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Well here's an idea. Imagine a company where you get hired with a probation period, and if you manage to automate a significant aspect of your job during that period, you get to keep it. That is, if you make yourself obsolete, you get to keep the pay. If you then do the same for another task, you get to keep the pay for the higher-paying of the two AND you get to give the lower-paying one to a person of your choice.

This gives you both incentive to take crappy, menial jobs as a technology expert (a robot could do that crap - no human should be so punished) and the most valuable thing of all - free time without worrying about income. And if you like automating human-degrading jobs, you can move up while giving people you care about the same thing.

Just an idea I'm throwing out there, it's my best answer so far for how to deal with the problem.




Interesting idea, but what happens to the older or less-educated workers who could have handled jobs similar to those? You might eliminate the need for drudgery, but you'd need a way to bring lower-end workers up to the levels needed for jobs that were previously 'beyond' them, and place them in those jobs.

It's the eternal problem of Luddism (aka technology is taking away our jobs and we aren't getting better ones).


Well, they can be gifted an income source from one of the more proficient ones and that gives them a chance to develop themselves with all the newfound free time.




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