Oh I dunno, learn to read, find out what modern work they find interesting, get an education, &c. Just because somebody is only qualified to do manual labor now doesn't mean they don't have other talents/abilities.

I did manual labor for a long time before I made the gamble to jump into software development. I had the luck to see it work out, but society can provide resources to help people move into more fulfilling and less physically-taxing careers.

I'll be honest, I love a good day of manual labor, but it isn't physically sustainable. Robots are a much better fit.

That is certainly one point of view but the legions of highly educated unemployed in Western nations suggest that it isn't actually true.

Educated vs. Skilled

Lots of people have college degrees in fields where jobs simply do not exist. Bachelors in Philosophy, Women's Studies, or Underwater Basket Weaving are admirable but do nothing to prepare you to get a job. Most people who study in fields that don't directly correlate to a job end up having a career in an irrelevant field after on-the-job training.

Being educated and unemployed just means that you probably didn't need to go to college anyway.

The difference between a high school diploma and a bachelor's degree is halving the unemployment rate. http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm

Yes, but if we could snap our fingers and educate everybody would the unemployment rate of the newly educated people halve? In other words, can the skilled labor market absorb the excess from the unskilled market without seeing a partially or fully compensating reduction in prices?

It's not impossible but I have my doubts.

No, I don't think that educating more people will make educated people worth as little as uneducated people are now. Educated people are (on average!) more productive, so the economy will be larger and the average paycheck should go up.

Yes, educating workers makes them more valuable. I agree.

No, the fact that a worker is more valuable does not mean they will get paid more. "More valuable" only implies a larger upper bound for what the company would be willing to pay were the employee's skills very scarce. However, almost by definition this is not the case for the majority of the labor market: supply and demand have a much larger effect on wages than productivity. Note how productivity has been rising at the same time as wages have been falling in, IIRC, the lower 90% of US household incomes, so this isn't just a theoretical distinction. For most people in the US it's a harsh reality. It is indicative of our fortunate positioning wrt supply/demand that we can even entertain the thought of getting paid in proportion to the value we create.

Small changes in supply/demand can have disproportionate effects on price, so adding a seemingly modest number of educated people to the market could theoretically send aggregate wages tanking far below where they were originally even if each and every employee was individually more valuable to their employer. I don't think the effect will be that extreme, I'm just stating the possibility in order to highlight how dramatic the distinction between value and wages can get.

That laborer could write music perhaps? Or maybe become a painter? Or perhaps he or she could just focus on the happiness of their family and friends.

"I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematicks and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, musick, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelaine."

In India?

Even in first world countries, incomes for poets and musicians are not distributed on a bell curve. There's the very wealthy, and the paupers elsewhere.

And as other posters have pointed out - the goal for education is to be employable. Witness all those pol sci majors who have themselves to blame for not choosing an employable profession.

So the idea that someone can study music is a luxury.

Further this is India. Construction and road workers live under crushing poverty, where the daily calorie deficit alone makes survival difficult. There's a deficit of teachers for children let alone adults.

And America is today starting to ape the educational pressures of India and China, where taking up a non STEM field was a sign of failure.

The Free Market has been faced with this problem countless times, and each time the answer has been "the service sector". First we moved from agriculture to industry until agriculture, previously humanity's main occupation, became a small part of the economy. Now we move from manufacturing to services. It's not even a new phenomenon. It's been going on for a couple of decades now.

I would love to believe that the service sector will be able to absorb the displaced labor without creating insane, poisonous power dynamics that put large sections of the population into an unnecessarily horrible position. For the very reason that I would love to believe this, I am cautious. Do you know of any other reasons why I should let myself hold this belief? I don't find these very convincing:

* Faith

* Optimism

* Vague comparisons to historical events that differ in every detail imaginable

You're asking if the new jobs of tomorrow will suck harder than the McDonald's of today, and I really don't know. It's easy to assume that more essential, "useful", jobs will be better paid, but if you ask farmers you'll find out that that's not necessarily true. That said, while Notch may feel like he is king of the world right now, most indie game developers don't, I think.

Yup. Supply and demand is the name of the game, "useful" doesn't have anything to do with it.

I'm not following how the "service sector" is any kind of answer to the problems and issues we are facing with regards to automation and labour.

It's not necessarily the answer, or even a good answer. But the service sector has been growing for a long time. And it has become one of the huge growth areas due to the software revolution. Just look at the types of jobs produced by Uber/Lyft/et al, and the many delivery services that are popping up. They're mostly low paying jobs for the most part, which in my mind, is not the answer to the destruction of jobs happening now.

I agree, but I'm not questioning whether or not the service sector is growing. The rise of the freelancer/contractor in any given industry seems to have grown exponentially just in the last decade alone. If we assume this to be the "answer" the free market has, I simply do not see how this is sustainable on a large scale. It seems to me that we would rapidly have an excess of service providers in an ever-shrinking pool of service consumers. Furthermore it would introduce a whole new set of issues from exploitation to underbidding/cutting.

Not really, even the service sector is being heavily optimized these days. What are we going to do once we optimize away banks and real estate agents?

Live entertainment and ever fancier dining, I suppose. Also pointless luxury goods and fashion. We'll find something to spend our money on and the jobs will move there.

I should've been more explicit. I meant that it's better to just give them the money than to make them work for it.

Unfortunately no, people need to feel like they are physically making a difference to there own lives. If people don't have a mechanism to improve their situation relative to those that they compare themselves to a general sense of futility will eventually development. and with that and too much idle time comes all the things that governments don't want when controlling populations e.g class envy, unrest, civil disturbances, crime. etc all imho ofcourse

Recipients of a basic income would still be able to work and improve their situation.

What does useful mean in this case? They could do anything they want.