Of course, the benefits of increased productivity should go to the shareholders, not the workers who increased their productivity.

It is the shareholders who are responsible for keeping the economic engine going through their smart trading and index funds.

Try picture the long ago, picture a man with a scythe, picture a millstone, picture a baker hammering out bread by hand, imagine the effort involved....

...picture an enormous John Deere tractor or a Claas Lexion, picture cargo trains, road trains and cargo ships, our engineered roads and water ways, picture our giant factories cranking out bread and what nots...

Then we also did a complex point system to divide and allocate resources, the fruits of innovation and the fruits of labor. Ideally those who contribute the most valuable things get the most points. Create organizations, take risks, invest where you think growth will occur.

But fixing exploits is poorly rewarded compared to exploiting them. People continue to find ways to be elaborately rewarded for great (and not so great) accomplishments that happened generations ago.

One could argue there to be 2 industries, one of miraculous production, progress, collective happiness and quality of life, squeezing wine out of a rock is not easy but we are apparently doing it in many ways. The other industry is also looking to improve quality of life but only for it self, it does so at the expense of others. It's not a black and white division, many of us play a role in both. Picture people at a discount store excited to buy the slave labor but also employers collectively driving down salaries.

The systemic problem we run into is that in order for further progress to take place (and I do mean durable progress in quality of life) people have to be able to afford it first. Enough of the resources and the other fruits have to be allocated to average Joe so that we can build a new and improved iphone, better cars, new and improved hospitals, better tractors, boats, factories etc etc On top of the bill for maintaining infrastructure, roads, houses, dykes, etc

You can see things went wrong in food subsidies. Food production is tens of thousands of times more efficient than before but hard working Joe needs subsidies to buy food(!?)

Take the language models, lots of people are very excited about the development but only few can spend [say] 100 per month just to play with it. Making a product is still possible but it will have to be a watered down shadow of what it could have been. Finding investors is still possible but without the river of easy money it is going to be much less obvious to bet on. No doubt the technology is going to do miraculous things in countless sectors and [like before] replace millions of jobs. We will have to find other things to do for them which isn't hard really, there is plenty to do.

But do you think if the pool of resources to be divided by the system grows by [in this case] an amount that use to take millions of hands.. do you think this should also mean the amount of resources allocated to working people should dramatically decline? Like a game of musical chairs?

The opportunity to cut salaries is certainly there every time. I could even picture an end game where we don't need people anymore. I mean, what do you and I have to contribute if our hands and our brains are to slow and to clumsy?

I like to think we've accomplished the current state of the art to improve life for humans? If that is what we want we should design the system to enforce that idea. It seems kind of important for you to agree :P

> The opportunity to cut salaries is certainly there every time. I could even picture an end game where we don't need people anymore.

And this happens. We no longer ship ice from the Arctic for cooling. That industry has zero people in it. We do most of our communication via electronic means instead of people carrying letters. We do most of our agriculture with machines, which is why for example 30% of Europe is no longer agricultural labourers.

In each case we do things better, they cost less, and we move on to the next problem and jobs open up there.

> Food production is tens of thousands of times more efficient than before

You need to distribute and sell food, and lowering this has hit wage floors and fuel price floors. Maybe one day you could send food directly to people via drones, and then you could scale it all better, but that's the issue.

> In each case we do things better, they cost less, and we move on to the next problem and jobs open up there.

The tricky part is the mechanism by which we chose the next problem.

If everything that sustains people gets cheaper we can lower all the salaries. Working people can buy more than before but get a smaller slice of the total pie. All things combined there is more stuff to divide which allows us to create more wealth elsewhere.

The pie as a whole determines what should be the next problem to attack.

Imagine for laughs an utopia where no one works, we all get a nice house, a car, free food, energy/fuel, a phone, computer, tv, nice cloths, etc, etc, everything you want plus an allowance of 10 USD per week.

Whatever problem the market attacks next there is no incentive to do something useful for humans.