<story><title>What did the tech CEO say to the worker he wanted to automate?</title><url>http://www.marketplace.org/topics/wealth-poverty/what-did-tech-ceo-say-worker-he-wanted-automate#.Uh6EtAC_2Bw.facebook</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jamesaguilar</author><text>Yep. If your job could conceivably be done by an automaton, eventually it will be. Since we are just automatons, that means that every job could eventually be automated. Which is ok. I&amp;#x27;d rather not have to work. But it&amp;#x27;s also basically proof that someday we&amp;#x27;ll need socialism because there will be no jobs at all.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_ak</author><text>Socialism is such a harsh word.&lt;p&gt;All it really needs is a welfare program for the general population that doesn&amp;#x27;t punish those whose jobs have been automated.&lt;p&gt;A system how to solve that has been discussed in Germany by left-leaning parties. The idea is simple: give everyone a certain salary per month that allows them to rent a flat, buy groceries, and have a social life. Without the fear of losing their job, not being able to afford food or just becoming poor, people will do whatever they like: some will continue their job (which earns them extra pay, obviously), some will try out a business idea they have, some won&amp;#x27;t work. Or that&amp;#x27;s the idea, at least, with the assumption that people aren&amp;#x27;t lazy by nature and thus must be punished if they neither work nor actively seek for jobs (i.e. the current unemployment benefit system in Germany), but instead would like to work, except working on the stuff they like working on.</text></comment>
<story><title>What did the tech CEO say to the worker he wanted to automate?</title><url>http://www.marketplace.org/topics/wealth-poverty/what-did-tech-ceo-say-worker-he-wanted-automate#.Uh6EtAC_2Bw.facebook</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jamesaguilar</author><text>Yep. If your job could conceivably be done by an automaton, eventually it will be. Since we are just automatons, that means that every job could eventually be automated. Which is ok. I&amp;#x27;d rather not have to work. But it&amp;#x27;s also basically proof that someday we&amp;#x27;ll need socialism because there will be no jobs at all.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>seiji</author><text>From 1994 (I welcome any earlier references too):&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;An easy change in the United States could be through the social security system. Social security was originally presented as a government-run pension fund that accumulated wages for retirement, but in practice it transfers income from workers to retirees. The system will probably be subsidized from general taxes in coming decades, when too few workers are available to support the retiring post World War II baby boom. Incremental expansion of such a subsidy would let money from robot industries, collected as corporate taxes, be returned to the general population as pension payments. By gradually lowering the retirement age towards birth, most of the population would eventually be supported. The money could be distributed under other names, but calling it a pension is meaningful symbolism: we are describing the long, comfortable retirement of the original-model human race.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1995/RobotMind.talk.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.frc.ri.cmu.edu&amp;#x2F;~hpm&amp;#x2F;project.archive&amp;#x2F;general.artic...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>