Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

What do you mean by "employment"? In the far enough future, anything that's deemed profitable can be done much faster by automation. No one will pay a human a check to do something that can be done dirt cheap by a robot.

The point is that our society rations limited resources through money. When resources are no longer limited, and no one can earn any money through employment, we'll require a completely different social and economic system for distributing resources.




I don't think that will happen until we have "replicators". Until we can make literally everything ourselves, we'll still need jobs. We'll also need almost limitless resources, too, unless our desires will tend more and more towards virtual things rather than physical. Either way, it's really hard to predict what will happen 50 years from now, but I'm quite optimistic about the human race.


With things like MakerBot one can argue we are getting to the point where we have "replicators" pretty rapidly.


Time will always be scarce. Even if we live forever.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: