[good_gnu]

Or we could keep the factories, accept unemployment as a result of technical progress, realize that the total amount of goods created has not diminished at all and stop tieing the right to consume to participation in the production process. The "human in the production process" paradigm is doomed to fail as technology progresses anyway.

[dmix]

All the more reason basic income makes economic sense. When the alternative is inefficient and costly human labor.

[chris_va]

Just to be picky, this is one of the weakest arguments of UBI. This gets into a "what is money" kind of discussion, but paying people because they are incapable of employment is not a good outcome. That money reprents scarcity, which traditionally has entirely been labor. In a post labor economy, what is money?

[dmix]

Basic income is for subsistence living. If you want to buy nice things you'll have to work. And almost everyone wants nice things. Scarcity will still very much exist, just human survival will not require consistent employment.

Plus I'd imagine a large spike in people who write novels and other arts. Other humanities and R&D can fill the void for those not gainfully employed. Which contributes to the progress of society.

[afarrell]

Money represents obligation. Either to give somebody a puns of silver or to provide a negotiated amount of value. That value need not be scarce, as in the case of say, a downloadable audiobook or music file.

[chris_va]

For something like silver/gold, the scarcity is around labor to discover/mine/refine it. If it was free to mine silver, it would not be worth any money/obligation.

You have to go one level deeper with something cloneable, but there is still scarcity.

The cost of a downloadable audio book is going to be based on maximizing the return based on its demand curve (since the supply curve is vertical).

The demand curve is going to be based on the scarcity/cost of an equivalent value audio book (if an audio book is $1000, you'll probably buy a different one from another author instead). Thus, this ties back into the scarcity of supply, which is tied to the scarcity of labor (skilled in this case) to generate that supply. There is a certain amount of labor required to become skilled (and to a lesser extent scarcity of talent), and more labor to produce an audio book. This scarcity of labor keeps audio book prices from dropping to zero.

[afarrell]

We should figure out a way create some sort of dividend that skims some money off of the benefits of automation and adds it to social security income.

I'd say we should distribute it across age groups, but this lets you use the existing Social Security Infrastructure. Plus, young people don't vote in legislative and local elections, so that wouldn't be as useful for preserving the freedom to automate.

[nikanj]

We have this, it's called "taxes". Not many large corporations pay any, though

[st3v3r]

"accept unemployment as a result of technical progress"

Ok. Are you going to be the one that has to give up their job forever?

[prodigal_erik]

The question is more like: who gets to give up their job without starving? Who has to keep working, and how are they compensated when nobody starves?