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I think this is overstated, looking over broad employment statistics. Even if we assume all of management, business, sales, education, healthcare, office and administration, and community service are gone (that's most of the big ones), and halve food service, what remains is 67M and 20% of 330M is (lazily fudging the difference between FTE and employment) ... also ... 67M. However, american 'living standards are a lot more than that. According to a graph I didn't look into, 55% of american healthcare spending is on the under 65 - and few want to give up good healthcare at 78. For every competent male doctor there might be several less-skilled female assistants, but they do load-bearing work. A lot of management is wasteful, but at least half is probably isefi;. Same for business, and to a much lesser extent administration and sales. Even sales plays a role in living standards - a medical device or industrial salesperson play roles in getting people their final goods. I'm ignoring the second-order effects you mention, but I don't think they're particularly strong. All the now unemployed people will still demand the living standards and products they did before, which will still require construction, transportation, lawn care, healthcare workers, etc. I'm also including 'continued improvement in technology and consumer goods' as a part of living standards, which seems reasonable, as few would want to give them up. Reintroducing half of what was cut brings us to 30%. I'm not confident in this though. I don't see room for easy efficiency improvements in gardening or repair, but construction's famous cost overruns and delays suggests room for cuts.
Now, that's if you fix living standards. Acknowledging that much of that is an empty simulacra - wow, neatly manicured greens! personal food service! plastic trinkets, from factory to your doorstep! therapeutic shopping for cute clothing! Vacations to tourist traps that could just as well be ten miles away! endless flavorings and combinations of the same foods, heroic healthcare efforts to let obese 78yos watch a few more years of TV, that's a stronger point. Cut a lot of that and you're at <12% easily.
Economics suggessts living standards might, so long as labor is still mostly human-driven, expand to use much of available labor. Economics is "neutral to the utility functions of agents", so it doesn't prove that - there are separate reasons people want grounds well kept or elderly preserved while slowly decaying. But they do. And 'the market' doesn't value man-hours equally, it values spending power, so even if Jose would enjoy watching TV more than Mike wants his bushes trimmed, Mike has money and Jose needs money.
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This is a very persuasive argument, the more I think about it the more I tend to agree. Useful economic work is a minority. Having personal experience at a startup it boggles the mind to realize some people really do 10x or 100x the work of others on short time frames.
I suppose my only concern would be our ability to grapple with the speed of change.
However I take issue with this dreary view of things. Our very simple brains, when networked properly, were able to build AGI. Even if that is our greatest accomplishment, we’ve done some incredible things along the way as well. Just stopping here would satisfy the Natural Law crowd, inherent dignity in being human, etc.
That being said, I don’t see why we can’t augment ourselves to keep pace or at least stay in the orbit of an ASI. I’d imagine at a certain point most will choose to do that - we are a species of technologists after all. We want to feel relevant, and it’s hard to feel relevant if you can’t understand what’s going on.
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A welfare state is not a post-employment/automated society. In a welfare state as you describe, productive people are doing productive work and the rest are taking advantage of their production to avoid doing so. But all the necessary productive work is being done and ultimately being done by people (even if they use machines as force-multipliers to do it). This is different in kind from an automated society where the productive work is done without the people.
The question is who exactly are the "productive people" keeping all of us afloat.
How many people performing some activity for money are really necessary for society to function, and how many of them are just UBI in the most wastefully imaginable form?
Is this popular meme right?
Is Nicolas really the Atlas holding up the world by typing on his laptop all day?
If so, then utopia is really there. AI can do whatever Nicolas does faster and better, and Nicolas can be hanging on the beach with his friends.
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It's an interesting question, but not relevant to the difference between a welfare state and a post-employment/automated society. All that matters is that category exists. And it does. At a very basic level, someone driving a tractor, operating mining equipment, or working on an assembly line making (e.g.) ovens, is doing useful work. From this flows more; there's some level of supervision necessary for that. There's some level of accounting needed. People have to build and repair on the machinery used. We need people to see to the health of the people doing all that. There's transport needed to get this stuff around. Etcetera. And each of those things themselves need some sort of support, and you can follow it out until a very large number of people who are many levels disconnected from the traditional "agriculture, mining, and manufacturing" are in fact doing productive work. We may suspect there's also a large number of people doing bullshit work (certainly I suspect that), but we know there's a lot of non-bullshit work being done by humans. In a post-employment/automated society there is not.
As for the meme, I have no idea what it's trying to express. If AI takes over one job category, and the people who do it go hang on the beach with their friends, we don't have a post-automated society, we just have more leeches. If AI takes over everything, that's another story.
That the "social contract" is the system by which the average frenchman subsidizes Africa, Africans coming to his land, boomers travelling the world and, and this is the amusing absurd addition, certifiably insane right wing degenerates like Varg. It's a common French complaint about taxation and rent seeking which are staples of French society.
The underlying impetus behind this is a truth that is conspicuously absent from the french debate on pensions, which is that as it stands the working man lives a worse life than a pensioner, and has no hope of ever living the life pensioneers are living today.
@Eetan is criticizing this view because the average white collar Frenchman is doing make work for his money and AI can also send emails around to make things happen, maybe.
In your words, the meme is saying boomers and foreigners are leeches, and the question is whether the people that work aren't already leeches also.
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