That is one way to look at it. Another way to look at it would be the industrialization of western society led to 100 years of exploitation of non-industrial peoples and societies through colonialism and imperialism. With it came global power struggles between industrialized nations for control of resources and technology (WW1, WW2, Cold War, etc.) on a scale the world had never seen.

If you live in the USA and Europe, you are the recipient of generations of global technological dominance. It's hard to understand the possibility of being on the other side of that.

That forgets what happened before industrialization. What do you call the long history of peasantry, slavery, and conquest before industrialization if not exploitation? What do you call all of the wars for plunder if not wars for resources? Horrifyingly one hundred years of exploitation is /brief/ historically compared to thousands of years of it.

And then again during the industrial revolution and consequent automation, where the work previously done by 10 people is now done by 1.

It's cyclical, and while I will concede that people lose their jobs because of automation, zooming out to the overall jobs market (and figures, which probably don't tell the whole story) things haven't really changed much.

On an individual level though, people lose their jobs and livelihood, and have to settle for a lower paying, dumber job.

That said, a lot of jobs replaced by automation are already low-paying, dumb jobs. Why stand 8 hours / day doing a repetitive manual job if a thing can do it just as well? Why expose yourself to the worst the internet comes up with when you can train an AI to detect CP?

I don't believe we'll see jobs becoming largely obsolete in our lifetime, but I would like to fantasize about a future where work is a choice and everybody can live comfortably (quality housing, food and spending money) even without a job. Not going to happen as long as capitalism and the never ending pursuit of profit and profit increase are still a thing though. But, we're seeing some hopeful developments in that regard, with things like UBI and the like.

(Aside: I don't believe UBI will work in the end, if everyone has a baseline income, nobody does. UBI only works if it's coupled with assurances of housing and that it's enough to cover all basic needs, which right now depend largely on the area you live in. I couldn't get an affordable rental place on my own income some years ago, because first there was a 15+ year waiting list, and later I was earning too much so I was thrown out to the 'free market', and there's a pretty big gap between the most expensive social housing and the cheapest free market housing. That gap is filled up with 'student' houses, think houses split up into multiple units / rooms. But nobody should be forced to live like that if they're out of college and have a paid full-time job.

>if everyone has a baseline income, nobody does

I think you are assuming an auction like situation for stuff like limited housing but it doesn't have to be like that. You can build more.

UBI won't bring magical satisfaction in America (even with promised "better housing") because everyone sees themself as a temporarily embarrassed millionaire (Steinbeck quote) entitled to more and more. It will simply never be enough.

> if everyone has a baseline income, nobody does

I believe the argument for UBI is based on economic utility: $1000 a month is worth more to a poor person than a rich person.

I think the counterargument is that if everyone suddenly has $1000/month more, the market will very quickly eat it all, as prices readjust to consume the extra disposable income.

I want UBI to work. But I haven't heard of a good strategy to mitigate what I just described.

You can't use cash. Guaranteed housing, a universal food stamp program that doesn't suck — there are ways we can give everyone a fixed amount of additional value without injecting extra money into the economy and seeing inflation happen. After all, a grocery store can raise its prices on customers, but when it has to hand its food stamp receipts to the state for reimbursement, the state can ensure that prices don't rise for the consumer while subsidizing as needed.

As far as real cash payouts go, there's value to them, but not universally. In order to have the maximum impact they need to be limited to people with little to no other income.

What sucks about the current food stamp program?

Though one plus side of that is that it reallocates resources from capturing the value the rich control towards capturing the value that's been distributed to the poor.

Right now few bright folks are interested in revolutionizing affordable housing, public education, or payday lending because the money's not in it. They make a lot more money advertising to the affluent class or owning a marketplace that gives them vacation rentals or cheap transportation.

If we had UBI, prices would eventually equilibrate to eat all the new disposable income, but the gold rush in the process might build a bunch more halfway-decent housing.

a complementary argument is that we can always find things for people to do for money. we all have unfulfilled wishlists, at least 330M in the US alone. from eggshell coat clasps to urban greenspace to maneuverable model rocketry to DDR competitions to mobile surgical centers to childcare. the list is literally endless.

what we don't generally have is an optimal dispersion of capital (and power) to fulfill many of those wishes. concentration of capital and power also concentrates labor allocation and decision-making (something capitalism in ideal form opposes), so instead of drawing from the ingenuity of hundreds of millions, we're trending toward that of hundreds of thousands. it doesn't matter how clever those hundreds of thousands are, they'll never out-imagine hundreds of millions (or billions worldwide).

ubi is predicated on the idea that lots of people will have nothing to do soon, but that's only effectuated in a dystopian world where capital and power are extremely concentrated. rather than altruism, ubi is rather a critical step toward fascist corporatism, acting to stave off potential opposition by trickling down a tiny bone to the masses. the populace assuming mass joblessness are falling into the rhetorical trap of the subjugating corporatists, not accessing a benevolent key to economic and social freedom.

Automation did not make all of humanity transition. Manual labour is still used nowadays, even for works which could be automated in some way.

Actually, there is a larger and larger gap between educated people with office jobs who earn a good salary to do "stuff that hadn't been worried about before"... and the rest of the barely educated people who barely earn anything and get to do all the manual work (taking care of the children, cleaning homes, offices, cooking food, delivering food, harvesting delicate fruit, etc.). The gap is bigger and bigger, despite or thanks to the progress of humanity.

In a world where less of the manual people are asked to do manual work for some reason, these uneducated people won't transition to other jobs. Best case scenario is they get a minimal universal income to stay calm at home and generate clicks on social media to feed AI some new data. Worst case scenario is they will want to work, and be angry at society for making them feel useless.

I think we are already at the point of saturation. Lots of people are working in the business of convincing you to buy things you don't need. On the other hand, the agricultural and industrial revolutions did give time for people to adapt. They happened in brief times considering human history, but they were enough for people to learn and become productive.

If you have automated cars tomorrow on the streets, most of the truck and taxi drivers are not ready. Heck, most of the oil countries in the middle-east are not ready for a post-oil economy.

Industrial agriculture has had disastrous consequences in the form of overpopulation, we just haven't felt them yet. Global warming and every other problem caused by overpopulation are all a result of industrial nitrogen fixation and large scale farming producing enough food.

Blaming nitrogen fixing or industrial agriculture for global warming is objectively wrong. The Romans were causing significant rise in atmospheric carbon levels just through the sheer scale of many small fires and deforestation. About the only sources of fossil fuels released were methane ignorantly released from mining and maybe Greek fire if the theory that it really was surface deposits of crude petrochemicals is correct.

Population capacities and thus overpopulation aren't fixed things meaning overpopulation is relative to conditions. It would be absurd to call algae overpopulated if they thrive just fine at concentrations in one epoch with different population conditions just because it would cause red tide in another epoch.