Yes this is totally my attitude that eventually we need a socialist system. But how do you convince winners in capitalist system that's a good idea (or the future robot owners)?
Very sincere arguments and reasoning. Alternatively, guns. There will be fewer winners than losers.
As I've been pointing out for a long time now, Norway de facto has a system like this with the welfare state already (primarily due to high petroleum incomes). If you are a Norwegian citizen and somehow unable to make a living (low skills, illness), the government will pay you a small but sufficient amount of money. This is what we will eventually need to institute across the whole world - tax the richest and use the proceeds to give a "guaranteed salary" to everyone. For instance, through negative taxation where below a certain income the government pays _you_. This is the only good way to ensure basic human needs for everyone in a world where technological leverage makes everyone but a small amount of very skilled workers redundant.
Eventually, the social stigma of recieving such benefits will vanish, since a significant part of the population will not do enough work to cross the threshold.
This is already in place almost across the western world. Norway's welfare state is not all that unusual.
> Eventually, the social stigma of recieving such benefits will vanish, since a significant part of the population will not do enough work to cross the threshold.
That will only work if the government is able to raise sufficient taxes from the shrinking proportion of the population who are paying them. If trends towards income inequality continue, there will be few, wealthy taxpayers. But the larger their share of the burden, the more they'll use tax avoidance schemes, whether legal or illegal. That has already been seen in countries where very high taxe rates have existed.
> Yes this is totally my attitude that eventually we need a socialist system.
In a true socialist system the robots will eventually fail (like all machinery) and the spare-parts will either be broken themselves out of the factory, will get stolen, or the service-repair people will not be motivated enough to do a proper job. Source: the guys that actually built the Sputnik at one moment in time (and other great technology), and then failed miserably.
I got the political vocab wrong I think - for me socialism is essentially capitalism with strong welfare state (ie basic income guarantee or whatever) vs communism with no differences in pay and no private ownership. But wikipedia disagrees with my definition, so I don't know where I got that from.
You got it from American politics, where anything to the left of anarcho-capitalism is "socialist". What you're thinking of is called social democracy, and in greater or lesser measure widely considered to be both responsible for the post-WW2 "Golden Age of Capitalism" and the best empirically tested economic system.
Basic income guarantees are the "Pirate Party" social-democratic response to automation.
You ignore them. All prices will fall - including the prices of robots. (3D printers are doing this right now.) So you build a decentralized economy - which will happen no matter what we do - and the "owners" become, well, everybody.
I don't think this is going to play out the way you describe it. It is a tempting scenario, but just look at the Internet. The Internet is the biggest equalizer in world history. Everyone can say anything to anyone who has an Internet connection. Billions of people directly connected to each other.
And what has happened? Yes, everyone can reach everyone, and everyone is equal, _in principle_. But the removal of competitive barriers makes the winner-take-all effect ("power-law") is stronger than it has been in _any_ context, ever. As robotics becomes more prevalent, this will happen in the physical world as well. The income disparity between the richest and the average will become a lot larger.
I am not sure that this in itself is a problem, though. But it is essential that we are able to develop the political and social innovations required to ensure that _power_ doesn't go along with money. Because the money distribution will be more lopsided than at any other point in human history.
The winner-take-all effect is not stronger than ever. I challenge you to prove to me that somebody has access to all the information and I don't. I grew up in the middle of nowhere and I know the world is at my doorstep now.
Moreover, I can actually find them and communicate with them now - growing up, I simply couldn't. I was a science-fiction fan and didn't even know there was such a thing as fandom. Now, almost automatically, I'm a Facebook friend with one of my early favorite authors (becoming an actual friend with time), I talk to publishers and fellow fans on a regular basis - they exist. They are part of my community. There is no winner-take-all effect at all, and in fact, I think I probably don't even know what you mean by it.
The income disparity simply won't matter. Money won't matter (much). Clearly it'll matter if you want to travel, for example, or buy something you can't get locally - but there will be a whole lot more available locally.
Here is an example of the winner-take-all effect as applied to Internet companies. The effect is very real, and it becomes more pronounced the more powerful our technologies become.
I'll grant you the pathological nature of the App Store, but I don't agree that that's characteristic of the Internet as a whole. The house always wins over there.
Then we hit the "Four Futures" problem, in which we must decide whether to institute draconian intellectual-property regimes to keep capitalism standing, or abolish capitalism in acknowledgement of the absurdity of trying to extract surplus-value from Replicators.
As I've been pointing out for a long time now, Norway de facto has a system like this with the welfare state already (primarily due to high petroleum incomes). If you are a Norwegian citizen and somehow unable to make a living (low skills, illness), the government will pay you a small but sufficient amount of money. This is what we will eventually need to institute across the whole world - tax the richest and use the proceeds to give a "guaranteed salary" to everyone. For instance, through negative taxation where below a certain income the government pays _you_. This is the only good way to ensure basic human needs for everyone in a world where technological leverage makes everyone but a small amount of very skilled workers redundant.
Eventually, the social stigma of recieving such benefits will vanish, since a significant part of the population will not do enough work to cross the threshold.