It should be noted that as efficiency increases, the company can compete and lower prices, meaning people don't _have to_ go to work as much to achieve the same level of living.
Yep. Except that instilling and maintaining institutional knowledge in an employee represents a sunk cost, which means the fewer employees you need for a job, the less it costs, even if the actual number of hours spent doing the job is the same. This is why instead of everybody working 3-day work weeks, we have 40% of people underemployed or unemployed and 60% of people being worked to death.
Right - and we have enough capacity / productivity now to feed, clothe and shelter the global population. The challenge is really how to distribute resources in a "fair" way whilst incentivizing growth in productivity to keep increasing quality of life for all.
The challenge is to get people to even consider it. In reality it is not hard to pay people to follow courses, pay people to tutor/helpdesk or pay people to be available when they are needed.
Imagine a gig economy where 100 employees are on call the year round, ready to jump in when you need them for as long as you need them, complete with training to make this absurd level of scaling possible. We could do a kind of fire drill to test your corporate scale-ability. Then we get valuable information: Your corp atm make 100 widgets per day but you can scale to 50 000 in 2 weeks.
One would just get a normal salary that goes up and down depending on training, market conditions, health and fitness. (the later 2 to some minimal extend)
In stead of a skill and experience starved pool to hire from it is redefined as a national asset. We monitor its market value and print money against it.
Since we/you/one/I want to feed, house and cloth everyone anyway we may coin a separate (freely exchangeable) currency for necessities and expire it after n months.
Just discarding people the way we do now quickly turns them from profitable & productive sources of tax revenue into expensive nuances. Having your head on the chopping block the year round with the sword hovering over it inspires a kind of productivity we no longer need. In the current economic situation we need people to maintain and grow their natural ability to think and learn. Similarly, people running businesses shouldn't have to fill their head with that horror nonsense either. They have better things to do for us. (things that they are actually good at)