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Comment by chmod775 | Hacker News Reader

People need to realize that we're quickly heading towards a world that won't need as much human labor as we have available. And that's a good thing.

There's only so many bullshit paper-pushing jobs and useless over-budget infrastructure projects we can create to make up for the lack of work.

A better way to deal with too much labor on the market would be setting government-mandated maximum work-hours, so as to spread the amount of available work evenly among the entire populace.

Secondly - for those countries where this isn't a reality yet - school and university should be free and you should receive government aid while attending them, to allow those out of a job to learn new skills or just pursue their interests.

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It's only a good thing if we can turn around our societies to handle this new reality and where we can keep our political and enconomical freedoms, including of course a chance at a decent living

A four-day workweek would be a nice start.

That'd be better for us, sure, but I think it is more likely that those at the top will will simply find a way to reduce the excess labor class.

Can't tell the difference between a head and a ball but will definitely be replacing billions of jobs any day now.

It’s a good thing, right up until it’s your job that gets replaced, and you can’t find another job, so you end up becoming homeless.

Sure but you also need a different economic system to handle this sort of reality. Without a change, this will lead us to extreme wealth disparity and social unrest. It will be interesting to understand which countries will go with mitigations that reduces disparity vs. use increasing levels of force to keep the haves protected from have nots

While I don't disagree with your main point, I think climate change mitigation is going to require great than 100% employment, moving whole populations, building dams and levees, digging super-tornado bunkers. Fun times!

This is a definitive possibility and an interesting point, not sure why you're being downvoted.

>useless over-budget infrastructure projects

Isn’t infrastructure chronically underfunded?

https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/wp-content/uploads/...

>Isn’t infrastructure chronically underfunded?

Both can be true at the same time. There's really no contradiction here, the opposite in fact.

Infrastructure being underfunded may very well be a symptom of infrastructure projects becoming way too expensive.

Fair enough. I would agree that, in general, we as a society are very bad at cost estimating large projects which tends to make them have budget shortfalls.

> setting government-mandated maximum work-hours

I think you’ll find many of those actually want to work hard will bristle at that policy. Not to mention finding that hard (and undesirable IMO) to enforce on entrepreneurs.

I want to believe in that, however I've witnessed a few times Parkinson's Law [1] taking place.

TLDR: Often after tech makes bureaucracy paperwork easier, some bureaucrats create more paperwork to compensate that, because they want more control over what is going on the office.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

So you figured out what a massive mass of people able to work, with enough time on their hands and nothing to do will come to? Cause it's strange to consider that a 'good thing'.

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