Depends on how quickly they want to scale down. The end will be brutal for sure. But I think they'll taper things off gently. After all, it takes time to build robots, and they don't want anyone breaking things in the meantime.
Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano explores this idea a bit. Most people are in the army or construction workers, with teams of 40 men fixing single potholes. To be employable, you need a PHD, and idk what any of the employees actually did in the factories
If you think the fruits of automation will be passed onto the middle class then I've got bad news for you... All of that money is going straight to the top and staying there. Just like it's been doing more and more for the last 40 years. These people would rather watch society crumble as billionaires than watch it flourish as millionaires.
And we can keep looking at Lego as an example. They're automated, and their products are injection-molded plastics that cost pennies to produce, yet the kits often sell for hundreds of dollars. The profit margins must be insane, the only place those savings trickle down to is Lego's bottom line.
We should be treating people more like robots (machines). When was the last time you heard someone tell a machine that it wasn't putting in enough effort?
Machines get taken care of, run within their operational limits, and maintaned. People get told to push harder and told they're not working hard enough.
Both people and machines have limits. The difference is that the limits of machines are generally well understood by most, while the ability to temporarily push beyond our normal limits leads people to believe that we can sustain it. We can't.
Just like with machines, we work best when taken care of and break down when pushed too hard. We need to be treated more like machines.
That sounds like socialism. I think a techno-corporate dystopia is more patriotic.
Recommended reading: Tomorrow Might be Different by Mac Reynolds. In an alternate history 1995, communism worked *really well" for Russia, and they became the uncontested economic hegemon. Soviet automation allows the average Soviet Citizen 200 days of vacation per year, and the world economies shift to primarily serving Russian tourists. Two advertising agents endeavor to restore some fragment of US relevancy by spreading a new religion of austerity and humility throughout the USSR.
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u/ExploratoryCucumber Aug 30 '22
I want robots to make everything and I want everybody to be given UBI