Comment by lopsotronic

Yeah once payback goes below subsistence[1] - even when it gets near it- things get unstable and extremely dangerous. Ancient people understood this very quickly and built up institutions to keep the baseline above subsistence for urban civilizations.

It's been so long since we've seen actual bread riots I fear we forgot how nasty those are.

I think the notion is that with new automated systems of violence and control, some of them built onto the people themselves, our "future civilization" can dial back the worker's compensation to below subsistence. There was a big zillionaire conference where they talked about slave collars, for example, or humanoid AI workers. I'm always a little distressed when the masters of industry fall back on science fiction in order to build a machine that needs to function in the, well, in the present.

[1] One person's output in terms of agriculture