Thanks for stopping by, vardi. Great article. I do buy that structural unemployment is a likely scenario as machine intelligence absorbs more jobs. That being the case, I wonder if Capitalism will become ill-suited for the type of market forces that evolve. You touch on this at the end of your article, mentioning that Keynes predicted that we might be at a 15-hour work week in the near future. However, it strikes me odd that he didn't suppose that we would just do a similar amount of different kinds of work. In other words, as long as you can create value with your time, our current economics sets the bar at a willingness to sacrifice a certain amount of time, as long as the return on that time is significantly measurable by someone else. If most are willing to sacrifice 40 hours a week at a task, you will have to do it too, no matter how soulless or inane. Maybe we will be doing absurd things, but as long as there can be demand for what machines cannot do, I don't see that we will find ourselves with much free time. I'd like to think that at some point the jobs left for us would be so absurd that we might collectively just refuse to put so much time into them. However, in Capitalist societies, people slave for the majority of their waking lives doing things like painting wind-up toys. Do we need new jobs, or do we need to rethink why we are doing them?
Agreed. IMO it has to do with rewards. If you replace workers (and their wages and benefits) with a robot, the reward is immediate. However, the reward for thinking about the consequences is distant, and ill-defined. This is why we are on a one-way street to severe climate change, right? It seems the only way that we can deal with these issues is through a kind of central planning, but history has plenty examples of how that can go awry. We are too short-sighted to plan ahead as individuals, and too ignorant to plan ahead as leaders. Maybe we can ask the machines to plan for us? An alternative might be to attach philosophers and ethicists to Senate and Congressional committees, and at they very least, allow them to attach commentary on legislation, giving a moral perspective that the public can center discussions upon.