richardhutnik said:
Mr Khan said:
richardhutnik said:
Mr Khan said:
Oil will crash, 2 billion of us will starve, and most of the rest will go back to work in the farms
But seriously, the market should correct against that in the long run. If enough people become unemployed and the demand for manual labor drops low enough, employment will go back up, unless those losses come primarily from the minimum-wage sector, but no-one really makes a living off such employment anyway |
Why would employment go back up, unless businessed have a demand for more labor? If all sectors are automated so that it isn't needed, then where are people employed into?
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Really nightsurge made a better reply than i did. New sectors will always emerge that demand manual labor. Who watches the watchers, who builds the automated machines? As more services become transferrable, more people can be employed meeting the world's demands, say, for something more complicated than the average Indian can do, call centers will increase in volume. We're going to need lots of people for the inevitable infrastructure swichovers that are coming: universal fiber-optic broadband, systems to meet the electric car economy or the hydrogen economy, plants to process algae and kelp biofuels to supplement the loss of fossil fuel.
There is a point when pretty much all services could become automated except the creative arts, but if it's a system of sustainable energy, then that'll just be a quasi-Communist utopia like they have in Star Trek, but that's way down the line
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Which of what you described is quantifiably different than what is going on now? If it is more automated and improved, why would employers switch to a model that would require them to hire even more workers than they have now? If you decided to allow everything to be salaried, then the employers don't hire more people, they just demand more hours out of workers. There isn't more hiring going on.
Also, where does a Communist utopia ever enter into the scene? You may get a dystopia where you have masses of people who are laid off and out of work and a system that says that is rigged where they have to do unpaid work for very prolonged periods of time, or they lose their place in line and don't ever have a chance of getting paid. You know, like all the people who write free code on the Internet, particularly in the videogame business.
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I'm saying when we enter a post-scarcity society, which would be wayyy down the line (once we figure out Cold Fusion), then capitalism (which is an economic vehicle to minimize scarcity and optimize output overall) would cease to be because everyone could meet their needs from a virtually infinite, totally automated system
As i said, think Star Trek. Not "Communist" as in single-party totalitarianism, but everyone has what they need without having necessarily to work for it (though everyone worked on Star Trek... hmm...)
