RE: Hive And A Post Labor World
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If human labour becomes superfluous, it would be logical that the generation of income should also become superfluous. But as long as work and income are linked, just like taxes, human income recipients are needed. The many professions that are replaced by automation or AI will nevertheless need food. But how are the many unemployed supposed to pay taxes if they live off the state or a so-called granted basic income?
The question then arises whether an income is necessary at all. One might think that if so many goods, commodities and foodstuffs are largely produced by machines, then earning an income is somehow pointless. Like artificially employing a bagger next to a cashier to fill people's bags with their goods. The subsequent question everyone asks is: if machines do most of the work, who pays to have them made and maintained? One could casually answer: No one. Since it is clear that payment is unnecessary. But because no government/company in the world is willing to simply take its raw materials from the earth or reuse them without compensation. So the question of compensation arises, doesn't it?
Because money is the means of compensation par excellence, the idea of taking something other than money to compensate is difficult. But what could that be? It seems (to me), after all, the only logical answer to this scenario.
Because to keep people alive, and yet progressively continue the use of machines/robotics/AI, involves trading raw materials that are not always available in one's own country. If you only transport back and forth what is needed locally, you'd have peoples lives covered.
If energy supply, roads, buildings, supermarkets and everything that people need to live is to be maintained, but this is not achieved by people for people through their labor, is it not the case that all borders would have to be dissolved and all nations would have to agree that they would henceforth do the opposite of what they are currently doing? To renounce war, for example. To renounce the collection and distribution of taxes. In other words, to abolish money as a means of payment.
Since this is unthinkable and probably not feasible (what do I know), I think it is more likely that artificial labour and income and taxation will be maintained or even intensified. Working for the big ones (state and corporations) will probably increase in the foreseeable future. Becoming a human resource in its scary sense (which I detest).
In twenty or thirty years, the baby boomers will be dead and population growth will come to an abrupt end. It is foreseeable that when people fall below a certain birth rate, self-sustainability - based on tax and social security fees - will no longer be granted. So that the young people of today, when they themselves are old, do not depend on the income and tax and social contributions of the following generations (since this calculation does not work out anyway), other means are needed for their survival. It would probably make sense that machines/robotics/AI use have to be much cheaper than they are today. Tax machines? LOL
Maybe parallel worlds will come into being. Peoples living off the grids or forming small communities next to the big/mega cities. I really don't know. Maybe becoming married and having many children will become fashionable again and taking vows between males and females seriously again.
I already have knots in my brain when I think about this stuff too long.
I don't believe in post labor future. I think people will come up with some crazy (or ingenious, it depends) jobs as they always do. After all, humans want to work, whatever that might be, they cannot do nothing.
I disagree. Humans want to be active, however you define that, in a certain way, but the idea they want to work is not something I agree with.
As for the post labor society, it is not close. The potentiality is there but the reality is much further along.
To start with what you wrong, keep in mind that money is designed to facilitate trade. That is the purpose it ideally servers. So the idea of a world without money is not going to happen.
And if labor is no longer human but machine, who is to say there is not compensation for it? Why wouldnt there be? Isnt that what cryptocurrency and blockchain can provide?
The difference is a lot of this will not be structured as a corporation but with DAO. That is likely to start expanding in utility as people experiment.
By the term "work", I really meant that people want to do something. Precisely because they cannot do nothing. They want to see meaning in what they are working on. If I said that people want to have "jobs", I agree with you. I am making a distinction here.
As I said before, I also do not see the scenario of a world without money. However, if work done primarily by humans is done by machines in the future, and yet nations will not forgo taxes and social security payments to distribute them, where will these revenues come from? From what forms of activity will people pay such levies, if not through a central national currency? In this context, what is better about cryptocurrency if it were also used for the same purpose? After all, you can't expect road construction, energy supply, supermarkets to be paid for in different crypto tokens whose stability changes in a short time, making planning difficult if not impossible?
If Berlin accepted the X token but not the Y token, Berlin would not be able to do business with Hamburg unless they accepted the same currency. The machines that run a power plant in Munich cost money and the operators want to see this money when they make financial investments to supply the region with energy, for example.
Even if cryptocurrency replaced fiat, don't you think it would also be centralised? If oil is extracted from the ground to run petrol stations or electricity is generated for electric vehicles, in what way does who compensate for the costs incurred?
It seems to me that cryptocurrency trading tends to be limited to less essential services and professions, but where it comes to food and energy, travel and construction, the sovereignty of decision-making lies either with the state or with the big corporations that call the shots.
I have no idea what DAO is and what you mean by that. Please, explain.
DAO = Decentralized Autonomous Organization
It is a crucial component to this entire discussion.
what makes it crucial? How does it refer to the questions I asked?
It alters the entire focus of the conversation.
You propose a centralized world which I disagree with. The future is moving in the other direction.
The challenge is that is one thing corporation and physical governments are going to be the structures of the future, then what happens if there is something completely different.
Another issue is that when you deal with networks, it again takes the conversation to another level. What happens when most people are finding autonomous agents that are housed in DAOs which are interconnected as being the basis for most of their activity.
But if you have no idea what the DAO is, then I can see why your point of view.
If we look at the last 40 years and see how the world changed due to the semiconductor, we can start the process of forecasting what the next few decades will look like.
This is where AI and robotics seem to be at point of massive acceleration. It was always happening but not at a noticeable level.
No, I did not propose it, and in fact, I detest it. I am over fifty and I observed what is also called "more centralization" instead of less. Our Currency, the Deutsch Mark was converted into the Euro, for example. On top of national governance we got the European Parlament. Small businesses vanish in favor of big businesses, one can go on and on with those kinds of examples. I wouldn't know how to counteract these developments, though I thought a lot about it.
DAO is a concept which still has to prove what you ascribe to it. We will see where it goes.