Yes, but those wages are rising only to the level below which robots can do the jobs cheaper.
The days when working in a factory was enough for a good middle class life are dead and will never come back. Manufacturing, long term, is likely to look like agriculture does today: employing only a relative handful of people.
This leaves the question of what everyone else does. Computer programming? I'd really like the answer to be "not much because we're all so rich we don't have to work", but it seems our societies are nowhere near rich enough to pull that one off.
>This leaves the question of what everyone else does. Computer programming? I'd really like the answer to be "not much because we're all so rich we don't have to work", but it seems our societies are nowhere near rich enough to pull that one off.
In the First World, we are that rich (in terms of per-capita GDP/national income/mean income), but people have an irritating tendency to hold that not-working-for-a-living is a capital-V Vice and that working-for-a-lot-of-money is a capital-V Virtue. It can go to such extreme lengths that people often believe (sometimes against their own class interest) that (high productivity) white-collar jobs are less virtuous than (low productivity) blue-collar ones, and often believe low-salary jobs (like teaching, factory work, manual labor, service-sector positions, and trades) are less virtuous than high-salary jobs (like banking, corporate law, programming, and management).
I like work. I like going into work, I like solving the problems that get presented to me at work, I like the challenge of working with other people to get shit done.
A lot of people hate their jobs. I think it's these people that are hoping one day that the technological wonderland comes where nobody has to work, but the real answer is to manage human labor better. I think that even if we implement basic income, I think after a little while we'll all be back to work.
Reason is people have this deep need to feel useful to each other. They want to feel like they matter. Most people don't at their jobs, but like I said, I think it's because management hasn't evolved to that point.
I don't think we'll ever get a world where no one has to work, at least not until we find the world where nobody wants to not work.
> I think that even if we implement basic income, I think after a little while we'll all be back to work.
The point of a basic income is that people will go back to work on things they're truly passionate about, without fear of becoming homeless.
e.g. a mailroom worker might be really passionate about woodworking, but isn't skilled enough (or confident enough) to make it his profession. With a basic income, he might decide that he can make a go at woodworking without starving to death.
>I think it's these people that are hoping one day that the technological wonderland comes where nobody has to work
Frankly, I consider it a very strong statement to say that your job is the best possible thing that you would enjoy the most of all to do with your time.
>I don't think we'll ever get a world where no one has to work,
You think nothing can replace human labor economically? Then what do you think human labor is, and where do you think it comes from?
> Frankly, I consider it a very strong statement to say that your job is the best possible thing that you would enjoy the most of all to do with your time.
I spent much of my twenties doing whatever I could to avoid work. Once I realized that all those things boiled down to 'working', and that programming was the most fun thing I'd ever learned in the cause of not working, I figured I'd just get a job doing it.
Could I have better jobs? Sure. But I'd need to have the skills in order to do the job. How do I get these skills? By working on them.
We seem to be performing a lot of mental gymnastics to convince ourselves that certain things are and aren't work. Economics is the study of how to get people the things they want. The things they want don't necessarily exist yet, so we have to work to make them exist. Then we have to work to get them to each other.
Whether it's by making machines that do the physical work or by fixing the machines or by programming the machines, we're still doing work. We will always have to do work. Even if we completely automate the supply chain, we will still have to think of new things to want and then add them to the supply chain.
Even if we realize that all these physical things are a lie and we just want mental / digital things, we'll still have to build / create them. Work. It might feel like play, but there's always going to be things about the building and creating that we like and things we don't like.
To paraphrase Voltaire, if work didn't already exist, we would find it necessary to create it.
>The days when working in a factory was enough for a good middle class life are dead and will never come back. Manufacturing, long term, is likely to look like agriculture does today: employing only a relative handful of people.
I'd modify that somewhat. The days when working in a factory as an unskilled labourer paid a middle class income are over, but someone still needs to install, maintain, and program the robots. Those jobs are likely to pay better than the unskilled labour the robots made redundant, but there will be fewer of them.
Our societies as a whole are rich enough that we all could work much less than we do. That would of course require quite a different distribution of the wealth that we produce.
> This leaves the question of what everyone else does.
I have full confidence in humanity's unquenchable appetite for consumer goods. People with extra money tend to spend that money on something (hand-woven organic angora sweaters). People will all their needs met tend to make up new needs (car seats that are 100.000001% safer).
This line of reasoning still works even if it's only a few people buying things (think excessively rich people buying ever increasing numbers of luxury goods).
In reality the marginal propensity to consume is greater the less money you make, so there's an argument to be made that increases in wealth disparity might in and of themselves cause a decrease in consumption. It gets complicated though, as when people don't consume with dollars they invest them, and invested dollars are ultimately spent on something too.
Invested money is spent on something but only if someone wants to borrow the money. Now the financial system has got very good at recycling the savings of the rich into more borrowing of the poor (subprime loans), but it is hard to see this continuing at that rate. The rich largely want risk free savings (in aggregate), so the banks turned high risk loans into risk free savings, with the government backstopping them. This has not been working too well. The vast majority of wealth is looking for safe assets (except the Elon Musks) which effectively means people need to have jobs to pay the rentiers.
That, and invested money is not cyclical in the economy. Yes, the invested spend it on something, but only on the pretense that future returns of theirs will go back to the original investor with interest. The only exchange of resources there is the time between having money now and giving more money back later.
Compared to more equitable economics where the baker gives the mechanist bread to fix the milkmans car who gives the baker milk, and each of them is using cash received from the other to provide goods for their wants and needs, is much more tantamount of a functioning economy than loans, especially when investment money seeks the safest of avenues for returns, thus the vast majority of potential entrepreneurs are out of scope of getting the money anyway.
Because you're making it out to be some sort of binarized chicken/egg problem, where I'd say it's more of a grey-mush of chicken and egg mixed into one. They feed off of eachother, whether up or down the spiral of wealth.
I sincerely hope we grow as a society in this regard. And not allow ourselves to be held back by the constant drain of propping up the unproductive, instead of letting them stumble and reach for their dreams.
The days when working in a factory was enough for a good middle class life are dead and will never come back. Manufacturing, long term, is likely to look like agriculture does today: employing only a relative handful of people.
This leaves the question of what everyone else does. Computer programming? I'd really like the answer to be "not much because we're all so rich we don't have to work", but it seems our societies are nowhere near rich enough to pull that one off.