Comment by nephihaha
4 days ago
"Under capitalism, it doesn't go to the people who did the labour."
Automation is removing the human labour factor rapidly, so that no longer holds true. Karl Marx's writings never anticipated cybernetics, transhumanism and genetic engineering despite his followers believing he was some kind of infallible prophet.
The machines will build themselves, repair themselves and run themselves.
Even in the 19th century you didn't need to be a prophet to ponder what will happen when machinery finally becomes fully automated, and what the process of arriving to this state might look like.
Indeed this is the main question of Marx's work.
Marx doesn't anticipate cybernetics at all. He has no opinion on transhumanism, genetic modification, and as far as I know, not much on space exploration.
His ideas are built around an industrial working class, which may vanish completely as an economic unit within the next few decades. In previous eras, there was a need for the rulong class to have a market and a human workforce.
so wait after you remove the need for manual labor do you go dystopian capitalism where people have no jobs and grow poor, or you distribute "universal high income" and start doing communism with oligarch supreme leaders determining who gets what?
It is a major problem wherever one finds oneself in it. Billions of angry poor people with little to do are going to be even more of a problem to the elite than they are already. Most of the solutions are going to be extreme, and some are frightening.
UBI sounds great on paper, but you have to be in with whoever or whatever is doling it, and it hands them power over you.
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