It's still 10s of millions of people who could be given a job (and some hope and purpose too btw)
Edit: btw I agree there's more to life than work. But when you're unemployed and hoping for work, competing against robots and LLMs is quite crushing.
Edit: btw I agree there's more to life than work. But when you're unemployed and hoping for work, competing against robots and LLMs is quite crushing.
Why would the students want to have to do two full-time tasks at once?
Why would the homemakers want to add another full-time task?
Why would the people with cancer want to have to work from their hospital bed?
There's more to life than work. Get a hobby! Hope and purpose doesn't have to come from menial labor.
Allow me to translate into a language you can understand: The people who are all “unemployed” are actually performing valuable services like maintaining the future labor pool, learning how to become skilled workers, and so on. These people should not have a second job, they should be paid for the valuable services they’re providing.
And the question of how much the payment should be has a straightforward answer: adjust until the birth rate reaches replacement.
If the payment ends up high enough that some mothers or fathers opt to leave the labor force to focus on raising their kids, then so be it; that's probably healthier for society in the long term.
It would be expensive, yes, but cheaper than the alternatives. And anyway, Japan's stagnant economy would likely benefit from the boost to consumer demand.
I think having employment delivers some of the higher needs to a subset of people, but it is a privileged few. A huge number work just to provide the basic needs. Advocating using the advances in automation to raise everybody up is what we need. Instead we seem to be maintaining a system that gives a few what we want and the rest of us are too busy with the survival part to influence that change.
I don’t know. Society should provide the framework within which people can achieve their needs (and wants), but not the needs and wants themselves directly.
Otherwise you put an artificial cap on human growth and inefficient allocation of resources.
That is not how the hierarchy of needs works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs
Removing the cap on growth is pretty much baked in.
If I was made to lamp street lamps 5 years after incandescent street lights were invented, while not working on any way forward, I'd probably fall into a deep existential crisis.
Ofc people dont want to become human fax machines (Morse decoders) nowadays, it would feel absurd.
But also if a role allows someone to feel satisfaction in accomplishment and in being an active member of a society it can be meaningful. For example tidying up streets/yards in low income neighborhoods can make the place look much better and you can feel like you're serving folks who are in need.
Only 2% of our efforts as a society go to getting food out of the ground.
The reason to have a job, to own property, to earn and spend money, to reproduce and fight in wars, it seems, is to maintain a valid stake in the whole game lest your masters designate you an undesireable.
For said master the more viable the alternatives to humans become, the more all those excess humans start to look like a liability.
Virtually all that don't work don't want to and don't need to or simply can't.
As the article we're commenting points out Japan has a labor shortage.