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Comment by tehchromic | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a real indicator and validation of what the next economy will look like: humans at the apex of the arts, where imagination and craft will be highly valued in the everyday folk worker, and mundane or trivial tasks will be assigned to automatons. We will choose our own employment adventure.

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There will be few people needed at the apex of the arts, once the best of the best can do the jobs of most everyone else combined. We still need an economic plan for everyone else.

Their amino acids will make an excellent source material for the 3D food printers.

I don't look forward to my future as soylent green

Nah, I'm pretty it will be more efficient to just grow meat in a lab.

Out of what?

Try googling "in vitro meat" and you may find some answers, but I don't know if this problem is solved yet. This article mentions algae as a possibility:

https://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2012/04/24/steak-of-...

I think you're vastly underestimating the diversity of tasks to be mastered. Everything is a hard problem if you want to do it well enough, and the current economy consists of a vast number of distinct kinds things made sloppily.

Japan is naturally doing this through their low birthrates.

I agree, there will always be fewer people needed at the apex of the arts, and in fact that's the definition of the apex!

But an economic plan that revisits the idea of what an apex is, I think would accomplish that 'for everyone else'.

That's why the idea of micro farming is so interesting: in an agrarian system where people grow their own food, as a pastime and 'art', then you can afford many, many apexes - at least one per farm/garden.

To enable that, we need to have an economic system that redistributes the resources so that we can all have a shot a living a decent life, reducing the working hours of the many rather than the wealth of the few. Has there been a time in history where so many people have been working so much for so little?

Of course there's been a time in history where so many people have been working so much for so little. Plantation owners used to work their slaves from dawn till dusk for nothing. Farmers used to work the land from sun up to sun down just to feed their family. What a ridiculous question.

Why do so many people think that times have never been so bad when, in all honesty, times have never been so good?

Because we used to live in the garden of eden where everything was perfect, but then we sinned against god and if we don't repent we're all going to hell.

I'm joking a little but I'm also serious. I kind of think that humans are somewhat hardwired to think this way given that so many people believe some version of this story.

Because the specific subset of people who post in these forums, mostly middle-class North Americans and Europeans, are worse off than a couple of decades ago - coupled with the fact that the type of jobs that are lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty make us feel dirty and self-righteous.

Worldwide, there are more people in slavery today than there was when slavery was legal. Plus all kinds of manufacturing quasi-slavery in south and south-east asia with crazy hours.

It's not clear. Are you advocating for socialism?

Capitalism is a method for distributing scarce resources. Remove the scarcity and you remove the need for capitalism.

You can't really remove the scarcity; if machines make mass-produced stuff non-scarce, the rest (including intangibles) will become more important. In Star Trek, everyone could probably have their own luxury car, but there was still only one captain for each whole ship.

"The Australia Project" from the novel Manna is one possible future in a post scarcity economy, it also shows one of the others.

Not all resources will be non-scarce, though, so this kind of one-size-fits-all thinking is misleading.

Nor are all alternatives to capitalism socialism. Socialism is also known to have very severe problems in application, particularly how to incentivize socialist managers to behave like capitalist ones in most circumstances, driving innovation and maximizing productivity. Socialist managers have somewhat different contstraints on them from capitalist managers, and nominally different long-term goals, but they are more similar than you might think.

The thing is: we know how to make capitalism work in a range of varieties, from the Scandanavian social democracies to the mess that's Texas. We have never seen a successful system of public ownership of the means of production (which is what socialism is, and nothing else). It has been tried in a variety of places and times, and it has always run up against fundamental problems of managerial incentives and political corruption at levels that make most capitalist political economies look pretty good (which is saying something!)

So looking for non-socialist means of distributing wealth in a society that is unequally post-scarce is a good idea. Today wealth is distributed almost exclusively through paid work, but that is a relatively recent invention. I'm not suggesting a return to feudalism or anything like it, but think we should be willing to consider variations in social order that are at least that large-scale, because the difference between what is coming and industrial capitalism is going to be at least as big as the difference between industrial capitalism and the semi-feudal societies that preceded it in many places.

Sweden is a capitalist country with a strong social safety net. It's not remotely socialist, at best a social democracy. In no way could you say that, in Sweden, 'to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities'.

The majority of production in Sweden is not state owned.

>which is what socialism is, and nothing else

Actually, socialism is the ownership by the workers of the means of production.

A system of co-operatives would also be socialist.

There are post-scarcity examples in human history (see gift economies and potlach societies - common among native americans and in the pacific islands) where social pressure caused any accumulation of wealth to be shared with the entire society (this is a bit similar to Andrew Carnegie's dictum that to die rich is to die disgraced, now leading to the billionaire's pledge). Of course, this only worked because the societies were individual tribes/villages and fit within Dunbar's number, where every individual knew every other individual in the society.

If post-scarcity is brought about by automation, then there will be no need for most people to work, and socialism won't be the appropriate economic model (since people will not be directly involved in production). At this point we'll probably need to return to a gift-like economy.

It's a terrible method.

That is shockingly ignorant, and shame on whoever taught you that.

Free markets and trade have lifted the most people out of poverty and improved the living standards of the largest number of people in history.

It is an imperfect way of organising the needs of people, but it is superior to everything else that has been tried, by an order of magnitude.

> It is an imperfect way of organising the needs of people, but it is superior to everything else that has been tried, by an order of magnitude.

This is extremely important to remember. The fear of the unknown should not stop us from trying new economic systems that may be superior to capitalism.

Yes; but even less radically so, I'm thinking about Keynes' failed predictions.

You shouldn't advocate for socialism, even in jest. It is a terrible system which has caused more suffering than all the despots in history together.

Forward thinking will only happen when everyone walks away for the wreckage of socialism and realises it is a dead fork in the road that must be rejected utterly.

...If we build framework to support such an economy, it may be possible.

That's the crux of the issue. It seems that the current economy will rather drive itself to the ground, taking all of humanity with it, rather than transitioning itself to a different value system. It looks like the post-scarcity world is not on the phase-space trajectory we're currently following.

On a macro scale it's momentum and incentives at play. Daunting, but malleable.

Locally, we're close to achieving sensible cities/communities with renewable energy, easier access to rapid prototyping, and worker co-op business models.

Do what you can with what you have to make your city and friends have access to healthy enjoyable lives.

From where I'm sitting, it doesn't look like we're remotely close. Renewable energy and effective urban planning are not at all common, and worker co-op business models are quite rare.

I like your vision of the future, but I don't see much evidence that we're headed there.

Right now I feel every reason to be gratuitously optimistic.

- Solar photo-voltaic is or is about to be the cheapest form of electricity, we will solve the storage problem

- Electric cars are getting closer to the tipping point, and they are going to drive themselves

- Biotech is making incredible gains, see cancer immunotherapy or NSI-189

- The pace of technological innovation has accelerated and continues

- The intellectual capital of the human race has never been anywhere near this large, free, accessible

- Robots/a lot of weak AI is or is about to get to a point to change the game

We're on trajectory technologically but not sociologically.

  "We eat in restaurants, buy branded toiletries, build 
  skyscrapers, create legislative institutions, travel in 
  flying machines, write poetry, and search for meaning in 
  relationships, temples, and scientific books. Humans have 
  discovered antibiotics, sent probes into space, decimated 
  rainforests, shared a billion views of clips of kitten 
  behaviour, and decoded their own genomes.


  But there is one thing that humans have singularly failed 
  to do, and that is to properly understand their own behaviour. "

  — Robert Aunger and Valerie Curtis:
  Gaining Control: How human behavior evolved

[0] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/gaining-control-9780...

It's hubris to say this, but we're not as far off as you might think.

If "they" can fix economics ( big if ) that alone would make a big difference. But the US only got off the gold standard in my lifetime.

There's a Churchill quote about Americans; I think it generalizes to humans - "Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing…after they have exhausted all other possibilities."

I agree it's what the 'next economy' will look like, but it's also what the 'last economy' looked like. Prior to the entire tech movement was agriculture, resource harvesting and material manufacturing.

Previously farming was done by hand, now a single machine replaces a hundred workers.

Previously coal was mined by hand, now a single machine replaces thousands of workers.

Previously trees were axed by hand and sluiced by river, now you can clear a forest with a couple machines and a couple skilled operators.

Previously producing cloth required massive numbers of skilled workers, then the loom was invented.

I often see this argument that we're in some unprecedented state of replacing labor with automation. I don't see any proof of that. I think we replaced labor with automation at a much faster pace during the industrial revolution and made it out just fine.

I'd love to see some stats on the differences if anyone has them.

or... previously everybody had to produce the food they ate, now only 1% does. previously many people had to dig out coal, now a machine has relieved thousands of a shitty job......

I didn't say replacing labor with automation, I said replacing mundane, inglorious labor with automation. I agree with you. What I am saying is that we will choose which labors we do by hand, based on an emerging, re-emerging set of ethics and values.

replace "automatons" with "foreign workers" and this economy is already in place in USA. It doesn't seem like pleasant to the humans at the apex.

most will choose their own unemployment adventure.

The problem is the current size of the world population is designed and fit for the Industrial Age and not for the Information Age.

What do you suggest we have to do to the "surplus" of manpower now?

Please no retraining nonsense as jobs will dwindle too and mirror the trend elsewhere.

Please show some political sense in your reply.

Invent new enemies every few years and new wars to send all our excess manpower off to?

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