No, I'm actually ambitious and optimistic about the scope of this.
Massive automation absolutely does not imply massive involuntary unemployment. We've actually been through this before. We used to require 90% of the population to grow food. Now it's less than 1%. The rest didn't end up unemployed -- they ended up involved in entire industries and economies that didn't even exist before.
Most of us have jobs that would sound completely fanciful to a farmer circa 1800. He couldn't have remotely guessed how most people would spend their time and earn a living in 2013. The same is true now for us -- I doubt anyone here could explain what most people in 2050 will be doing with their time.
But the existence proof for there being useful work to do is the fact that not everyone has everything they could possibly want. So long as there are unmet needs and wants, there are necessarily opportunities for people to work together toward satisfying those needs.
Either the poor can afford the outputs of the robotic factories, in which case they will have a high standard of living, or the poor can't afford the outputs of the robotic factories, in which case they constitute a large market in which the robots are not competitive, not relevant, and unable to put people out of work.
No, they constitute a small, impoverished market in defiance of their numbers. CF: the present day ecosystem of food, etc provision to very poor people. It's heavily consolidated and the products are trashy because the amount of profit to be had is paper-thin.
Massive automation absolutely does not imply massive involuntary unemployment. We've actually been through this before. We used to require 90% of the population to grow food. Now it's less than 1%. The rest didn't end up unemployed -- they ended up involved in entire industries and economies that didn't even exist before.
Most of us have jobs that would sound completely fanciful to a farmer circa 1800. He couldn't have remotely guessed how most people would spend their time and earn a living in 2013. The same is true now for us -- I doubt anyone here could explain what most people in 2050 will be doing with their time.
But the existence proof for there being useful work to do is the fact that not everyone has everything they could possibly want. So long as there are unmet needs and wants, there are necessarily opportunities for people to work together toward satisfying those needs.
Either the poor can afford the outputs of the robotic factories, in which case they will have a high standard of living, or the poor can't afford the outputs of the robotic factories, in which case they constitute a large market in which the robots are not competitive, not relevant, and unable to put people out of work.