Crap...

Capitalism, my favorite economic system, has a major drawback that will become more and more prominent in the future.
The issue is that as machines grow more sophisticated, efficient, productive, and useful, people will have an incredibly lesser ability to compete with then for jobs.
Wanna be a clerk? Sorry, we're not hiring; that new robotic and computer system does the job better than any human. Plus, it's 100% honest. Plus, we just pay for it once and it'll work for 30 years; all we have to do is keep it plugged in!
Wanna be a soldier? Two words: autonomous drones (for ground, land, and air forces; even infantry are replaced). You wanna be the guy who does maintenance on the drones? Why? We've got a drone for that!
You wanna be a doctor? We're not hiring; there's a brand new robot doctor which possesses 100% of humanity's accumulated medical knowledge!
And don't even get me started on factories and farms...

Whenever this process becomes complete, the only people able to make a living are the people who own businesses and robots. The rich. Everybody else will be jobless.
Technology is going to ruin capitalism...

Dassault Papillon: Physiologically, there is an established limit to what human beings in their default biological state can do. Robots, on the other hand, are evolving and they likely won't stop evolving. Even administrative positions will be taken over by super-intelligent systems.
That is, eventually it will be physically impossible for humans to compete in any field.
When this happens, I think humanity will be forced to embrace communism.

To my understanding, the mechanization of the workforce can happen in a communist society as well.

Machines have already taken a lot of jobs that workers used to have in factories. This doesn't necessarily create job loss, but rather a faster rate of corporate growth allowing companies to provide more jobs in the grand scheme of things.

Blackflag: More will be produced, but if machines are superior to human workers in almost every possible way, they'll be chosen above human workers. "More jobs" will simply go to more machines.

It hasn't happened yet because, despite amazing advances, machines generally cannot yet run themselves independent of human help. Also, factories and farms still require a fairly high degree of human oversight and work. Machines are not yet at that point; give it a hundred years or so and it will.

The mechanization of a workforce can happen under Communism, but in this case all that was produced would be shared with all of humanity and the machines would be owned by the collective.

Dassault Papillon: We'll have to see how far artificial intelligence can go. I would like to think it would be a lot more expensive to maintain a robot than it would be to train a human being.

Blackflag: Perhaps somebody could establish a "stupid" settlement, which'd be a large piece of land where people would be allowed to grow food and stuff and provide for themselves in isolation without any robot competition?

Dassault Papillon: Why do you see this as a problem? More efficient factors of production mean more goods means lower prices? If we see money as a billeting system for the distribution of wealth, the simple answer is to give the unemployed some money. Something almost all countries already do.

Dassault Papillon: The Amish already exist. Also, the Luddite movement died.

admin: Independence and fiscal stability is important. Lower prices are good, but you want people to have jobs in which they can continuously buy consumer goods.
Giving people money is an alleviation tactic. It is never a solution to any problem. That money does have to come from somewhere you know.

Dassault Papillon: IDK, this whole scenario is kind of forward thinking, so I am not really completely interested in finding solutions for a non-existent problem.

Blackflag: No it doesn't have to come from anywhere. Money is just a confidence trick. If robots produced 100% of all production, there'd be nothing anti-capitalist about equal pay for everyone, or for that matter, abolishing money altogether, since the robots could just provide everyone with the things they wanted. As we move closer towards that kind of a future, a straight non-redistributive financial framework makes increasingly less sense.

No it doesn't have to come from anywhere. Money is just a confidence trick. If robots produced 100% of all production, there'd be nothing anti-capitalist about equal pay for everyone, or for that matter, abolishing money altogether, since the robots could just provide everyone with the things they wanted.
What you described is a future hell of idiocy and unskilled deadbeats. We need losers as much as we need winners. I've seen I, Robot / that kind of future is scary as shit

admin: Yeah, and you'd have to provide for the permanently unemployed for their entire lives.

admin: I don't think a Luddite humanity would be needed if we simply transitioned to communism instead.
However, I don't think such a transition should be made until it becomes necessary.

Blackflag: Two things:
1. Movies are crap depictions of robot technology. People once said a future where robots made cars is scary as shit, because the auto industry used to employ millions. Now GM is basically a retirement fund. Robots that produce goods aren't inherently movie-like.
2. It now seems pretty apparent that the robots of the future will be designed by other robots, the practical advantage of which is faster calculation of linear programming. As such robots can solve for constraints like human safety much better than humans can solve for those same constraints.

As for whether people would be unskilled idiots, hell no. I think people would be more academic and, at the same time, more socially focused. I also feel like one of those constraints would be human control over ethical decisions, in general, but specifically in areas like medicine. Hence why robots couldn't conquer the world etc.

Dassault Papillon: I don't necessarily see the problem with that. Unemployment is a good thing if it doesn't negatively affect wealth.

admin: People once said a future where robots made cars is scary as shit, because the auto industry used to employ millions. Now GM is basically a retirement fund. Robots that produce goods aren't inherently movie-like.
I come from motor city, the auto industry created jobs. Anyhow, my problem isn't with industrial mechanization, but your proposal to unemploy 100% of the population and just funnel them money as they continue to get more idiotic and worthlessly deadbeat. There might as well be a holocaust on the ppl who get their entire lifestyle pay'd for, or they'll bring everyone else down with them.

As for whether people would be unskilled idiots, hell no. I think people would be more academic and, at the same time, more socially focused
Why? What would they have to gain that they wouldn't all have by sitting on their asses doing nothing? You just said that everyone should be unemployed and be given everything they need, like some kind of stalinist fantasy.

I don't necessarily see the problem with that. Unemployment is a good thing if it doesn't negatively affect wealth.
It always does though. Redistribution of wealth? Pls, taking all the money from the producers to give it to the wasters isn't an economy booster.

The working class earned their money, while the deadbeat class didn't. What logical sense does it make to forcibly take money from those who earned it and giving it to people who did nothing to earn it?

Blackflag: And where are those jobs now, oh great auto city? Mostly, outsourced to asia, and even the asians aren't doing the nitty gritty work. It's dem machines.

It's not a proposal. It's something that I think will happen organically, in the way distant future. The ultimate aim of human work is to make things easier for the next generation. Eventually things will become so easy that it's more efficient just to let robots make things easier for us than for us to make things easier for ourselves. Capitalism creates the incentives for ultimate 100% unemployment where we can all live lives of luxury. To be clear though, I don't think any of us will see this within our lifetimes. Self-improving machines go back to the 1940s, but we're a LONG way from seeing them able to be tested in practice, yet alone applied to all fields of work.

People do academic things not always for pure advancement of society, but often for simple curiosity. That's something linear programming, by its nature, cannot solve for because it has no constraints. Hence academic. And social because we are social creatures, and so voluntary efforts for social interaction won't go away, but will only increase.

Redistribution can certainly be an economy booster, because poor people are more liable to spend than save. Savings take money out of the economy for later - which wouldn't be a problem if they eventually went into super-productive sectors, but that's the thing, they don't. Wealth never trickles down, trickle down economics is a simple lie. Matter of fact, Canadian research shows the rich cost the country a thousand times more through tax evasion alone than all the deadbeats put together.

This being said, what I'm saying is NOT wealth redistribution, because you're not taking wealth away from anyone. You are simply adding to everyone's wealth. Nobody can possibly work because nobody can compete against machines in any clearly defined problem (even if there was no machine to solve it, a machine could simply build a machine for the purpose, since linear programming is self-solving).