It has the potential to be good for humanity. All the most dangerous/degrading jobs accomplished by robots. Allow people shorter work days and allow people to do "less essential" jobs. More artists, more psychotherapists, more people building affordable housing, more nannies and helpers, people working on just improving life for everyone else out there.

But then, unrestrained capitalism isn't compatible with this. The way it's been going in America for the past 40 years, productivity has gone up but salaries have gone down relative to inflation and work hours have stayed the same or gone up. Many people need 2-3 minimum wage jobs just to feed the kids and pay the rent, no free time. The rich, the corporations, are trying to milk the people for all that they're worth, to try and maintain the elite at absolutely insane levels of wealth.

The predictable outcome, in the next few decades, is that we'll get worse jobs, higher rents, smaller apartments, more cost increases on food and electricity, longer work hours. The middle class will keep getting squeezed until things reach some kind of breaking point. The rich will have to provide the rest of us with enough distraction and a minimum level of comfort required to prevent famine, disease, civil war, and revolution from happening.

We could have some kind of utopia, we have the technology, but the wealthiest capitalist are too near-sighted, it seems, to understand that it would be in everyone's best interest to make sure that everyone is comfortable and safe. Rampant poverty, hunger and crime aren't going to make their lives better. Being some rich elite living in a world filled with miserable, diseased, violent and uneducated masses doesn't sound all that fun.

Assuming that we aren't living in a Culturesque post scarcity society how do you allocate stuff if economic output is no longer important? I don't think that there is an easy solution to this, but my gut feeling is that the world is going to get a whole lot uglier if we don't figure it out.

The problem is that the worker who is going to be out of a job doesn't own the company that buys the robots to replace him/her. Ever heard of a lights out factory that has all the former assembly line workers at home with full salary? Didn't think so. What Gates is describing will only make those that have the money stronger.

I do not predict a utopia.

People in the bottom 50% survive because they are an economically valuable resource - the elite can profit off of them from labor and taxes, while giving them barely enough money to purchase food and shelter to survive.

Once people are entirely useless, and machines can do everything better and cheaper, there will be economic pressure to purchase and/or take any assets the poor folks might have (to create more machines), and to let them waste away and starve.

Revolution will be out of the question, because machines fight your wars for you.

But hey, once all the poor people die off, the average life expectancy and GDP per capita figures will be way up!

I don't see how Gates' recommendations do anything to push us toward the latter.

"This means eliminating payroll and corporate income taxes while also scrapping the minimum wage so that businesses will feel comfortable employing people at dirt-cheap wages instead of outsourcing their jobs to an iPad."

That kind of sounds like a bunch of broke people on the bottom end. They might be able to save their jobs if they take much less than minimum wage which isn't a livable wage to start with. I'm all for a utopian future where people can spend time doing things they are good at or love instead of working but that will require a major change in the mindset of the people (especially in the US). Right now there is an anti-welfare movement and they say the alternative is to get a job. There aren't enough jobs for everyone and there will be less jobs and more people in the future.