What socio-economic system would work in a nearly fully automated world/country?

This comes from a debate I was having with someone recently. Basically, in a mostly fully automated world, obviously most of the jobs that people have would be gone, thus unemployment would skyrocket. For argument's sake I'm saying that 90% of all jobs have been filled by machines. So, what policies do you enact in order to keep 90% of the country from starving to death? Where are people going to get more jobs now? Do people even need to have jobs anymore? If not, then what of money? How will people get it, and will it even be important anymore? I'm interested in hearing your thoughts before I share my own personal answer.

 

I *think* there would be a divided system for acquiring goods and services. Rich corporations and owners of factories, machines et cetera would be running on money as usual... But the unemployed civilians, after initial riot phase would pass, will return to the medieval barter system. You know, person A cuts the hair of person B if person B trims the lawn of person A. Something like this. People would be kind of forced to pick up skills required to acquire food and commodities - one could sell homemade foods (or stockpiled shop ones), exchanging them for services/other goods. It would be difficult with all media, like Internet/TV and more expensive things like cars, computers and such.

But that's just one of the possible outcomes. Another one includes brutal riots everywhere, and possible wars. There's no political system that would hold up in this kind of scenario - as one able to hasn't been designed yet due to lack of need for.

 

Interesting. I can't say I'd have a plan but this is what comes to mind:

Consumerism lives off of money. No money in the hands of the GP, no people to buy anything, no consumerism. You can't sell nothing if nobody buys...not counting export markets...so there would be a lot of stagnation. So really the only people this would benefit is those with the cash to do so.

I wonder what people would do with themselves with all the free time. Drink themselves to death? Make things? Fight? It would certainly divide the population by virtue of money/assets/skills even further... Intoxicating substances would skyrocket in value and demand I'd imagine. Actually the value of things in general would change dramatically. Since machines are doing all the work that's nobody to pay which is a significant expense and would drop ut production costs quite a bit. But if nobody has money anyway...

If you want to get really greasy one could argue that the now huge unemployed work force is nothing but a burden on the rest of society and it could be an opportunity for mass extermination or slave labour. Yikes...

 

I can only really think of one system that would work for the most amount of people. A tax would have to be introduced that would only charge companies, businesses, such and such. Either it would charge on a per-replaced-employee basis, or it would analyze the company's net worth and charge a significantly higher tax on any profit above a certain level, which would be determined by the company's net worth. Then most of that tax money would give citizens who do not have a job an allowance of sorts, which should be enough to provide basic necessities and a few comforts/luxury expenditures. Allowances could be altered based upon living arrangements (room mates and the like) marital status and number of children to ensure that they are getting enough to live off of, and nobody is getting a significant portion of extra because of things like split rent. The rent shouldn't be enough to live like kings, but it also shouldn't be so low as to land you in the poor house.

I would suspect the creative industries would receive a boom of sorts, both because it's questionable whether or not an AI could perform the same creatively as a human and because people might want more out of life than sitting at home and receiving allowances month after month. Allowances wouldn't have to be given for people who make more than the allowance doing whatever it is they've decided to do, and if their business is just starting out they can still receive a partial allowance that's the full amount minus however much they made.

Another potential for the people who don't want to sit at home is to open up "human operated" small stores or restaurants or the like. Some people might just be inclined to shop there, either for the novelty in such a world or because they really just prefer seeing a human face.

Ultimately the businesses wouldn't like it, they paid for the bots to save money after all and now it's costing them, but they can pretty much go suck an egg. They would still be paying less under the per-employee tax, because they don't necessarily have to pay every employee's full wage, just the amount set by the government that ensures all people can live under the allowance. The allowance will probably be higher than minimum wage, but many people work for a lot more than minimum wage, so ultimately companies still save under that particular system. Under the other, which charges very large tax on profit after a certain point, is actually already being proposed by presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in the US, so it's definitely plausible.

 

I would hope for a Star Trek future (money has been done away with, people pursue advancement for the sake of advancement of humanity, not monetary gain), but that's highly unlikely given human nature/greed.

 

Wall-E

 

I imagine some collection of people, would close themself off from the automated world. Like the Amish. Or... I don't know, that movie The Village... without the "monsters". Self-sufficient communities.
Bartering would be big.

Yeah, I like the Star Trek's idea where the goal is not wealth, it's the betterment of man and woman. Not sure if they had the "woman" part, but I thought it would good to put it there. Equality was another thing (Roddenberry had to fight to get Uhura on the bridge). But... it's just not feasible.