joules77 3 hours ago

Price of Services (specifically edu, health and housing) have to fall.

We know Employers being well programmed robots in loss aversion will pay less for less work. If the cost of the core basics don't fall what are people supposed to do? Either get more indebted for life to Wall St or move out of the country.

Tech btw has only contributed to the rise of prices in edu, health and housing. Layer upon layer of new cost + financialization.

Just notice the most successful companies very studiously avoid entering these sectors cuz they are low margin. So why will anyone else do it?

Until there is some serious Martin Luther level reformation event(s) that pushes tech to focus on essential sectors and deflate costs there thro productivity gains, there is massive built up inertia for status quo maintenance which is to get tech to only chase high margin.

  • rbanffy 3 hours ago

    > Price of Services (specifically edu, health and housing) have to fall.

    In most of the developed world, the first two are already at zero cost to the individual.

rbanffy 4 hours ago

Considering all the productivity gains we got since the advent of VisiCalc and WordStar (someone should have made a computer aided software engineering tool called CamelCase) we should be somewhere between the 1 and 2-day work week.

  • fakedang 4 hours ago

    Given all the declarations of people on this site expressing how they only really work for 2 hours a day out of 8, with the rest being occupied by meetings and the like, I'm inclined to agree with you.

    Given enough digitization, a country can easily implement a 4 hour work week. Some countries have been doing that already. Works very well when the cost of human capital is already quite high .

FrankWilhoit 3 hours ago

We've been trying to pretend, since the steam engine, that there is enough work to go round. There isn't, not nearly; but we will never drop the pretense, we are too invested in it.

  • rbanffy 3 hours ago

    We have invented a lot of professions to absorb all that free time: telephone sanitisers, account executives, hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, and management consultants.

    We should get rid of all of those. Perhaps not the telephone sanitisers. Those might be important.

more_corn an hour ago

Ai is not owned by the workers so all the gains will go elsewhere.