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You won't eat, because you won't be. Industrial economic systems (including capitalism, which is better at it, but also Soviet communism for another) will always reinvest some of its surplus back into itself. That form is either scale or efficiency, the latter of which is usually the replacement of labor with capital. It may not do this very well or as fast as it could, but that transition is always permanent, and therefore cumulative. So, what happens when we do that? Well, for awhile, nothing. When labor is the bottleneck, then there's always more outlets for it. But eventually there comes an inflection point, where there is so much labor replacement and the bar has been raised so high, that the surplus is in labor itself. At lower tiers, its value approaches 0. Spoiler alert: this point has already been passed. Probably everyone here knows multiple surplus individuals, who have no place in the economy, and the bar for their entry or reentry into it is so high now, they can only produce negative value in current market conditions. So, we have an ever-increasing surplus of unrealized labor. Our overlords may feel bad about that for awhile, decide to bear the burden of a mass multitude of dependents. We better hope they do, because this works fine until it doesn't. The zeitgeist only needs to shift once for it to all be over. This won't happen tomorrow, but they only need to look at the balance sheet from a certain angle once for the massive cost center to be seen as yet another inefficiency to be optimized for. On long enough time scales, the probability of any possible event approaches 1. |