This and other fairytales.

The only solution here is to stop tying people's value to their productivity. That makes a lot of sense in the 1900s but it makes a lot less sense when the primary faucet of productivity is automation. If you insist on tying a person's fundamental right to a decent and secure life to their productivity and then take away their ability to be productive you're left with a permenant and growing underclass of undesirables and an increasingly slim pantheon of demigods at the top.

We have written like, an ocean of scifi about this very subject and somehow we still fail to properly consider this as a likely outcome.

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ap99 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Speaking of fairytales, you're living in your own.

Disconnecting value from productivity sounds good if you don't examine any of the consequences.

Can you build a society from scratch using that principle? If you can't then why would it work on an already built society?

Like if we're in an airplane flying, what you're saying is the equivalent getting rid of the wings because they're blocking your view. We're so high in the sky we'd have a lot of altitude to work with, right?

	▲	IgorPartola 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Imagine a society where one person produces all the value. Their job is to do highly technical maintenance on a single machine that is basically the Star Trek replicator: it produces all the food, clothing, housing, energy, etc. that is enough for every human in this society and the surplus is stored away in case the machine is down for maintenance, which happens occasionally. Maintaining the machine takes very specialized knowledge but adding more people to the process in no way makes it more productive. This person, let’s call them The Engineer, has several apprentices who can take over but again, no more than 5 because you just don’t need more. In this society there is literally nothing for anyone else to do. Do you think they deserve to be cut out of sharing the value generated by The Engineer and the machine, leaving them to starve? Do you think starving people tend to obey rules or are desperate people likely to smash the evil machine and kill The Engineer if The Engineer cuts them off? Or do you think in a society where work hours mean nothing for an average person a different economic system is required?

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karol 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They key is to do it by setting up the right structure or end up with it naturally, not by laws and control, because then you end up in a oppressive nanny state at the very best.

	▲	Sohcahtoa82 17 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> They key is to do it by setting up the right structure or end up with it naturally This is extremely hand-wavy. Can you be more concrete in what you think this looks like? The way I see it, we're only 5-10 years away from having general purpose robots and AI that can basically do anything. If the prices for that automation is low enough, there will be massive layoffs as workers are replaced. There's no way to "naturally" solve the problem of skyrocketing unemployment without government involvement.
	▲	ap99 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		You couldn't set up a lemonade stand using that principle let alone an entire society.
	▲	hackyhacky 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The key, as history teaches us, is guillotines.

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carlosjobim 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's already completely disconnected, don't worry about it. Most people who own any real estate earn more in price appreciation per year than they earn in take-home salary from their real full-time jobs.