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Comment by dmm | Hacker News Reader

> I wonder what the tax system should do once >90% of the population can't work as farmers anymore

What do you mean by this? Are 90% of people farmers now?

> I'd say that this would be the perfect case:

Actually in that case I'd say people would be consumed by politics and trivial bs and destroy themselves in a generation. It'd be very similar to today, except rather than spending all day minus 8 hours on youtube they'll just be on there all day.

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No, but most people used to work in farming. Then manufacturing became dominant. Today the service sector is dominating. It is 1.4% agriculture, 20.6% industry, and 78% services. (source: Wolfram Alpha).

For this reason, automatic web services probably have a larger potential for destroying jobs than robots. Hopefully nextparadigms is right that more jobs is created than destroyed by this process (I have no idea). Previous shifts seems to have worked out alright.

I think what he means is that there will come a point at which technology renders most occupations obsolete. What happens when 90% of the population aren't needed in the workforce?

Read "Player Piano" by Kurt Vonnegut.

They do something else, as the said 90% of agricultural workers did during the industrial revolution, as did typesetters in the 80s, as did computers (the profession) when computers (the machines) took over.

Human desires are endless. This is why you will always have employment. Technology frees up time and humans than use part of that time for leisure and part of it for doing more meaningful, higher value work.

What do you mean by "employment"? In the far enough future, anything that's deemed profitable can be done much faster by automation. No one will pay a human a check to do something that can be done dirt cheap by a robot.

The point is that our society rations limited resources through money. When resources are no longer limited, and no one can earn any money through employment, we'll require a completely different social and economic system for distributing resources.

I don't think that will happen until we have "replicators". Until we can make literally everything ourselves, we'll still need jobs. We'll also need almost limitless resources, too, unless our desires will tend more and more towards virtual things rather than physical. Either way, it's really hard to predict what will happen 50 years from now, but I'm quite optimistic about the human race.

With things like MakerBot one can argue we are getting to the point where we have "replicators" pretty rapidly.

Time will always be scarce. Even if we live forever.

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