[AmirS2]

> fulltime labor for everyone is simply not going to happen. We just don't need it.

and from the article

> there’s not enough work to go around

I disagree.

There's not enough paid employment to go around, but there is an enormous amount of work that needs to be done!

Our entire society needs to be weaned off its carbon dependence if we want humans to survive the next century. This will involve at the very least the wholesale transformation of our transport and energy systems, and probably construction too. We should be putting massive numbers of people to work on solving and fixing this, and there's no point leaving people unemployed while there's still work that needs to be done. Whether we can organise society in time to achieve this is the real question. Once we've fixed the environment and created a truly sustainable civilization, then we can talk about labor that is surplus.

Other work that will be in increasing demand is healthcare and elderly care (especially given the aging populations of most countries). I don't see robots replacing humans for this any time soon, and we are far from the point where we have enough health / personal care for everyone. Plenty more examples of work that's needed but not currently being done can be found with a bit of creative thought...

[visarga]

> there's no point leaving people unemployed while there's still work that needs to be done

Yes, and the government can compensate for unemployment by investing in public works, at least until the automation reaches a level where UBI needs to be implemented.

[pygy_]

The constant supply solar of energy (and finite supply of mineral energy sources) also means that we won't be able to grow the economy indefinitely and need to find a way to transition to a system that thrives at equilibrium.

[beat]

I'll leave that problem to my great-great-grandchildren. For now, I'm more concerned with pulling off the fossil-to-solar transition without breaking down in the process.

[morgante]

Right now we're using a very small percentage of the total supply of solar energy to Earth. [0]

We could grow our economy by literally 1000x and still not have any worry of running out of energy coming from the sun.

Your comment sounds like someone who says we shouldn't bother doing anything due to the inevitable heat death of the universe.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Current_status...

[stale2002]

Why would we have to worry about that now?

The economy can grow by a million X before we start running into physical limitations on solar energy.

[nhaehnle]

The rate of CO2 emission per GDP is already decreasing thanks to technological advances. There's no fundamental reason why the same couldn't happen to the ratio of energy use per GDP. So finite supply of resources is not a problem per se, and certainly won't be within our lifetimes, which is what we need to deal with.

[pygy_]

You can't be more than 100% energy efficient, so, while there may be some headroom in that direction, there's a hard limit as well.

Edit: Also, while there seems to be a positive correlation between GDP per capita and energy efficiency, the most efficient nations in the world have a very low GDP per capita... I wonder why it is the case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_intensity#Economic_ener...

[pdonis]

> You can't be more than 100% energy efficient

Yes, you can, practically speaking. The amount of energy needed to produce a given amount of value to humans is not fixed; it can be decreased, and in principle can be made as small as we like given sufficient advances in technology. That means the amount of value to humans that can be produced with a fixed amount of energy can increase, in principle as much as we like. That's what the parent to your post was saying.

Obviously it will be a while before we have technology advanced to the point where, say, the amount of value currently being produced per year on Earth can be produced with one tenth or one hundredth or less of the energy it currently takes. But we also have a while before we hit any hard limits of the sort you are referring to.

[ant6n]

Given that the total of humanity produces all necessary food, consumables and other services today, it seems that humanity generates and requires an amount of work that seems to be in some sort of equilibrium right now. The rest is just a matter of distribution.

[visarga]

Humanity is divided, especially around wealth, and the new technologies will make the rich richer in the short to medium term, which will make the poor poorer especially now that they lose their jobs. How will we handle that situation?

[kazagistar]

I agree, and an extensive program like this might permit for a clean transition as even the make-work disappears; pay for public good work to doing whatever you want and sharing it with the world sounds like the ideal utopian outcome.