Literally what the title says. I'm curious what everyone thinks will happen with this topic. I was watching a death stranding critique and they talked about "drone syndrome", and how in the game, automation was banned because despite everyone getting some form of UBI, the mere fact that everyone had nothing to do caused waves of mass depression and suicide out of a lack of feeling needed.
I find this to be a pretty realistic outcome in all honesty. I've always wondered how we'll deal with such problems since we all know massive amounts of tech that has been held from us is going to be handed over to the public square post cabal. I'd assume that includes advanced AI, robotics, etc. Stuff that would make full automation of entire industries not only viable, but incredibly easy and profitable.
Which of course sounds good, but in all due reality would be incredibly detrimental to actual people. If 50%+ of all jobs are replaced by automation, then we're really not much better off then we currently are economically as a nation, or a people. And this applies to pretty much every country.
And before anyone starts with the whole "Automation will create new industries" or "learn how to code" or any of the other typical responses, I'm just going to point this out. Not everyone is technologically inclined. Some people work better with their hands. Mechanics, craftsmen, plumbers, electricians, construction workers, factory workers, oil rig workers, gas well workers, etc. This even extended to desk jobs too. For example, do you think they would try to eliminate things like accountants with advanced AI that can do your taxes for you?
Contrary to what most seem to think tech jobs are not the majority in any nation. In fact, in nearly every nation on the planet, skilled and unskilled labor jobs are the overwhelming majority when it comes to types of employment. If we were to start eliminating such jobs, then 90%+ of the global population is suddenly jobless with no way of obtaining employment since there's only so many software and hardware engineers that would be needed to maintain the automated system.
Even if you start implementing some kind of UBI (something that isn't feasible and completely contrary to free markets and capitalism while being socialist at its very core concept), then what? People have no means of lifting themselves up from whatever circumstances they're born into. No forward momentum or upward mobility. We'll still end up in caste system where you're either a literal slave wage (literally, not the meme) or you're lucky enough to know someone or be born into a family with enough connections to get you in with one of the few thousand human based jobs in the country.
Personally I see that there would either be an outright ban on it via an international treaty (break this treaty and your country is cut off from importing or exporting to literally any other nation on the planet so it can actually be enforced), thus avoiding the problem altogether. Or there'd be some kind of tax incentives for companies and corporations to maintain a certain percentage of their "work force" to be actual humans. Like give them X amount of tax credits for every 5% or 10% of the company workforce that is an actual person for example.
Regardless, it's a problem that we'll probably have to tackle, otherwise we'll just end up back where we are right now, with a slightly different mess.
There have been a lot of automation waves, and arguably they have all been a net positive. Water wheel for milling leading to machine tools to help build the steam-engine, internal combustion engine, electricity, the transistor, the integrated circuit and the internet.
Which isnt to say thats any guarantee that any other innovation will be compelled to be positive. Plenty nowadays surely falls under the banner of slave-tech. Cell phones, QR codes and the soft-prison walls of arbitrarily-forbidden travel, shopping, and social contact is surely one such application.
Rome 2000 years ago at the height of its power had all the basics to enter the industrial age at the time, sufficient mathematics, education levels, society, manufacturing and artisan-base, and wealth to make the investment. They had the visionaries, inventors and philosophers. What held it back were the indentured slave labor force - building a waterwheel would displace hundreds of people, what would be done with them then? There's no motivation for process improvement if the displaced workers will cause societal unrest, and are cheap or even free.
So essentially the same point that is being repeated today. As long as people have the liberty to make choices, and if they want to, go off-grid and raise chickens, tend their farm, and live in a cabin they build with their own hands, that seems fine to me. Just gotta be vigilant in rejecting all the slave-techs though.