Let's get rid of the factories for cars, silicon, and electronics while we are at it. Efficiency is not conducive to jobs and prosperity. Workers must unite to protect livelihoods! (end sarcasm).
No wonder there is a backlash against globalism and 'free trade' agreements when this same group of insular regulators and powerful market leaders are designing the agreements and calling all of the shots. Sweatshops are hardly the result of free trade but government controlled/financed trade that only prioritizes the interests of the mega corps, sometimes pushed to the point of exploitation in countries with poor legal systems and weak concepts of human rights.
The process of creating the TPP made this even more apparent to the public, they hardly even tried to hide the obvious favoritism and complete lack of openness. Clearly it has become so status quo that they didn't even bother with pretense.
Try staring a business in a market with large established players. You'll find that you cannot do many of the things they themselves did to get started -- they have erected legislative barriers preventing replication.
Easy -- just write "think of the children" legislation demanding egregious safety, accounting and legal overhead, trivial to bear at scale, but lethal to new entrants...
Running a non-megacorp business and surviving without a job has not been made easier at all since the 50-60s. It's actually harder than ever as a result of government intervention and wasteful resource consumption for very little benefit to society. It makes you wonder who the government has been busy serving all of those years.
(Hint: the kind of business who wouldn't think twice about running a sweatshop via trade deals that never seem to involve clauses to require following the laws of the parent country) .
The reason is that capitalists (the economic class, not "advocates of capitalism"; the two have substantial overlap, but aren't identical) tend to be the power behind both business and government in capitalist systems.
I'd say we should distribute it across age groups, but this lets you use the existing Social Security Infrastructure. Plus, young people don't vote in legislative and local elections, so that wouldn't be as useful for preserving the freedom to automate.
You have to go one level deeper with something cloneable, but there is still scarcity.
The cost of a downloadable audio book is going to be based on maximizing the return based on its demand curve (since the supply curve is vertical).
The demand curve is going to be based on the scarcity/cost of an equivalent value audio book (if an audio book is $1000, you'll probably buy a different one from another author instead). Thus, this ties back into the scarcity of supply, which is tied to the scarcity of labor (skilled in this case) to generate that supply. There is a certain amount of labor required to become skilled (and to a lesser extent scarcity of talent), and more labor to produce an audio book. This scarcity of labor keeps audio book prices from dropping to zero.
Plus I'd imagine a large spike in people who write novels and other arts. Other humanities and R&D can fill the void for those not gainfully employed. Which contributes to the progress of society.
Ok. Are you going to be the one that has to give up their job forever?
This concern is a valid one: keeping the current paradigm, automation will lead to unemployment on a massive scale which will wreak havoc everywhere especially in underdeveloped countries with little to no social safety net or worker and citizen protection. Keeping the current paradigm, the capitalists will reap even more obscene profits by absorbing the difference between the current salaries and the much lower automation costs, while potentially tens to hundreds of millions of people (in the short term only) will be out of jobs and left with no means of survival. This is very concerning to me, and attacking a straw man with a ridiculous "oh let's close the factories then shall we" is childish.