Sunday, July 29, 2012

What's the plan once technology makes manual labor obsolete?

As technology improves, workers adapt, learning marketable skills that are more economically performed by a human than by a machine.  In this way, even though improvements might make a worker's current economic role obsolete, workers are able to stay employed and keep food on the table.

But what happens when improving technology results, as it inevitably will assuming our future isn't a dystopian hellscape, in devices which are capable of outperforming most of humanity in any conceivable way for a cost below starvation wages for a flesh-and-blood worker?  Without any economic incentive to hire people, what happens to the people?  Some number of intellectual/creative people's skills will remain in demand, at least until technology replaces them, too.

For a liberal or socialist system, taxes will be levied on the owners of technology to provide for people's needs.  But what would be the conservative alternative?

1 comment:

nyb said...

Ever watch Idiocracy? That's where we end up. The future belongs to those who show up - and the plebs continue to reproduce.