[K0balt]

Don’t imagine that it wasn’t heavily promoted by industrialites after they saw that after ww2 they could increase the labor force by 30 percent without paying more than they were before.

Everything that starts out with a few well meaning people is, especially now, immediately turned into an astroturfing campaign to fuel some specific economic or political (is there really a difference?) end.

[bombcar]

The FIRE movement is in direct opposition to this and should be encouraged for that alone - as it reduces the pool of workers.

[K0balt]

Yes, and it also points people away from pathological overconsumption, which is arguably a very good idea on a number of axis. And also would shrink the economy significantly if it was widely adopted… which maybe hints at the inconvenient fact that an economy based on ever-expanding per-capita extraction is ultimately unsustainable.

Fundamentally, the economy is sustained by energy. In preindustrial society, that energy was provided by agriculture, which tends to be somewhat sustainable. Fossil fuels fuelled explosive expansion, leading to the paradigm that unlimited geometric expansion of the economy was desirable, which led to delusional theories that it was uncapped even in limited space.

Now the world is near its carrying capacity in several dimensions, and we are going to find the limits to our delusion. Automation may help us find the economic limits of this paradigm before we hit the physical wall, which might turn out to be a good thing or a bad thing.

At any create, I am convinced that the next century will be marked by systemic change that fundamentally reorganises global priorities and might best be described in terms of collapsing paradigms as economies move away from human labor, in the process changing focus from the accumulation of money, which is mostly useful for paying wages, to pure power and resource control.