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If I truly believed that automation, especially in the short term, would include UBI or some other social safety nets, I'd be far more optimistic about this.

I'm nervous that in the short term, fewer people will continue to get very rich, and more people will fall out of the middle class.

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Very much this. HN seems not to appreciate that jobs are our only currently accepted mechanism for distributing wealth on the scale necessary for our current society. If automation removes them, sure, it will increase net productivity (at least until the poor masses destroy the machines). But if we lose distribution in the process, it's an enormous loss.

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