The discussion of basic income has been brought up here before. The article briefly mentions unemployment, but I think that is going to become a major issue in the future. Advances in technology keep cutting down the need for labor.
As automation erodes away at the need for workers, what will we be left with? Certainly, there will always be a need for people that can maintain and innovate our technologies, but why hire people to do the things that machines can do better, faster, and more cost-effectively? I think unemployment is something that is naturally going to increase in the long-term. I don't know if basic income would work or not, but it is worth considering.
Ultimately we may want robots to do everything for us, and making anything to be so efficient that governments or companies would even offer food or other stuff for free.
But until that happens, there will probably be a transition period of 50-100 years that will be very difficult for most humans. I think there are 2 solutions to fix that:
1) move humans "upmarket" (more complex work robots can't do very well yet) constantly through education. But this sounds very difficult to do and organize, as the skill to learn will always be a moving target, and I have very little faith governments are competent and fast enough to tackle this problem. So self-teaching from Internet courses and whatnot, might be the only solution here. The problem is humans also hate learning, and can't wait to get out of school to "stop learning stuff".
2) Pay everyone a living wage, for "free", by increasing taxes on capital for companies, all over the world, to sustain the increasing unemployment and the effects of automation.
Since governments are lazy, and like solutions that they don't have to think too hard about, this is probably the more likely scenario.
That's not to say they will do it willingly, though. Oh no, especially not with corporations basically owning many of the world's biggest governments right now. So there will be more mass protests and revolutions, until the governments get forced to come up with a solution - any solution (that works for the unemployed people).
Why would unemployment be any bigger of an issue in the next 10 years than it has over the last 150 years? We've had incredible increases in efficiency in both manufacturing and agriculture in the early 1900s alone, yet unemployment has rarely broken 10%.
You bring up a good point, but I don't think the status quo will be able to persist. This is because of the pace of at which efficiency increases. To be honest, I haven't looked relevant data, but I imagine our rate of improvement is non-linear. As technology advances, it increases the rate at which technology advances. Thus far, demand has scaled in conjunction with the increases in supply. I don't believe it will be able to keep up in the long run though. You just won't need as many workers.
You'll also notice that the average worker now has far more education and training than in the past. This is a side effect of our increased dependency on technology. As more and more specialization is required, the barrier to entry in the workforce will just become too high.
I too see unemployment (or rather, the diminishing demand for labor) as the key political issue of the 21st century. I can imagine a point by which the vast majority of humans simply aren't needed to provide services to the owners of capital.
Yeah, it's scary to try and imagine what sort of society would come out even further in the future. An aristocracy with an elite worker class and the masses in relative poverty? Relative is the operative word here, of course. It may well be that the quality of life for someone in poverty in such a future would be better than a middle class person today.
Convincing the 1% to waste money on labor-intensive services and renewable goods would help with redistribution of wealth. Like $50 hand-carved bamboo chopsticks or $15 servings of organic quinoa. Entertainment catering to the 1% probably qualifies as well.
> Mass markets are driven by marginal costs, not one-time engineering costs.
If you define "mass market" as "a market in which the quantities delivered are so high as to render the amortized initial fixed costs negligible in the final cost of goods", this is, of course, tautologically true.
Of course, that that doesn't actually help with proving that any particular market is a "mass market" in that sense with regard to any particular proposed bit of one-time engineering.
>I think that is going to become a major issue in the future.
As hackers are fond of repeating: "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed."
There are already huge surplus populations. This is in evidence in a brazen way in southern Europe as the crisis restructures economy and society and yet it is no less true in the USA.
One of the most pressing questions for contemporary liberalism is: What is to be done about these surplus populations? Switzerland has formulated one trajectory of response in the referendum for a basic income. Other wealthy countries take a different path towards control.
Consider this famous question posed by Michel Foucault: "Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" Are these not all ways in which we already deal with surplus populations?
As one method of social control, work, is becoming less and less available and more and more precarious the other methods of social control are on the rise. Pupils are staying in school longer. Ever increasing numbers of people are being sent to prison. Wars continue to be waged.
The workplace, the school, the barracks, the hospital, and the prison are not all just places. They are conditions.
The conditions that typify each are being sublimated throughout all of society and increasingly so. Leisure now often has a productive aspect, e.g., vaporous web browsing is monetized through ads. The panopticon was an innovation in prison design and now it is our experience everywhere.
The line between society and prison is blurring as more and people are under state control in the form of parole and probation. More generally, entire populations are having the conditions of prison thrust upon them through constant surveillance and the constant threat of search and seizure of their person, e.g., stop and frisk.
The future is bleak because the present is bleak. This bleakness just isn't evenly distributed - yet.
To innovate, in the HN sense of the word, is invariably to hasten this ongoing distribution. Every time the Internet eats an industry power and money is re-consolidated into the hands of fewer and fewer and the surplus population grows.
"Understood as a class, programmers occupy the same position today that the bourgeoisie did in 1848, wielding social and economic power disproportionate to their political leverage. In the revolutions of 1848, the bourgeoisie sentenced humanity to two more centuries of misfortune by ultimately siding with law and order against poor workers. Programmers enthralled by the Internet revolution could do even worse today: they could become digital Bolsheviks whose attempt to create a democratic utopia produces the ultimate totalitarianism.
On the other hand, if a critical mass of programmers shifts their allegiances to the real struggles of the excluded, the future will be up for grabs once more. But that would mean abolishing the digital as we know it—and with it, themselves as a class. Desert the digital utopia."
from Deserting the Digital Utopia: Computers against Computing[1]
As automation erodes away at the need for workers, what will we be left with? Certainly, there will always be a need for people that can maintain and innovate our technologies, but why hire people to do the things that machines can do better, faster, and more cost-effectively? I think unemployment is something that is naturally going to increase in the long-term. I don't know if basic income would work or not, but it is worth considering.