Didn't they say back in the 60s that by now robots would do most of the work and we'd all be living in some Jetsons utopia or sth? And yet here we are still working as before, if not even more? And now a couple have to both work full time just to support 1 or 2 kids versus back in the day when presumably a married man on an average job could support a whole family with multiple kids. Or am I just romanticizing stuff? Maybe their standards of living were much lower tbf. And half their kids died in infancy or worked down the mines or whatever. But still.
John Maynard Keynes wrote this essay in 1930, envisaging a future world 100 years hence where we have 15-hour work weeks and tech does most of the grunt work. Well, we're close to 2030, and it seems his predictions haven't quite materialized.
http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
UBI would be a nice idea (assuming it's not utopian fantasy like some Marxist beliefs – poor old Karl, bless him; I think he meant well and I honestly think he would turn in his grave or maybe never make his views public if he could have possibly ever seen the utter horrors inflicted on humanity years thanks to his ideas). Whether it will ever happen on a mass scale is one thing. Even I wonder how it would work on a practical level. It might work in small trials in Scandinavia. But would it really work rolled out across hundreds of millions of people or is it just another utopian fantasy like the luxury communist type argument?
And also I imagine a lot of conservatives would be against it anyway. Goes against the whole "Protestant work ethic". Work is good for you, remember? Even if there's no work to be done, look busy anyway, dammit. Otherwise, you're lazy.
The idea was humans use their brains to make labour-saving tools like washing machines, dish washers and running water in our kitchen (instead of fetching buckets from the well 5km away) which free us up for more high-level pursuits like art, poetry, philosophy, navel-gazing, planting trees, helping old grannies cross the street, or whatever.
The reality (in my admittedly non-economist's mind): those tools do our labour, but thanks to our outdated economic system we still have to work to earn money to support ourselves, so now it's actually even harder because the machines have taken half the manual jobs we were doing. But we still have to work to earn our keep because not working equals lazy. And this predates AI btw. It's been going on for way longer.
