Oh, robots and automation will make us richer in the aggregate, but there’s the potential for even greater inequality. Sure, you’ll get even cheaper and shinier gadgets to distract you, but will bread and Kardashians ultimately be enough? The midterm range of the new normal looks particularly daunting. Computer scientist Federico Pistono, author of Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That’s OK just conducted an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. An exchange suggests a big-picture political solution, though one short on details. An excerpt:

Question:

I’m nearly at the end of my full-time employment life. In the early days, I assumed that shortened work weeks with livable wages and things like working from outside the office would be standard procedure by now. Instead, it’s turned out to be cheaper to pay 1.5 wages for virtually mandatory overtime than to hire additional staff and split the hours equally, even keeping the wages constant.

What evidence is there that robots will free people from the tyranny of employment without introducing the tyranny of poverty?

Federico Pistono:

Robots/automation without a restructuring of the social system lead to robber barons, the disappearance of the middle class, increased wealth inequality, and a nonsensical race to the bottom for most of the people, while plutocracies run amok.

I mentioned it in another answer, I think the greatest challenge for humanity in the next decade or so will be to decouple income and work.

Work is now essentially wage slavery, with over 80% of the people hating their job, and having most jobs either irrelevant, redundant, socially, psychologically, or environmentally destructive.

Work should not be viewed as a requisite for survival. The phrase ‘earning a living’ should disappear from our vernacular. We have enough for people to just be, without having to justifying their existence through often tedious, meaningless, or degrading work.

Even in this schizophrenic society, as much as 50% of the people find the time to volunteer for social causes (helping the elderly, the disabled, cleaning up the environment, doing community work, etc.). Imagine if nobody had to work for living, how many would do useful things for others, how many would create something amazing.•