[Einstalbert]

I've had friends lose jobs in Amazon warehouses over their aggressive research and development of an all-machine packaging line. They do work now that requires the precision of a human hand and eye, but that job may also go the way of the assembly line. His only hope is that custom carpentry's demand by rich celebrities wanting the "premium" afforded by the work of a Human over the static of a machine.

When I look back at people who invested their lives in the future of mankind, and their predictions in something like the year 1960, it's interesting to note just how incorrect they were. Communication boomed over transportation, for example. Knowing that, I try to think of the ways the future will be so impossibly different than my present. A world without work is one of those, and I hope it angers and confuses every currently living generation enough that we wish we would have made it a reality sooner.

[notahacker]

A world without work was a pretty common vision in the 1960s. And the 1860s

But humanity has a remarkable capacity to invent new outlets to fill our waking hours as we redeploy resources used to make stuff to make other stuff or sell stuff. We didn't have (or foresee!) social media managers or video game designers in the 1960s. And software doesn't just make our production efforts scale, it makes our consumption scale. You can fit far more lifestyle apps on your phone than chairs around your table, and a couple of decades back few people would have foreseen mobile phone apps as a category of product that needed people to make, still less an industry reportedly topping up the paycheques of a million Europeans.

I'm not seeing the developed world's desire for more stuff reach satiation point, and if anything desire to subsidise unemployment is trending in the opposite direction.

[lkrubner]

In the USA, male participating in the wage economy has been in the decline since the 1940s:

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/LNS11300001

For women, the peak was in 2000:

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USALFPWNA

Wages for men have been in decline since 1973, which demonstrates one of the obvious ways people deal with declining opportunities: lower wages.

In the 1800s Western nations conquered the world, and were thus able to export their unemployment to other countries, thus creating what we now call The Third World. As late as 1820, India was still producing more steel than Europe, but all such industries were eventually closed in India and moved to Europe, leaving India in a bad situation from which it is yet to fully recover.

It's unlikely that Western nations will have an easy time exporting their unemployment in the 2020s or 2030s. Among other things, they lack the military power that is necessary to do so.

[digikata]

On the other hand, I strongly suspect that we've long hit the point where we could apply our productivity to reducing working hours with little appreciable end effect in output of stuff (and a huge increase in quality of life).

[VLM]

"But humanity has a remarkable capacity to invent new outlets to fill our waking hours as we redeploy resources used to make stuff to make other stuff or sell stuff."

Mere coincidence combined with survivorship bias. Ask the Easter Islanders or Mayans about how people always find new employment. By definition a developed economy is a country that was historically lucky, therefore its members hold very strange beliefs about cause and effect, like the collapse of employment in one industry magically results in employment in another industry because if it hadn't coincidentally happened, our ancestors economy would have collapsed and we'd be dead or owned by some other economy.

Bad car analogy is I've crossed many a street on foot, and I've never been hit, therefore there is a magic dead hand of social science that pushes cars out of my way, and I'll never get hit and nobody ever gets hit and its going to be eternally safe into the future. After all, if someone had run over my g-g-g-g-grandfather with an ox cart in the street, I wouldn't be here, therefore fatal car-pedestrian accidents don't happen.

[zzalpha]

Hell, modern theory has it that the pyramids were in essence a type of stimulus program to keep folks busy and fed (and no, they were not in fact slaves)!

[baddox]

Comparative advantage.

[notNow]

Unfortunately, work esp in these current adverse conditions prepares people and teaches them invaluable survival skills that a vision of world without work could produce as an unintended consequence good-for-nothing slobs like in "Idiocracy" where they can't find their butt with both hands.

We need to teach people survival skills without working them to death.