And when the day comes that available labor far outstrips the demand for labor? Your skill may be in demand, but how many will be willing to do the job at subsistence rates? Will the day come when 10s of millions (billion even?) of people be made redundant by technology? What will they do to eat? How will nations and societies deal with this? Grind the unemployed in to Soylent Green?, grand social welfare programs?, war?
I think your point is lost here. Most people here are self-made millionaires and entrepreneurs that believe everyone else just doesn't try hard enough.
That depends whether we work out hard AI. I am not sure in the past 50 years if we have made much real progress towards writing programs that will automatically produce programs of greater scale and complexity than themselves.
People are willing to pay a heavy premium for handmade goods, despite those goods often being physically inferior in every aspect to a machine-made equivalent.
Fundamentally, the economy is driven by demand, and demand is driven by culture. If it is perceived that it is distasteful to buy machine-made goods, then people will buy handmade.
Similarly, i assume that anything 'tailored' will become popular. If it is as cheap to produce a run of one as a run of 1 million (and this day is coming), then everyone will be looking for something tailored just for them. There's a huge opportunity for low-skilled labor there.
It will be within our lifetime, and unfortunately there is not a damn thing the human species can do about it. The machines will be our producers, and our destroyers.
We make them in our image, and they will do just as we did.
Exactly! We just raise corporate taxes so high that the money collected can support unemployed masses, thus reaching the long sought after ideal of work being the option and not the necessity. Each person will have the choice to either work towards elevating his social status (via creating his own invention/company/piece of art/...) or just collect the state check.
I agree with the raising taxes part...but corporate taxes are a terrible vehicle to do so. Aside from the terrible distorted incentives that corporations face due to corporate taxation (Hey dumb shareholders....buy me this jet! Otherwise you'll just spend the money on taxes!), inference studies have shown that increases in corporate taxes disproportionately affect those at the bottom of the corporate tax structure.
Since corporate earnings exist for the benefit of the shareholder, it makes far more sense to raise taxes on shareholders than on corporations. Shareholders don't get to benefit with trying to justify their personal spending as a tax deductible business cost.
Dreamdu5t was just making the point that every person owns the products of their labour; and one's failure does not grant any right to take from others.
> I don't owe you anything simply because you exist.
I have an opposing opinion. Let me explain my thoughts.
In a fair system everyone would have access to the same amount of land once he is born.
He could then farm the land build a house and provide for himself.
But this system would not be very efficient. We as a society do better once we start specializing. As a necessary result some people / companies have to own more land than others.
Now if someone is not able to make a living because his skills are not in demand, I think we as a society have the obligation to help this person, simply because he suffers consequences from a system, we as a society profit from.
I always liked this fictional story about it. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm