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Great post!
If we're indeed getting to somewhere between "Semi Automated Luxury Earth Social Democracy" and "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism" (I'm not convinced - we've build an exceedingly complex civilization and AI can't save us), I think your central premise is correct: a job gives people purpose/structure/incentives. You want/need all of that for a more stable society.
The interesting question is if those jobs need to be so obviously unnecessary.
If you run a jobs program, why not do something good? Take small groups of children on a well-designed adventure. Teach them music, art or crafts. Coach them in a sport. Give them a lot of time one-on-one if you have so much capacity. Hell, take a group of adults through the same program - less formative, but it probably makes them happy/health/social if it's well-done (no excuse why it wouldn't be, you can pay people to do planning and quality control, then staple more incentives to the quality). And most of them don't have anything better to do anyway.
There's the argument that the post-WW2 combination of cheap housing and the expansion of the welfare state in Great Britain (together with the growth of new art schools and direct public funding for culture) resulted in a extraordinary wave of music, art, and cultural experimentation, completely over-proportional to the relative size of British society. And if you look at the artist at the fore-front, much of them came from working‑class or lower‑middle‑class backgrounds.
We could just do that again, so the people uninterested in adult day care can occupy themselves with something productive of their own inspiration. Most likely some of them will greatly contribute to the shared culture.
This is actually how I'm trying to design my future career to be 'AI-proof'. Not getting into details, I'm trying to open a fitness/adventure centered small business because I believe that kind of work 1) will continue to be valuable and human-centric even in Semi Automated Luxury world and 2) I'll be moving into the ownership/capitalist class while the opportunity still exists.
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I think this may be one of those "exponential curves are self-similar" things: if you pulled up an administrator for Hammurabi and described the state of modern farming, I'm sure they'd look at you agog and ask what you do with the idle subsistence farmers. And the story there is that "division of labor" led to a centuries-long Renaissance in terms of pretty much every human endeavor that isn't "scratch out a living on a small plot by hand". For all the claims of "singularity", indefinite exponential growth seems an equally valid outcome.
So I guess I'm on team "we're pretty good at finding new ways to keep ourselves busy", with a look of part dismay at "consoom content slop" trends (as if alcoholism and other vices haven't been with us for ages too).
Part of it is just how you look at the economics: you can exchange money for goods or services, but when you buy goods that money isn't expended in the production and distribution of that good, and it at the end of the day it ends up in the accounts of one or more actual humans. Automation can reduce the number of humans in that chain, but the prospect of eliminating it completely seems pretty far off: "my car, fashioned from steel mined from land I own by my own robot army, fueled by gas my robots extracted and refined".
I agree there are reasonable concerns about the concentration of capital, but the free-market endpoint of "Scrooge McDuck holds all the dollars" is a self-defeating liquidity crisis where nobody can exchange goods or services (even spending from the gold pile ends the condition), and other than inflationary threats, the market is typically ambivalent about a huge hoard of unmoving currency. "Bertrand Russell's teapot, but it's a quadrillion US dollar bills that I own" is at best a way to start a religion, unless the astroid mining folks strike it rich, but even then it'd only directly hit goldbugs unless they have actual US dollars, which are a social construct.
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