[azinman2]

The people and skillsets to successfully run a company have little overlap with strong software engineers. It happens, but no where near the numbers of engineers out there.

Plus if you kill off many engineers jobs, who is left to buy your products?

[rglullis]

Let's go all back to trade school. I hear that plumbers and electricians are making a killing nowadays.

[blibble]

what will happen to their wages when all white-collar workers take up that career?

[rglullis]

They can go back to work in the farms, or weave baskets, or pottery...

Still not good? Ok, maybe this is too radical but hear me out: how about we take this incredible increase in productivity as an opportunity to start paving the way for a true post-scarcity future that can benefit most people, eliminate intellectual property and take everything produced by robots to fund UBI, instead of worrying about our cushy jobs and (relative) wealth/status obtained through bullshit jobs?

[blibble]

> They can go back to work in the farms

yes I think feudalism 2.0 is how this will probably turn out

[moshun]

I enjoy having drinks with people who have also come to this conclusion.

[mplewis]

Oh cool, when do we get to that future? What’s the realistic path from today to there?

[rglullis]

Glad you asked. Here's my very short list:

- Get rid of corporations by adding a cap size to the maximum number of people employed by a company. Corporations make sense when we need to coordinate large groups of people around a common project, and when we need the maximum efficiency from each individual. Nowadays most people's work is coordination and the actual labor is done by machines. Getting rid of corporations will lead companies to be smaller and more numerous, and we reduce the complexity of overall coordination needed.

- Patent / Copyright law reform. Anyone wanting to have some type of IP protected must put in some type of insurance bond. If (e.g) a book author wants to receive $100k for their work, they need to pay into the system to ensure copyrights. Once the value is reached, the bond can be reset (for a larger amount) or it goes automatically into public domain. The higher the amount desired and the longer the policy is in place, the more expensive it becomes to hold it. For software, there is an additional clause: the source code must be made available 3 years after the first release, failure to be able to reproduce the object code from the source code leads to an automatic fine equal to the value of bond.

- Make tie-in of sales and services illegal: if Amazon wants to provide a software-based service (AWS) then the software should be able to run on any commodity networked computer. If Apple wants to sell a hardware device, people should be allowed to install whatever operating system they want.

Now, please don't respond with "it's not realistic", because it very much is. There is no "boil the oceans with a candle" here. They may be difficult, but very well within the realms of possible. For my first point, one common objection is "if you limit the size of the company, then you'll have people being employed as contractors" and my response is "you can write the law in a way that anyone that spends more of 50% of their working time working for the same client should be counted as an employee.