But this does not mean that the world will be a good world when robots do all the work and humans do none of it. In a good world, robots will do as much of the unpleasant or boring or dangerous work as possible, and humans will do things (many of which were never done before at all!) FOR EACH OTHER to make the world even better than it is today.
For example, in the past most people had to work on farms to produce our food, and NOBODY created computer games. Now very few people are required to plow farm fields and instead people are freed from that task to do things such as create computer games (and perform in theatrical productions and be medical-research scientists, etc.). What makes for a better world is when people contribute reasonably according to ability toward making it a better world for each other. In a good world like this, the principle is "From each according to reasonable ability, to each according to reasonable need or desire, with scarce things equitably rationed according to need."
It would be a terrible world, however, if people no longer did things to help make it a better world for each other. This is true no matter how much robots do. A world in which people used the ubiquity of robots as an excuse for not doing anything to make life better for others is a nightmarish world, and its principle is the freeloader's principle: "Take from others but don't give anything in return even if you are able to."
This is why people (such as Robert Reich who calls robots "i-everything" devices) who defend UBI by arguing that "Soon robots will do all the work and people will all need to be paid to do nothing" are wrong. No! Robots will NEVER do all the work, unless it's a nightmarish world based on the freeloader principle where sick people have nothing but robots caring for them and the only entertainment is provided by robots and so forth.
It is true that the ruling class may want this nightmarish world with the same class inequality we have today, justified by the idea that ordinary people are useless because robots do all the work; all the more reason for us to oppose it!
BUILDING A MOVEMENT FOR REAL ECONOMIC EQUALITY
For lots of discussion about building a movement to remove the rich from power to have real, not fake, democracy with no rich and no poor, please visit www.PDRBoston.org.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
3
3
3
