The nature of this conversation seems to be that we’ll seriously go on a side tangent to talk about the merits of central economic planning to support commodity prices, rather than face the fact that some Americans are demanding to keep 19th-century jobs at 21st-century wages.
I acknowledge said fact.
~Max
Based on what happened today, I think it is safe to say America is in steep decline.
Before Trump, internationally respected intellectual property rights were never a serious thing. If America funds and education system that trains a kid, funds the infrastructure to make his dream a reality, and then all China has to do is copy that and produce it for a firth of the cost that doesn’t make a sustainable equity. Without international protection of patents global free market seems a winner for CEOs, only. American industry workers have been feeling the brunt of this for decades.
We have to think about what sort of society we want to live in. Up till now, we’ve needed people to work in order to produce the goods and services we need and want. If that’s no longer the case in the future, then a society where the majority are paid to watch TV and be consumers is preferable to one where they are left to starve, but it’s still not a good society. We should be aiming for a society where everyone has the chance to contribute and to better themselves, and to reach their potential. Sitting around watching TV does not make for a satisfying life. Achieving something does.
It’s amazing how good intelligent people can be at playing stupid when they do not want to admit the truth.
They chose 10 trainees from 900 applicants. But if they can scale it up then more power to them. There’s also the problem of lack of work in the area, but perhaps they can look further afield.
Medical schools are very oversubscribed. They don’t need to take random burger flippers when they can select on whatever abilities they think are relevant. It may not be impossible to train the burger flipper, but there isn’t nearly enough demand for doctors to make it worthwhile.
Most people don’t really want to be idle. The people who are idle often face serious financial or circumstantial obstacles to achievement.
I think you’d be pleasantly surprised if you gave people the resources not only to cover their basic needs of food, shelter, and medicine, and then gave them the resources to train and retrain themselves as the job market dictates. Many would find ways to achieve, many wouldn’t.
And some folks will always find joy in being labor scolds who criticize those who don’t think life is all about working one’s finger to the bone.
I’ve been unemployed and met other unemployed people and unless you try hard, it’s easy to get stuck in a rut of getting up late, doing nothing useful with your time and achieving nothing. And it doesn’t make you happy. So that’s my opinion from personal experience.
Were you unhappy enough in your idleness to go work as a garbageman in the daytime and then pull a second shift at McDonalds in the evenings to keep a roof over your head?
If not, I’d suggest maybe you’re not the social mind-reader that you seem to think you are. Make your own decisions for yourself, and respect others to do the same.
I was unhappy enough to take various temporary jobs that I disliked. And it doesn’t require mind reading to see that eg my friend from gaming was happier after he got a job in a shop and started working towards becoming manager, or that my Mum was happier after returning to work from years spent raising us kids, despite not having a high powered job.
Have you ever been involuntarily unemployed for any length of time?
If there are no jobs around then people won’t have a choice, will they?
And anyway, I’m not suggesting we force anyone to do that or anything similar. I’m saying we should automate away the drudgery aspect of jobs but set things up in a way that encourages people to contribute something useful to society and allows for advancement.
With all due respect @DemonTree, this isn’t about one unemployed person making their decision about where to work. This is about huge societal change at every level.
Farming is a good microcosm for what I am talking about here. But this isn’t unique to farming - this same exact process happened in manufacturing too, for example.
In 1800 farmers grew enough food for 3 to 5 people, and 90 percent of the population lived on farms. Go back in time and tell smart policymakers of 1800 that by 1995 one farmer would produce enough food for 128 people, and that less than 1% of the population would be doing farm work. How do you think they’d react? Probably much the same way you are reacting to the automation we are talking about here: what would all those people do for work? How would they make a living as tomorrow’s few large farms start outproducing today’s numerous farms?
Indeed, there was much agrarian unrest towards the second half of the 19th century for exactly these reasons. But what happened? Urban centers grew; production of both food and everything else skyrocketed; and society, overall, prospered.
It is absolutely true that we will need to redefine what it means to work. In the relatively near future, many staple jobs of the 20th century will disappear. No more cab or truck drivers, many fewer factory workers (like, by the same order of magnitude as the decline in farm workers 2 centuries ago).
The remaining farm workers will be decimated too - for example, machines capable of picking soft fruits like strawberries without damaging them have come onto the market in just the last couple of years. Do you know how many seasonal and migrant workers are employed during California’s harvest season precisely for the purpose of picking soft fruits alone?
And it isn’t only manual labor at risk. China is working on AI that can diagnose patients, and is already matching or exceeding doctors in some areas. That doesn’t mean we won’t have human doctors; it does mean one doctor will be able to do the work of a dozen in the not so distant future. And diagnosis is probably the toughest place for AI to thrive. Surgery - which requires extreme precision - is a place where AI will soon outcompete humans. Soon enough a surgeon’s job will not be to cut you up and remove your tumors, but simply to guide a robotic arm to the right area and watch it while it performs surgery, identifying cancerous tissue with far more precision than the human eye and guiding a scale with a steadiness unmatched by any human doctor.
Lawyers are not immune either. Again, I’m not saying you’ll pull up Lawyer.exe on your laptop when you get to court. But your lawyer will review documents a hundred times faster when assisted by AI which already exists.
We are headed towards a world where one human, assisted by AI, does work that today would take a hundred. This is scary to us, on this side of the third industrial revolution. But just like when an ancient Egyptian first decided to tie a plough to an ox and call it an “ard”, dramatically decreasing the time and effort it took to plough his field, mass unemployment and societal collapse didn’t result - we will get through this.
What will the people of the future be doing? A whole range of things. Look at how many people have become content creators in the age of the internet. You and I may look at video game streamers or makeup tutorial instructors or hobbyists who document their passion on YouTube and think “what a waste of time”, but enough people are interested in this content and willing to support it a buck or two at a time that there are lots of people making a living this way. I think that will continue to grow.
For another example, and one that I find personal distasteful but which may become more common in the future, look the the ultra-religious community in Israel. By voting as a bloc and gaming Israel’s parliamentary system, they have lots and lots of undue influence, which has allowed them to push for exemption from army service and for a stipend for rabbinical students.
These people don’t make much money, but they do make enough to live on. What do they do with their time? Study religious texts. Again, you or I may feel like this is a total waste of time; that they aren’t making anything productive. But they’d disagree, and they find meaning and fulfillment in this work; in fact, study after study shows that these people are actually happier than the average population, despite their relative poverty.
I DEFINITELY don’t think that we should all become rabbinical students, but I think this shows that when you take care of people’s basic needs, they find their own work that’s meaningful to them to do.
Maybe in the future thanks to automation our levels of production will be so astronomically high that only a small portion of the population actually engages in the meaningful production of necessities. That sounds crazy and terrifying, but from the Ancient Egyptian perspective, that’s already us. Only the 1-2% that works in Agriculture and maybe 10% that works in construction or adjacent fields do something that the Egyptians would recognize as ‘essential’. Show an ancient Egyptian a chart of what percentage of the population works in what industry and they’d laugh at you - your civilization would starve within a year! And all those peasants not employed on farms would probably rebel against the pharaoh!
The rest of society will find ways to fill up their time doing something that they and at least some other people value. This is human nature.
Eta: if you’re interested in more about this, I can heartily recommend the book “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” by Yuval Noah Harari.
There ARE real and present dangers stemming from AI and Automation as well. But people not wanting to do anything useful is not one of those dangers.
I’m talking about human nature. That if society is going to change so much that we need to plan to do something about it, rather than letting it evolve without intervention, then we should take human nature into account and build a society that suits us and makes as many people as happy as possible. Communism, for example, did not take human nature into account and did not result in a society that people would choose to live in.
If this automation revolution goes the same way as the industrial revolution then we won’t need to do anything. Old jobs will disappear and new ones will appear. If that happens all well and good, we won’t need to intervene and this discussion is moot. But the policy makers in the second half of the 19th century were not proposing to pay those farm workers to sit around and do nothing. They did not need to redefine what it means to work.
Not at all, it sounds like the present day. We are in agreement here. But currently people do manage to produce something that others are willing to pay for. If in a future of (even more) plenty, that continues to happen, then like I said, no problem. The idea I am objecting to is in effect paying people to be consumers rather than to produce something of value.
One thing I’m not sure about is to what extent agricultural automation was driven by people leaving to work in the cities, and how much was the reverse. Perhaps that’s a question for GC.
That part kind of did happen. 
I’m not suggesting we pay people to be consumers. I am suggesting we meet people’s basic needs (so they aren’t starving in the streets or dying of plague) but that if they want anything above and beyond that they will find a way to produce SOMETHING - whether that’s physical goods, food, entertainment, philosophy, makeup tutorial videos, or religious pontification - that other people find valuable.
We don’t need to make that production a requirement to not starve in order for people to do these things. Whether for luxuries (and the common person may well live far beyond our current means, yet still desire luxuries - because human nature is that happiness isn’t based on absolute wealth, but relative wealth compared to others), social status, or just to fill the time, people will continue producing SOMETHING.
It just may not be something we today would recognize as valuable, any more than an ancient Egyptian would comprehend our financial sector.
And we’re better off for it!
We do that already; what do you want to change?
This is all a bit of a tangent, but I think this is the wrong way of looking at it.
Jobs exist because humans have needs. So if we reach a point where there are no jobs for most people, the implication is that everyone has their needs met: everything from hot meals to iPhones. The fewer people that can afford robot made goods and services, the less disruptive it is to the existing work structures.
Now of course, many people would scoff at this, and point out how automation has increased and yet there are lots of people in the US that are unemployed and/or below the poverty line.
But this is not because there are not millions of jobs available, but rather because of various market failures like 1) not enough people trained in areas that are in demand, 2) opportunities not being given to certain groups (e.g. a 50-year old guy that could make a fantastic junior clerk but will never be offered that role) and yes 3) some proportion of people with drug or alcohol problems that would need to be treated first.
Anyway my point is that it’s a bit of a red herring to think of people as entirely redundant; that would be great if it happened, but isn’t really the near future problem.
You may wish to check the headlines, Demon. Almost 4,000 Americans died of a plague just yesterday. 
In the US at least, many people go bankrupt due to health issues. Your insurance comes from your job; if you lose your job due to a medical issue you also lose your insurance.
Beyond that, I don’t think a modern nation as wealthy as we are should have any homelessness.
And 1000 Britons, too. But not because they couldn’t afford treatment, but because a) we can’t always cure the plague, and b) not enough capacity available to deal with the pandemic (which we can blame on the government in various ways, but the only suggestion to improve matters was @octopus’s idea of subsidising strategic industries like medical equipment, which everyone objected to.)