Some great points. Trying to evaluate your usefulness or productivity based on income doesn't seem safe - nor does any connection with essentialness of what you do. Even trying to connect it to numbers of people who could do the same thing seems to have sufficient exceptions to make me wary of turning that into even a lowly rule of thumb.
Increasingly I'm tending to agree with a group I would previously have dismissed as Ludicrously Optimistic Socialists -- though the S word may not be quite right there -- in that pretty much everything is going to have to change, in huge ways, if we're to retain any kind of stability in the developed world.
I also work in the tech industry, as a consultant, but about 75% of my output is creative / people-related -- but that still means my part of the industry is going to shrink by at least 25% in the near future as smart machines are brought online to do the non-people/creative bits. It's fascinating to talk to people with various jobs, and ask them how long they reckon it'll be before what they do will be done by a computer / machine. Most people are hugely optimistic about the level of sophistication they bring to the table, and their consequent relative safety in the workforce.
What happens when automation starts to produce more physical, intrinsically valuable goods, though? I'm thinking of developments that don't just eliminate jobs, but also increase personal security.
Like, what if farming becomes primarily robotic. But, in the process of that transformation, each of us ends up with solar-powered, open-source driven backyard robots that tend gardens where the produce did not require pesticides nor chemicals to grow. Perhaps even raw materials for 3D printing and manufacturing of some household items could be raised as backyard crops.
You'd have less need to buy things that you need to survive, and so less need to work. Society probably will need to trend more socialistic, but perhaps automation will wind up allowing unemployed people to live more independent and self-sufficient than they can today.
Yes, I believe that open source hardware and firmware would become an imperative if one actually intended to rely on robot-grown food as a supplement/replacement for store bought food. You wouldn't want to risk having Google revoke your license to eat.
Increasingly I'm tending to agree with a group I would previously have dismissed as Ludicrously Optimistic Socialists -- though the S word may not be quite right there -- in that pretty much everything is going to have to change, in huge ways, if we're to retain any kind of stability in the developed world.
I also work in the tech industry, as a consultant, but about 75% of my output is creative / people-related -- but that still means my part of the industry is going to shrink by at least 25% in the near future as smart machines are brought online to do the non-people/creative bits. It's fascinating to talk to people with various jobs, and ask them how long they reckon it'll be before what they do will be done by a computer / machine. Most people are hugely optimistic about the level of sophistication they bring to the table, and their consequent relative safety in the workforce.