| "until every person gets an adequate basic income so people don't need to be employed." Hand-waving pleb magnets like this (the statement, not the person stating) show a painfully inept understanding of how autonomous labor is going to work. Once Moore's Law crosses the processing power/price ratios where robots can perform "good enough" object acquisition and manipulation, (pre-Singularity phase) no nation on earth can deflate their currency fast enough to stop charlatans from promoting wholesale human elimination instead of inflationary appeasement. Meaning, after the "good enough" threshold is crossed, nations will engage in inflationary policies to bide time while desperately seeking a clearing price for human labor. But they won't find it for most labor because of two factors: 1.) At the most efficient time usage (under politically impossible configurations and assuming equal productivity), in which people work 18 hour days forever and utilize 6 hours of sleep, 1 machine's labor equals 1.25 human's labor. Typically, 1 machine's labor equals 3 human's labor. Accounting for productivity enhancement, the comparison will be about as worthwhile to make as comparing engines to horses today. (My drone is 500 plebpower?) 2.) It takes 12 years (again, under politically impossible standards) and ~18,000 pounds of food to make a human productive. It takes a drone a few weeks to be born out of a few gallons of fuel, and a few pounds of materials. The real cost of labor is staggering. And if you think people are stupid enough to fall for the trap (again) to use the productive gains of a new technology to do nothing more than cycle it all back into a mechanism to breed more humans into existence, I think you will be in for a rude awakening when human costs drop so low from endless inflation appeasement that using said drones to harvest these surplus humans for their physical materials becomes wildly profitable. And if the charlatans can make even HackerNews believe North Korea was behind the Sony hacks and clamor for invasion, just imagine how easy it will be to manufacture some social justice narrative for mining populations centers for biomaterials. ("Those evil sexists need to be mined! For great equality!") TL;DR: Once the price of human labor drops to sub-zero levels due to political appeasement via inflation to counter "good-enough" drones, it will be more profitable to crush human organization than promote it. |
After we free up the surplus material making the humans, there will be far less need for many robot-provided services.
Farming won't be as big of a deal anymore. Many of our modern industries will shrink dramatically. We won't need food, clothing, entertainment, or medical services.
We can expect to keep a contingent of engineers around to service and design the robots until they hit the self-repairing, self-designing level of the singularity recursion.
It seems like a more-or-less plausible jumping off point into a runaway-AI future.