SuperNova said:
I realize all of that. And my point was not to turn companies into wellfare (although I would prefer slower and more healthy growth rates and less profit with more reinvestments). I'm saying they should worry about this for their own sake, because no consumer base equals no profit in the long run.
If they were smart they would do their business diffrently.
I don't think we even need to fight robotization. Robotization could be potentially awesome. But it also means that companies will have to be prepared to pay out insanely high wages for relatively few working hours, as multiple people will probably have to share the same job position, or a small amount of working people will have to earn enough to pay enough taxes to provide for the unemployed masses.
You can't really take companies out of the equation and expect the state to fix everything. Where is the tax money to care for society supposed to come from when the majority of people is umemployed? Without companies to pay wages and those wages getting redistributed by taxes and retranslated into spending power no state can properly function. And for that matter, neither can any business. At least not with our current system.
And while a few new job opporunities will certainly pop up with robotization, that won't nearly be enough to cover the new unemployment rates.
(I personally see handcafts having sort of a renaissance for a while, with wealthy people paying good money for quality handcrafted stuff. And we'll probaby see a surge of 'young creatives' leading to a total oversaturation of that market [wich as an illistrator honestly scares the crap out of me. ]).
So countries will eventually have to find a system to get to the riches of the upper 10% and distributing it down to the masses. (wich will be interesting since thise upper 10% also happen to have enormous political influence and are not likely to part with their money willingly.) It would be in the businesses own interest if they would help with that.
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I know what you meant and I agree with it. I just don't see it happening under current legislation or perhaps even the current economic system. But as much as I'd like to see companies consider the long-term picture, I don't think they are going to do it until it directly cuts into their profits, which may never even happen because of environmental pressures from other companies.
I see a few possibilities for coping with the situation. The first one is that people find new jobs robots can't do (at least yet), and get their income and pay their taxes that way. I'm sure some people will manage to do just that, but I don't think it will be enough. Alternatively, governements will have to find the money to support very large amounts of people financially. Funding that will of course be a huge challenge. Personally I'm expecting companies themselves to be taxed more heavily as their profits increase with robotization and they can afford to pay more taxes. Won't happen easily though, and I'm sure other alternatives will be explored. Or perhaps the money will be taken from the rich, like you suggested, but it's probably even harder to do that than it is to tax the companies instead of the people behind them. And of course it's entirely possible that some completely new ideas surface.
All in all, I expect robotization to bring huge societal changes with it. What exactly they might be is difficult to predict, but the transition period is probably going to be quite difficult. In an extreme case, robots would do almost all work in the end, and people would be free do spend their lives as they wish with no worries about work, but I'm not sure that's even possible in a very, very long time.
