Yeah. There have been spontaneous demonstrations of joy and gratitude for our happy new way of life. Said no-one who's job just got automated. Automating work out of existence may or may not be a laudable goal. Assuming it is we've yet to see a roadmap presented that doesn't brick the economy somewhere in the middle of the gap between now and full automation.
There is no roadmap. It'll all be organic (unfortunately?). Its up to us to put guardrails on to ensure people who are automated out of a job can still find purpose and meaning in their life (UBI or some other method to ensure no one goes without housing, food, clothing, healthcare, etc).
EDIT: If it goes south, I assure you, I'll be one of the first to devote the rest of my life to getting humanity back on track with the distribution of resource and knowledge wealth (not fiat currency "wealth" mind you, cause that isn't going to be worth much compared to raw resources and automation knowledge).
Automating work will probably be a good thing in a vacuum. Unfortunately it's happening in an old economic system established during a period of scarcity of labor and capital that rewards and encourages things that will not be very important anymore.
We really need to be thinking about how to distribute the benefits of automation but right now our answer is only those people who already have capital will benefit from it.
Do you long to return to the time when more than 50% of the US labor force had to work in food production? Thanks to automation, less than 2% of our population is employed to feed us all, freeing the rest of us to develop software or drive trucks.
Funny that you mention starvation wages. 50 years ago, you would have had to spend twice as much on food and you wouldn't have gotten anything at the level that's available today. I'd encourage you to read some of Megan McArdle's posts on how we look back at historical food preparation with glasses that are extremely rose colored.
50 years ago is only the 1960's. Food was more expensive then in no small part due to the fact that production was mostly by family farms. The economies of scale that have wiped out rural communities around the country had only just begun to develop in earnest. This meant small family farms were still competitive in the market and could enjoy a high quality of living. I welcome an explanation of how driving family farms out of business with vanishing margins and concentrating what little profits remain in the hands of massively capitalized corporate farming outfits is a net win for society. Note: cheap food is ripe for all of the standard criticism normally aimed at trickle-down economic theory so plan accordingly.
Also, define "food", because we can certainly devote some time to discussing processed foods.
"Automate things" is an incredibly coy way of saying "destroy other people's jobs" unless or until all of the magical information economy jobs politicians and industry mouthpieces have been promising for the last 30 years start to materialize.
No. There won't be more "information economy jobs". You need to index the work week, wages, and entitlements to productivity. As less labor is required, we ask less of labor and pay it more for what work it does do.
