Civil war. One side is robotics company executives and their robotic armies. The other is either governments who’ve been taken over by populists advocating unprofitable ideas like taxing robot labor for a BGI, mandating hiring of humans despite increased cost and decreased efficiency, butlerian jihad, etc, or if governments prove resistant to populism, generalized revolts.

This problem arise because "work" currently serves two distinct and entirely unrelated purposes:

1. It serves as a mechanism for getting stuff done. All the products and services that humanity needs must be produced somehow; currently the main mechanism for this is that people work.
2. It serves as the primary mechanism for distributing income to most adults.

Let's say increased automatization means we can get the same products and services made using only half as many working hours.

If that simply meant your working-day would now be 4 hours per day, for the same pay, I doubt many would complain about it all that much; higher productivity is awesome!

But the problem is, odds are it'll instead result in half the workers being fired and losing their income, while the other half continues for roughly the same pay as today, the benefits of increased productivity go mostly solely to the "owners".

And ownership is a LOT more unevenly distributed than capacity to work is. That's especially true for low-educatiion-needed work.

Let me put it this way; nobody is 10 times as efficient as the average adult at picking strawberries, driving a taxi, or peeling potatoes. Inequality in capacity for manual labor is real, but fairly modest. But nothing prevents one person from OWNING more than 1000 average adults. When income is predominantly distributed to owners balooning inequality is the result.

My preferred solution is to disconnect #1 and #2 above. Not in the sense of doing away with work, but in the sense of having it no longer be the sole realistic source of income for most adults.

We could for example create an UBI -- and set it at a certain percentage of GDP/capita. Doing it that way has the advantage that progress in productivity will benefit everyone in a given country. It could be financed with taxes, primarily on the owning-class, but also on things that have negative externalities in accordance with classical capitalist theory for how to create efficient markets.

For the most part it will be a slow enough process to modernize each industry that you won't have this all at once kind of scenario. It will be more like a steady flow of change, not so much multiple industries facing significant job losses at the same time. At least not until you have general purpose labor robots.

The way automation will change the economy will be much bigger than just 2008. The 2008 crash really only lasted like a year and got better steadily. It was a lot of fear mongering and consumer getting scared for no reason more than a legit economic problem.

That does tell me though, consumer confidence is the single most important metric in economics and I'd say every other metric together barely even compares in importance.

Long term the value of money and all assets produced with labor have to go down to re-adjust to the new much lower labor rates of robots. At some point this means your house and other assets have to decrease in value because they are significantly easier to re-build new than when you bought them.

Money is mostly a metric that measures labor. It's not real value, it's a measure of the value of labor... so without economic intervention even the value of money itself should decline.

I think this EVENTUALLY leads to the scenario where money just doesn't hold as much importance in society because everything is so much cheaper it just doesn't matter as much. What matters is how good your robots are and how many you have as a nation and eventually how available they are the general public. I suspect an open source robotic labor industry will spring up eventually and even robots will make robots, meaning even the robots won't be worth much in normal terms of value.

Really very little stays worth much beside land, because that's one of the few things you can't just have robots build more.

The transition to get that point where unemployment might keep building up faster than new jobs get invented will be the worst part. After that the costs of things will be declining and make the whole lack of jobs things a lot easier to deal with.

Beyond that the hardest thing here is just humans figure out what to do with all their spare time since working 8 hours a day is mostly a waste of time at that point.

We will invent SO MANY dumb jobs it will be funny, but even with that I think a lot of people will have to work much fewer hours per week if they work at all and most assets will lose so much value that keeping the standard of living up will be easier than it seems, even without everyone needing jobs.

People like being with other people generally. We will just have a more people focused service economy where people skills will be most important.

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Poverty management as a service. Simple solution. Lol. Repurposing of the human being as a data commodity and data producer instead of a physical labour commodity.

The ai/machine learning layer needs data. The more data, the more magical tricks the ai can do. Thus the more services can be provided. In order to get that data, the human being becomes a data commodity and powers the world in that way. You are their to be extracted from. Very very simple.

The more magical tricks the ai can do, the more the world can be powered by ai. Thus less wealth is trickled down to the average person through wages. And the greater the wealth that is retained by those who own these system.

People still power the world, just in another way.

Exactly what was done when computers replaced humans

Ask chatGPT. It had some interesting answers when I posed a similar question to it about a month ago.

A healthy economy needs consumers who are able to purchase products and services.

It is not in the interest of big business to shoot itself in the foot. Profit is the driving factor behind innovation. You can't profit if you don't have customers.