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Comment by chooseaname | Hacker News Reader

> We really should be having an urgent conversation on how to handle this and what the responsibility of those that own the means of production will be (if any) when this occurs.

The problem with that is the people who would be in a position to make change don't feel the constriction of the immediacy of it and those who do are rarely invited to the table to talk.

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Just change the ownership rules, the old concept of private property is clearly nonsensical for the same reason that the game of Monopoly was meant to be a warning, not a tutorial.

I don't mind people downvoting but you're not gonna tell me that people with the 18th century had timeless wisdom that allowed them to extrapolate to today's economy in the 21st century and appreciate all the problems of resource allocation, externalities, and financial markets. If your principles are implicitly predicated on infinite land and labor availability then its possible your understanding of economics is kinda primitive.

Our ancestors in the 18th century didn't have a time machine, but neither were they stupid. Our view of economics is going to look similarly primitive in 300-400 years. The notion that jobs, and thus work, was going to disappear has been a theme since the Industrial Revolution began, in the late 18th century. A treatise from that time period on how to avoid a depression is certainly suspect, but the crash in 2008 wasn't so long ago, so it's not our understanding of market forces is 100% either. (To be fair, our understanding did allow us to recover from it, in an imperfect way.)

We still don't have a better answer as to what the displaced will do for work than we did in the 18th century, other than "oh, we'll create new jobs". Not comforting, especially to anyone that simply can't afford to go to a coding bootcamp, or those that have gone and dropped out. They, too, deserve not to starve or die in the gutter. Thus, there is wisdom from the 1800's that is relevant, even today.

Technically we do have infinite land and labor, there's just a step function in cost.

Sure, perhaps we will solve by shrinking ourselves down like the ants did to effectively expand our territory while reducing our footprint. It's clear that our current large size is economically inefficient.

I was referring to expanding out into space.

Some people in the democratic debates are bringing it up, at least

Just go for the one job that's not apt to be automated soon... guillotine assembler.

Hmmm. Make money selling blades?

No, I got a better idea - give away the guillotine, make money selling the blades.

Or perhaps a subscription model for the blades?

Probably the best option is decapitation as a service.

Yang is advocating on their behalf, even if they don’t know what’s coming.

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