I honestly believe that many decades from now, 20 to 50 years, at least one industrialized country will have something like a Basic income guarantee.
It happened to Rome. When all of their work was done by slaves, the free Romans got bread and circuses on the government's dime.
I think we will reach a point where unemployment will just grow despite a growing economy. And it will steadily grow for months, then years, and over the years we'll go through a long and painful political process which I think will eventually result in a a Basic income guarantee.
At that point a staggering percentage of our economy will be 100% automated.
The unemployment part really concerns me. We are going to be automating so many people out of jobs and there is going to be no work or only minimum wage jobs out there for them. Whatever field the majority of them train to will be slammed with pay cuts as a glut of new workers gets added to the pool.
We really need to start implementing universal basic income
Maybe we'll realize through this pandemic that a huge number of existing jobs are bullshit and totally unnecessary and finally start transitioning to a basic income.
I think it’s safe to assume that this machine will be getting improvements. The “pick” part will surely also get automated at some point. It’s quite obvious to anybody who is willing to think about it for a while, to deduct that these kind of jobs will eventually all get automated.
What the various governments should be doing now, is to start preparing the society to a new reality in which no-skill and low-skill jobs are gone. This will happen at some point. What do we do about it? The only thing that is happening so far are various timid Universal Income pilots. But those often hit substantial political pressure and are being labeled as socialist or even communist, and therefore unacceptable. So how do we prepare?
College will become mandatory but it will matter what your degree is because demand and supply dictates market economy. I'm more worried about full automation that is coming in the next decades because it will leave many unemployed. I think universal base income is inevitable but what comes after that?
As soon as middle class work starts to get automated we will form a new system of resource allocation because all of a sudden the current tax system doesn't work and we go through the mother of all recessions.
Can't wait till this happens in North America. I hope we realize shorter work days and basic income in the next couple of decades. Then we will truly have a golden age.
I think that sooner or later we'll end up with higher taxes, and basic income. Over the next 20-30 years we'll have fewer well paid employees making more money, and masses of people out of job market, depending on welfare and government support.
If jobs continue disappearing due to robots and software and are not sufficiently replaced by new jobs, then we will end up with a lot of unemployed, poor people. At that point, we will either introduce some variant of UBI or we will have civil war.
Also not only for ChatGPT, but there will be a timespan between majority of people are automated out of jobs and a a forceful redistribution of wealth happens (let’s call it socialism). It’s always a good idea to have that $$ to bridge that gap.
It won't happen until the era of universal material prosperity, when people won't need to work at all. The bored majority will demand freedom from the moral norms that make their lives bland.
That sounds essentially like Basic Income, depending on how it's doled out. Especially with the rise of automation "taking all our jobs," it seems like some form of this is inevitable. But of course things will probably have to get much worse before our culture starts accepting the idea (despite the fact that statistically it will directly benefit most of the people).
It will be a slow-motion economic calamity, similar to how internet sourcing of materials and sales has gutted the lower middle class. The generation in the out-automated job never retrains or productively re-enters the workforce. Instead they turn around and vote for people who want to flip over the economic card table.
Democratic capitalism has to get this isht figured out, or the next century is going to be unpleasant.
Given the stall of real wages for the lower ends of the wealth spectrum, the replacement of human labor by machines seems slated for hunger and riots, since the human jobs aren't actually being replaced.
So yes, I expect it actually will be a rather terrible time.
In the very long run almost all of us will be unproductive.
I suspect that in a society like that money will no longer be as important as it is in the current one. Social security as 'basic income' is a staple in many countries right now, and those countries would be far worse off if they didn't have it. Expect to see more countries adopting it and the gap between social security and income for work to slowly decrease over time. It's a matter of votes in the long run (assuming democracy).
This will be huge. Imagine a cinder block building half-buried in the ground with a loading dock and a drive-up. You wave your chipped credit card, the screen shows your last 5 orders or a Menu button. Make your selection and drive up to the pneumatic delivery chute. Plop! your bagged meal arrives seconds later.
Economically, it means we'll finally have to face the fact that, to run our country, we don't actually need everybody to work any more. Have to figure that one out (or at least, come to the consensus that a basic income is a good thing).
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