Gwynne Dyer: Universal basic income is not crazy and not going away

[The2ndWheel]

31. I can't argue about the social benefits of work, I agree

Labor shortage raises pay, but not if people aren't needed to do the job. If you go from 40 to 32 hours per week, but the same amount gets done, who is going to pay people more for less time? If you go from 40 to 32 hours, and the increasing automation works the way the it's supposed to work, who is going to get these raised wages? How many people are going to get the raised wages?

Need is really the part that raises pay. If the automation works the way it's supposed to, there won't be a labor shortage. There will be a need shortage. The need for people to be around for 40 hours, 32 hours, 10 hours, or whatever.

It's definitely going to be disruptive. There's no telling exactly how it'll play out. The meaning of work as we know it will change. It's almost inevitable, since that meaning has always changed in some way or another, since however far back as you want to go. You look at society as a whole, and we've already been building an increasingly isolated world for people in some ways. As they say, you can have 1000 friends on Facebook, but it's not really real.

It's a question of, if automation takes away the most basic of jobs, then takes away some more advanced jobs, and on and on down the list, what do people do? How many people can be doctors, or athletes, or whatever high paying profession? People in those positions make so much money because they're rare. If the majority of people don't have the talent, or drive, or chance to do those things, and machines of some kind are doing more and more jobs, where do people go?

If we're going to have the resource concentration mechanism that we call civilization(so there's nowhere outside of it to go), and we're going to advance technology in an unrelenting way(which puts that much more pressure on people), at some point we have to pay people for simply existing. Otherwise there are going to be a lot of pissed off and/or dead people.