I agree we need ubi or something more dramatic but there’s been various decent arguments for how things could work without it.
The most popular is probably a continuation of what happened all through the rest of the industrial revolution. Like how the price of cloth fell when autolooms took peoples jobs, this caused demand to increase and created whole new industries - fashion, fashion blogging, etc, etc. It’s easy to think that there’s nothing new left but that’s because new things are harder to imagine.
There’s also a lot of talk about a return to more localized business models, the falling cost of services resulting in smaller communities being able to be self sufficient. The same logic goes on a larger scale also, governments able to offer more complete services at much lower prices reduces the cost of living and avoids the privation and poverty which caused such unrest in previous eras of low employment. Higher standards of living and more opportunities to engage meaningfully with the world or enjoy distractions will result in less political urgency, especially as solutions roll out globally reducing pressures that cause migration, etc.
The doomer model pushed by tabloids and drama merchants just hand waves away everything that doesn’t satisfy their urge for bad news, they want us to imagine a world where hyper efficient robots have stolen everyone’s jobs but it’s 1925, we’re suffering after a failed world war and there’s no bread… it makes no sense.
We can already see the effects of technology making life cheaper, even this international conversation would have been too expensive for me to participate in fifty years ago. Education resources are actually free now for all but the most obscure subjects, it’s hard to think of anything you can’t learn free. Entertainment also, creative tools, all sorts of things are available to everyone on the planet - anyone trying to pretend this isn’t a huge thing simply isn’t being serious.
There’s a lot of really complex stuff that goes Into models for how things will unfold and people talk about it all at great length, I feel a lot of people avoid these topics like antivax groups avoid learning about actual science because they don’t want things to be complex, they want to feel special and you can only do that when you’re certain of your opion because you actively avoided learning any confounding arguments.
I agree we need ubi or something more dramatic but there’s been various decent arguments for how things could work without it.
The most popular is probably a continuation of what happened all through the rest of the industrial revolution. Like how the price of cloth fell when autolooms took peoples jobs, this caused demand to increase and created whole new industries - fashion, fashion blogging, etc, etc. It’s easy to think that there’s nothing new left but that’s because new things are harder to imagine.
There’s also a lot of talk about a return to more localized business models, the falling cost of services resulting in smaller communities being able to be self sufficient. The same logic goes on a larger scale also, governments able to offer more complete services at much lower prices reduces the cost of living and avoids the privation and poverty which caused such unrest in previous eras of low employment. Higher standards of living and more opportunities to engage meaningfully with the world or enjoy distractions will result in less political urgency, especially as solutions roll out globally reducing pressures that cause migration, etc.
The doomer model pushed by tabloids and drama merchants just hand waves away everything that doesn’t satisfy their urge for bad news, they want us to imagine a world where hyper efficient robots have stolen everyone’s jobs but it’s 1925, we’re suffering after a failed world war and there’s no bread… it makes no sense.
We can already see the effects of technology making life cheaper, even this international conversation would have been too expensive for me to participate in fifty years ago. Education resources are actually free now for all but the most obscure subjects, it’s hard to think of anything you can’t learn free. Entertainment also, creative tools, all sorts of things are available to everyone on the planet - anyone trying to pretend this isn’t a huge thing simply isn’t being serious.
There’s a lot of really complex stuff that goes Into models for how things will unfold and people talk about it all at great length, I feel a lot of people avoid these topics like antivax groups avoid learning about actual science because they don’t want things to be complex, they want to feel special and you can only do that when you’re certain of your opion because you actively avoided learning any confounding arguments.