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Comment by astazangasta | Hacker News Reader

I find it ironic that the New York Times followed this up with "RFK was right, we DO need more jobs." Personally I'm rooting for 'full unemployment'.

Everyone should read Galbraith's "the Affluent Society". Our economy is built on scarcity; we couple productivity to consumption (thus, we need jobs because we need to have money so we can buy things so we have jobs). This is idiotic, especially when we don't have scarcity any more. It's very likely humanity is productive enough to give everyone a high standard of living, but our economics don't permit it. We're too busy redistributing income upwards.

Basic income seems a way out, at first. But a post-scarcity economy should be fundamentally different. This likely means getting rid of some forms of property; this won't be easy.

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>This is idiotic, especially when we don't have scarcity any more.

We are nowhere near living in a post-scarcity world - a world isn't possible anyway (assuming an earth based society) because there is a finite amount of resources such as land, water, minerals, ect.

There is plenty of land, water, minerals, etc. We just need to use it efficiently. Agriculture needs to go, for example. This is not impossible on Earth. As for whether we are post-scarcity, our productive capacity is high enough to give everyone a decent life - global GDP per capita is $13,000. We just need to organize to achieve this.

Agriculture needs to go where, exactly?

I'm just guessing as to the intent of the previous poster, here:

Up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming

Up. Vertical hydroponics are absolutely the future.

They make zero sense from an energy point of view. We have way more land than energy.

We're basically tapped out in terms of arable land usage; you should look at the numbers some time, they are alarming (I recommend the FAO's "Livestock's Long Shadow"). Meanwhile, the energy budget of the planet exceeds by many orders of magnitude what is required to satisfy the meager energy needs of humans. What we need to do is stop dispersing our energy consumption through soil, plant matter, cow intestines, etc., before it gets to humans.

I even do vertical farming in Minecraft.

Exactly.

Humans have been doing agriculture for 10's of 1000's of years. Simply stating, "Well, that just has to go, period." without explanation (and then moving on from there) is cute, and ridiculous.

> We are nowhere near living in a post-scarcity world

I agree that we're not near living in a post-scarcity society, but not necessarily because of technical limitations. Humans don't need infinite amounts of land, water, minerals, etc.

The biggest problem is that a scarcity-based economy hinders the development of a post-scarcity society, by creating artificial scarcity.

Humans don't need it, but they want it. Everyone wants a bigger or fancier house, a bigger car, to travel more cheaply, to travel further(space tourism anyone?), etc.

That's only valid if people would consume infinitely. There's clearly enough dirt and oxygen on earth that we can give it away, even though there's a finite amount of it.

There is, however, an infinite amount of information, which is basically free to copy and transmit anywhere in the world. So to the extent that our lives exist on the internet, we are already living in a post-scarcity world.

And considering that robots already took all the agriculture and manufacturing jobs, and we're supposedly split between "knowledge workers" and "service workers", I'd say the problem of automation taking our jobs still has a long way to go.

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