alt Hacker NewsWhat do we do when former window repairman can't find other jobs? Just fuck em, right?
The narrative we're seeing around AI and current automation isn't "we're going to automate one category of jobs". If it were then sure, we could be relatively confident that the excess labor from that industry would be absorbed by other segments
But that's not what the future looks like to me. The future to me looks like "we want to automate a large majority of labor"
So what then? If tons of labour is displaced then the Broken Window Fallacy doesn't really apply, because it is based on the assumption that there will always be something for displaced labour to do.
Call it the Excess Labor Corollary. If there's no way to absorb excess labor in other segments, then what.
When there really aren't any jobs for the former window repair man to do, we are in a "post scarcity economy", which could be a utopia where everyone lives in comfort and has more leisure time.
Or of course, a few billionaires could hoard the wealth.
There's a Wikipedia page about it.
We could be in a post scarcity economy now, except that generally instead of realising we all have enough of we share, we raise the threshold of what we consider to be enough comfort and stuff.