Disagreed. No matter how much you automate, there will always be more work to do, even if you don't as a species "climb up the value latter" which of course we will do.
This is due to the fact that once basic meets are met, whether by manual labour or mechanisation, then more sophisticated needs will evolve for the markets to satisfy.
The same fears have been around during industrialization. How about thinking again about some basic principles that are unlikely to change from one technological/civilisatory wave of change to the next?
American society has no way to deal with a situation where half of the workers are unemployed. During the Great Depression at its very worst, 25% of the population was unemployed. In the robotic future, where 50 million jobs are lost, there is the potential for 50% unemployment. The conventional wisdom says that the economy will create 50 million new jobs to absorb all the unemployed people, but that raises two important questions:
What will those new jobs be? They won't be in manufacturing -- robots will hold all the manufacturing jobs. They won't be in the service sector (where most new jobs are now) -- robots will work in all the restaurants and retail stores. They won't be in transportation -- robots will be driving everything. They won't be in security (robotic police, robotic firefighters), the military (robotic soldiers), entertainment (robotic actors), medicine (robotic doctors, nurses, pharmacists, counselors), construction (robotic construction workers), aviation (robotic pilots, robotic air traffic controllers), office work (robotic receptionists, call centers and managers), research (robotic scientists), education (robotic teachers and computer-based training), programming or engineering (outsourced to India at one-tenth the cost), farming (robotic agricultural machinery), etc. We are assuming that the economy is going to invent an entirely new category of employment that will absorb half of the working population.
Why isn't the economy creating those new jobs now? Today there are millions of unemployed people. There are also tens of millions of people who would gladly abandon their minimum wage jobs scrubbing toilets, flipping burgers, driving trucks and shelving inventory for something better. This imaginary new category of employment does not hinge on technology -- it is going to employ people, after all, in massive numbers -- it is going to employ half of today's working population. Why don't we see any evidence of this new category of jobs today?
I suspect that by the time we develop intelligent artificial minds, we'll have already made inroads into enhancing our own. Come to think of it, we're already doing it.
My point is that there already is not enough work to do. We can fill the basic needs of humanity with well below full employment and this will only become more obvious in the future.
Society creates ways to compensate people for doing some form of work.
It would be great for society if we all reached the point where perhaps 5% of workers covered our basic human needs and the other 95% were paid to entertain and do academic/scientific research to further improve our standard of living.
That is my expectation for a bright future for humanity.
The problem is that 95% of people simply aren't capable of being entertainers or researchers, not in the meaningful sense of creating something genuinely original. That's not elitist, it's a fact. Those people would have to come come, more or less, from the ranks of the 5% needed to operate things.
that is assuming we can't genetically engineer ever and for people who are already born not able to alter our DNA through some kind of viral infection mechanism.
That has been true in theory since the Industrial Revolution with the advent of mass-production and I believe it's still only a problem in theory. As evidence I point to the fact that the majority of countries still fail to meet the basic human needs of their citizenry.
We have drought and flood resistant crops, we have assembly lines, we have heavy machinery, and yet the majority of the world's population lives without clean water and regular meals. There is a huge reservoir of work which needs to be done but because of the degenerate governments, is not getting done.
On the other end of the spectrum, wealthy countries are expanding the definition of what basic needs are. Just last month, Finland declared that broadband internet access is a right of every citizen [1]. All of a sudden you have, by government mandate, a new service which must be provided to every corner of the country.
So on the one hand you have all this latent potential and on the other hand you have ever growing demand for services. I just don't see the artificial jobs/services limit ever being an issue, even though we've long had the means to cloth and feed every man, woman and child on earth.
Meeting basic needs is the beginning of the human story, not the destination. We don't need "work". We need imagination. Work will take care of itself.
This is due to the fact that once basic meets are met, whether by manual labour or mechanisation, then more sophisticated needs will evolve for the markets to satisfy.
The same fears have been around during industrialization. How about thinking again about some basic principles that are unlikely to change from one technological/civilisatory wave of change to the next?