The crux: "It seems to me that technology will soon destroy jobs faster than it creates them, if it hasn’t started to already. Which is a good thing! Most of the jobs it destroys are bad, and most of the ones it creates are good. Net human happiness should be vastly increased, not decreased, by this process — but, unfortunately, capitalism doesn’t work that way."
Instead of trying to lower costs for big companies by creating software that replaces people, we should strive to create something of value that can also employ people in meaningful numbers. Don't know what exactly, but that is the shape of it.
Basically, that quote was the foundation of Marx' argument for why he saw capitalism as doomed to eventual failure.
People tend to think that Marx argued for the overthrow of capitalism because it is/was in his eyes morally "bad" or "evil", but that's not really the case.
Marx argued that capitalism was better than any previous system, and - despite failings - vitally necessary to bring the world to a point where production would for the first time in history make it possible to meet the basic needs of everyone
(without which, he insisted, a socialist revolution would be doomed to failure: in such a situation, redistribution would just make want common, and cause the old class struggle to re-assert itself - like it did in the Soviet Union etc. with the party installing itself as a new upper class).
But he expected capitalism to continue to push production efficiency to the point where it would overproduce and under-employ, and that this would eventually trigger socialist revolutions.
> Instead of trying to lower costs for big companies by creating software that replaces people, we should strive to create something of value that can also employ people in meaningful numbers. Don't know what exactly, but that is the shape of it.
Why? If we can reduce or remove the need for people to work, why should we not?
Interesting! I did not realize this was Marx's point of view.
> Why? If we can reduce or remove the need for people to work, why should we not?
Well, it is because I figured people would want to feel valued and like they have a meaningful place in society. But, if people don't want to work and there is no need for it (assuming a low-scarcity future, as the author described), then sure. That should be an option too.
We can not remove the need to work, because there will always be a need to eat, and to be able to eat, you need to work because nobody will feed you voluntarily.
If somebody else has to work so you can eat without working, thats theft and your victims will try to kill you to stop you taking the products of their labor.
I believe the parent is thinking of a hypothetical reality trending toward one where technology is capable of solving nearly any arbitrary problem at no material cost.
Imagine, say, a world where clouds of von Neumann self-replicating builder robots fly around and plant seeds, tend trees, harvest, and deliver food. They also charge and repair and modify themselves, take material from mined asteroids, and are so plentiful that they may respond to every nonviolent human whim.
That world may have problems (which I don't care to discuss, I am just throwing out a possibility), and it's nowhere near reality. Not close. But I think such a pie-in-the-sky scenario is the one under discussion, where assumptions like 'nobody will feed you voluntarily' are not as bedrock as they are for us.
Lets set aside the fact that somebody has to build those robots and wants to profit for building them...
Once we have that hypothetical robot slave army feeding everyone of us, the discussion would be over by itself because there would be nothing left to discuss. Everyone would have all he needs and that would be it.
The only reason we do have the discussion already now, long before the star-trekian replicator utopia has been realized is because a lot of people are so impatient to stop working, that they want to engineer a system where not robots, but _other people_ are working for them, of course involuntarily.
you need to work because nobody will feed you voluntarily.
Nobody pays taxes voluntarily either, yet we collect them and use them to pay for services everybody uses. I see absolutely no reason why we couldn't do the same thing for all of people's basic needs.
Because taking from everybody and building common infrastructure _everybody_ benefits from is different than forcibly taking from one group of people (those who do work) and giving to another group of people who dont _want_ to work.
Like communism, basic income (which is just another word for communism) is outright slavery, where person A is being forced to involuntarily work to feed person B who doesnt want to work.
Wanting to work vs not wanting to work is not even a relevant question. Everyone wants to feel useful. Not everyone has a job. Whether someone gets a job or not depends on market forces, not just desire or motivation.
Like communism, basic income (which is just another word for communism) is outright slavery
Machines can not be slaves. When machines produce everything we need it is unconscionable to allow some people to starve while others grow rich and fat with profit.
OR embrace the structural changes and move towards a world in which fulfillment of basic needs (food/shelter/medical care) aren't tied to whether or not one has a job. All this extra value floating around should take care of that...
All this extra value didnt fall from the sky, but has been produced by somebody elses labor. If you dont want to work to trade the products of your labor for the products of his labor, why should he share with you?
It's not really a matter of /wanting/ to work, it's structural disconnection from labor opportunities. As for why a basic income makes sense in an otherwise free-er market, there's plenty of both pragmatic and normative arguments floating around hacker news and the internet.
Whether it makes sense for you or not, the discussion around this basic income nonsense regularly neglects the fact that in order for you to get money for not working, it has to be forcibly taken from somebody who actually did work and refuses to voluntarily share with people who dont work. Forced sharing (aka communism) is outright theft, and working people will fight you to stop you from taking the products of their labor.
> it's structural disconnection from labor opportunities.
Being "structurally disconnected" doesnt entitle you to forcibly take stuff from people who are not structurally disconnected. You can of course try, but then you got a war and people will fight you until you stop trying to take their stuff.
Who is "we"? There is no "we". Capitalism exists because different people have conflicting desires and unequal abilities. Capitalism is just another word for natural selection. Any attempts to get rid of capitalism as the "default" state of interhuman relations, will have to be accompanied by massive amounts of force, because you cant fight human nature without force. And even then, the only people willing to invest force and suffering to end the natural state of things are people who would personally profit from ending it, otherwise they would have no motivation to lift a finger, let alone lose one fighting to end capitalism, which then makes the attempt to violently end capitalism just another, more brutish form of natural selection.
You can not somehow "out-smart" natural selection and evolution and make people live happily together ever after without anybody exploiting anybody else. Inequality is a fact of life. By forcibly ending capitalism, the most humane form of natural selection to date, you can merely make the endeavour more bloody again.
Instead of trying to lower costs for big companies by creating software that replaces people, we should strive to create something of value that can also employ people in meaningful numbers. Don't know what exactly, but that is the shape of it.