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I don' think automation will have a net-destructive effect on jobs--that is, new jobs will replace old ones. But to go along with the hypothetical, probably a continuation of what we have now: more welfare spending, but also occasional on-time universal remittances like in 2020-2021, but it will not be a UBI.
Likely not because in a consumerist capitalist society elites derive their wealth from the lower classes. Who is clicking those Facebook, Google, or Instagram ads? There will be more business to business activity, bypassing the consumer altogether, such as Facebook selling ad space to NGOs and multinationals, Amazon selling cloud storage to big companies, Microsoft servers, etc.
There will always be some scarcity, such as social status or between the merely rich and ultra-wealthy.
The critical point is when the expected economic value of a typical human goes negative. That's when things start to go screwy, and I worry we're crossing that line soon.
Presently deriving wealth from large numbers of the lower classes is the most common route, but what if you could derive your wealth from large numbers of robots instead? Unless the aggregate poor can sell something to the aggregate not-poor, cash will flow away from the system until the population dies out.
This obviously concludes with Mongolian supremacy, since they have land to build with and fewer mouths to feed. Steppe Nomads at it again
I'm a little confused. Would you agree that the expected economic value of a typical human is positive today? That is, the average human produces more output over the course of their lives than they consume. It seems like requiring this go negative is predicting a large decrease in the average human's economic productivity. Why do you think humans are going to be much less economically in a future with more automation than they are today?
I agree that present-day EV is positive.
Humans take maintenance: food, water, medicine, education, entertainment. Even if you'll accept being a subsistence farmer in the wilderness, that costs land. I'm predicting that, post-automation, most humans will be unable to do enough useful work to pay for this upkeep. That is: anyone able to provide you with food or water or farmland, could get what they want more cheaply by paying for a robot. At that point it's economically efficient to do away with the human. That's what I'm worried about.
I think two different positions are being equated here.
First is the question of whether humans will be productive enough to sustain their own existence, that is, whether humans will create value in excess of what they consume. This has been the case for probably all of human history and it's hard for me to comprehend what could happen to the human species that would cause a massive decrease in productivity such that we would be unable to sustain ourselves by subsistence farming.
Second is the question of whether it will be more efficient to automate various kinds of labor as compared to having humans doing them. That is, whether it will be cheaper in price per unit output to have a robot farm some patch of land (or whatever) as compared to having a human laborer do it.
The key point is that both these things can be true. It can be the case, simultaneously, that (1) humans who engage in subsistence farming are net-EV positive and (2) robots doing subsistence farming instead would have a higher EV.
As long as humans have a comparative advantage (equivalently, as long as automation is not costless) there will be things we can find for humans to do. And if automation is costless, then why wouldn't everyone use it to fully satisfy their desires?
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