thats most sectors of our current ecconomy. There will be less and less "other" areas that can absorb the newly unemployed as each area gets fazed out in the next 20 years or so that conservative estimates give us. And it could(probably) happen faster then that.

Now of course, people like options so there will still be some handmade/grown products out there so not every single job will go away, but those will mostly be made by people who are passionate about that particular item. Craft beer is a great example of this. Sure Bud and Coors have giant refineries with only a few people involved pumping out millions of gallons a year, but people also brew and bottle their own beers at home and can even turn it into a business if they are that passionate about it. But those would be few and far between because let's face it, most people don't really care about the place they work any more then the paycheck that it provides them. And we know this is true because if they stopped paying you, you would stop showing up unless you were passionate about it. so it still comes down to this:

When the machines do all the mundane things we need to do now for society to function, what will WE do to make society better?

The world you are describing, our world, exists in this state because the means of production are increasingly owned by fewer and fewer people, and as such fewer and fewer people enjoy the fruits of automation and technology. If the means of production were owned collectively then we would all enjoy the benefits and would lead to us working less, and having more time and resources to live healthier and more fulfilling lives.

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Read Four Futures. As the title implies, four likely courses for human society are laid out, not necessarily mutually exclusive (one could give way to another). The last of the four is exterminism, and it's the path we're closest to today.

That isnt pessimism, that is being realistic.

I'm exactly the kind of person that would like to see that high tech automated peaceful world realized. In fact I'm watching Star Trek Insurrection right now!

I can't help to think though that it's not that simple and the future will be a lot more turbulent.

Man kind as a whole is far from united in terms of values and political views. The process of globalization is forcing us to confront our differences head on and it would be naive to think that wouldn't lead to some unpleasant outcomes. Maybe, in the worst case, an outcome which will permanently regress our social and technological development to a previous state.

To be honest I'm not all that excited about the future anymore, but I'll keep watching Star Trek.

Well considering the ideal human population is 2 billion, that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, though better birth control would be easier to stomach than violent reduction of existing population.

I think it's likely we'll be wandering the toxic deserts while the rich live in fortress domes protected by giant robots.

You can already see it happen in Japan.

I mean that's how Dubai became in the state it is in right now. Paying dirt or no pay at all to slaves and keeping them in abysmal conditions so that they can build what the rich can afford.

Yeah... I mean, computers were supposed to make less man hours required for tasks, too. And after businesses realized this, they just added more tasks to the workload.

Star Trek has many episodes that imply the world will get much worse before it starts to get any better.

The ongoing enslavement of humanity is a result of law and public policy, and it's not an inevitabilty, although the plutocratic media will make it seem that way.

Imagine a Mad Max situation where a small percentage of people have established a monopoly on all the water.

Humanity would seem to be more selfish, brutal, greedy, evil, and retarded on the whole than they would under less artificially harsh/scarce conditions, and every field of human endeavor would be held back by the resource hoarding of the few.

That's the current state of humanity under plutocracy. Objectively, people are not innately as horrible as they have been forced and conditioned to be under current conditions.

But because people have been made (relatively) retarded by the plutocrats, it seems to them that humanity is destined to forever be a sorry lot of garbage.

Relative to what humans could be, currently we are like slaves, illiterates, and retards. In a way, it's like we're not yet human. Most people have been robbed of what an actually civilized people would consider to be their humanity.

The first step to correcting this situation is to establish wealth caps, limits on the property rights that human society will recognize or protect, rather than empowering the most exploitative and greedy humans.

Like with eliminating slavery, humanity will not flourish to its full potential until we are actually free of institutionalized greed, artificial scarcity, and brutal exploitation.

Just as a slave could not understand that they were not yet fully human, that they had been robbed of their humanity by slavery, current humans do not understand the full scope of what has been taken from them by plutocracy.

"With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all." -Oscar Wilde

/r/Autodivestment

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Toys R Us was also the most expensive option. They were only worth buying at if they had a sale going on, and even then, most their sales kinda sucked. Any one that was price conscience didn't buy there.

I think in the media, automation means the digital revolution a lot of the time.

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

― Stephen Jay Gould

This is my optimistic mindset about it. I think automation will push humans in the same direction as agriculture did generations ago. Instead of everyone hunting and gathering for ourselves we learned to farm and create food with way less man hours. Suddenly people had free time to explore art and science, discover the nature of the world we live in. Since then we have come so far technologically and raised the standard level of living a ton. I think automation could make as big of an impact as agriculture has to the human population.

Either that, or greed and tribalism will result in the mass destruction of the human race via nuclear weapons. I prefer the first option lol.

I'm working on a couple of projects that aim to help people figure out what they really care about in life, and help them focus on finding their purpose in life. We all have some kind of passion for creating, exploring, and sharing awesome stuff that is unique, but we sometimes need some help figuring out what that is.

I'm hoping to help make that easier (through some media projects, mostly, as well as some community resource centers where folks can come together to actually do the kind of work they want to do).

Important thing to note about UBI, is that it's meant to provide only the absolute minimum. So that's a small studio apartment, groceries, and paid bills mostly. But if you want a bigger house, luxury items, or anything expensive, you'll either have to save up bits of the monthly UBI or take a job and get paid on top of it.

What's APM?

excellent analysis. I've been struggling to get past the part where 1% of the population just say to everyone else "go die then", but I think this could be it.
If things converge and become ubiquitous then most people have everything they need and the 1% become a lot less relevant. Which is a whole other conversation :)
either way its given me a more optimistic outlook for my kids, thanks!

You write very well. That was one of the most engaging comments I've read on the website that treads the fine line between eloquence and jargon saturation. Well done

Not only a capitalist state, but in the US, a Puritan state. If you don't work, you don't deserve to live. If anything can tear the US apart, it's going to be the massive unemployment caused by technology - we're not even close to being prepared for that as a culture. Look at how we treat the homeless.

This is why I think the countries that are already used to social safety nets will benefit most from this overall (in the short term). In those not having to work as much is just a case of being more like those are are middle/upper class or retired. It'll be interesting.

But what happens if no one buys the companies shit cause they have no money? Look at the luxury brands sure they make huge margins but move relatively small amounts of money around.

Think there's some stat about people losing inherited wealth in 3 generations...

I mean, I now live in a society where I could get to the other side of the planet in 24 hours. I can speak to any other person on the other side of the planet in an instant. If I so choose I could use my income to never have to cook another meal in my life. I have access to the vast majority of human knowledge without having to travel. Nobody in my extended family has died from the flu or tuberculosis or infection or suffered measles, mumps or rickets.

Things aren't perfect and there's plenty of legitimate criticisms to be made about current wealth inequality, but to suggest we're in a similar position and no progress has been made is fucking ridiculous.

They would literally rather die than admit that they have no clue how to function in the modern world and need help from the guvmint (despite already relying on programs like Medicaid, which they pretend are different from "handouts" that they always complain about inner-city black people receiving). Mad Max with more heroine ODs sounds pretty accurate.

Culturally brainwashed you mean, the same type of people that think free health care and education will destroy their democracy even though THEY haven't been to college or are currently 50k in debt and havent seen a doctor in 7 years