How will people make money if there are no jobs?

If automation takes most or all jobs how will people buy things?

Today those who don't work are supported by family, community or by the taxpayer. Even in a world where labor is largely replaced by automation there are still other factors of production, things that cannot be manufactured, like land, energy and other raw materials. There are also services that do not appear to be candidates for automation, including most knowledge worker and personal service jobs.

Note that we no longer have 90% of the population working on farms like we did 100 years ago, since automation and intensification of agriculture has made those jobs obsolete. But the unemployment rate has not increased, even though the population is vastly larger now. But we have workers doing things, like computer programming, that could not even have been imagined back then.

The other thing to consider is what happens to the robots when their owners die? It is quite possible to imagine, in a world where the population is relatively constant, that ownership would become more diverse over time. If everyone has a robot, or ownership interest in a robot, and robots specialize, then we simply end up with our current economy relabeled. Those with robots that produce goods that people want the most and which are scarce, will be able to command more of other items in return. It might be convenient to use tokens of value rather than engage only in barter exchange. We might even call these tokens of value, "money."

In other words, nothing really changes when we replace human muscle with animal muscle with steam power with fossil fuel power with atomic power with automation.
If everything is automated, why will we need money?
They won't Which means either they will live poorly or they will live on a dole of some sort. Some kind of dole is almost essential to keep the economy going.

If I had to guess, people who cannot find work will either be given government make work with a wage or a dole of some sort.

When everything is done by robots and there are no jobs, how will people get money?

When everything is done by robots and there are no jobs, how will people get money?

I don't have a solution to the problem, and I don't think anyone else does either.

I live in Kyoto and they recently announced plans for an almost completely autonomous giant robotic lettuce factory. Many factories are already partially or completely autonomous. Robots are becoming cheaper, more dextrous, cleverer and more ubiquitous all the time.

There is currently a huge race to get self-driving cars on the road. In the next 20 or 30 years, taxi drivers, bus drivers, train drivers and even pilots will go. Their jobs will be given over to tireless, dependable, precise, AIs with the reflexes of a mongoose.

A lot of people sneer at that, and say people will never trust AIs to do things like fly planes. That is an utter lack of imagination on their part. They are projecting their own opinions and prejudices, and those of their generation. But we are not talking about them. We are talking about the current generation of teens and preteens who are growing up asking Siri or Cortana to answer their homework questions.

Also, people say that there will always be jobs that robots will not be able to do, like counselling and painting. Nope. AIs are already getting close to passing the Turing test, even if it is with various hacks and cheats (that's exactly what the Turing test is about). Complex NLP systems are already summarising articles and coming up with dry but interesting stories. Google's deep dream system is already churning out marvellously interesting abstract images. Robots will invade every area, and perform much petter than people, from prostitution to medical care. It's just a matter of time.

Basically, there will HAVE to be large shifts in the economic structure of the world as more and more and more jobs are taken over by robots. It will not be an easy transition. Unemployed rates will go up and the 1% will get richer than ever. Added to the positive-feedback effect of corruption in government, the economic inequality will go through the roof.

Only two things can happen. Social welfare systems can rise within a democratic system until people can live comfortably without working (since there are no jobs for them to do), paid for by HUGE tax increase on the corporations that employ robots ("waah! unfair! unfair! parasites!"), or there will be wars and revolutions by a very hungry majority. I see no other possible result.
Its very hard to predict. This kind of transition could have massive and unforeseeable effects on all the societies in the world. It could also do very different things to different countries. I doubt people will react to automation in Norway the same way they will in the United States. Here are some cases that I think are probable.

Worst Case - Normal people won't be able to make money but will still need it. The wealthy few who invested in robots (or whose ancestors invested in them) will own near 100% of society's resources. The rest will either die out or live on handouts. The world will into aristocracy as the rich have no need of the poor and gain full control of government. Rebellions may occur. If they occur late in the process they will likely be crushed easily crushed military robots and advanced A.I.

Less Bad Case - Again the wealthy will take control of most of societies resources. However, to promote stability they will continue to hire people to work makework jobs that contribute nothing to the economy. People will continue to work for no real reason in order to "justify" their existences. Most people will have a similar level of wages as they do today with the rich becoming richer.

Mid Case - Automation will be severely limited by regulation or just turn out to be much harder than we thought. Limited automation will cause unemployment but it will be manageable. This may be sustainable in the short term but is more likely to be a temporary state.

Good Case - Automation generates a huge amount of wealth but also creates unemployment. Governments take notice. They raise taxes and use the increased revenue from the automation to produce an increasingly strong safety net. At first this involves helping the newly unemployed survive and trying to reeducate them to do more advanced jobs. As the advanced jobs start to disappear this will eventually transition into simply being paid enough by the government to live. In the end the owners of robots will still be very rich. The masses will be able to live nice lives and not have to work. It's unclear how well they will adapt to this massive amount of leisure time.

Wildcard Case - A.I becomes highly intelligent and is inherently uncontrollable. The A.I's themselves end up controlling all the world's wealth. They could be far more or far less benevolent than any human, it's impossible to say. This could result in utopia or extinction.
TL;DR: Not that there's nothing to worry about, but "how will (most) people get money" is not what the long-term problem is going to be.
People in aggregate are constantly labouring to produce a certain amount of bread, jewelry, houses, haircuts and songs; people in aggregate are constantly consuming those same things. Sometimes we make elaborately structured exchanges, like where you acquire a house with a concentrated amount of someone else's labour and then keep paying it off with decades of your own, while a third party labours to maintain some assurance that the debt will not be shirked. Sometimes we just labour to take care of the needs of someone we care about. Sometimes the exchanges are involuntary or grossly unfair. None of that changes the fact that people-in-aggregate keep using the value that people-in-aggregate produce.

This has all worked since before money existed; in fact, it works to some degree among chimps and bees. We consume oxygen that's produced by algae and trees and not (yet) by other humans who could expect bread or haircuts in return.

The point is that money is not an essential part of that complex cycle of exchange, it's just a practical, agreeable and (usually) efficient mechanism for distributing the value we produce and consume. We invented it at some point, we've already changed it a couple of times (a mere century ago, people distrusted paper bills as not-real-money), we'll change it more eventually, and we might yet outlast it.

If civilization ends up in a state where enough bread is produced with no labour, there will still be a certain amount of bread being produced and consumed, regardless of whether jobs and salaries still exist. Maybe bread will become "free", the way oxygen is "free" today. If money still exists by then, maybe you will be earning it with your creativity or wise advice - and spending it on haircuts or extra-fancy bread, because there will always be something scarce.
If this sounds rosy, it's because I'm glossing over some darker aspects. The overall path of civilization's productivity does seem pointed in that direction, but when you zoom in there's no reason to expect it will go smoothly or evenly; when you're a shoemaker, and people around you are still working jobs for salaries, there's limited joy in knowing that shoes are free from tomorrow. We've survived crises like these in the past, but still they've brought outrageous amounts of misery, and the ones coming up will be more extensive than the ones of the past.
To deal with that, we will probably have to tweak our habitual ways of distribution, based on some new, future ideas of labour fairness. (We already accept as fair that toddlers, or in many societies also students or retired people, shouldn't have to work to earn sustenance and safety; we might one day extend that to out-of-work shoemakers or just everybody.)

Worse, the ongoing consolidation of increasingly more power and control in increasingly fewer hands could lead to a future world where the the 0.1% have every luxury and the 99.9% have only bread, and no hope of a successful revolution. We have seen this play out at smaller scales all over history, and if it happens on a large enough scale it may become permanent.

And worst of all, there is definitely some room for a complete catastrophe, for purely economic scenarios which would permanently set back or destroy humanity. But in that case, income will be the least of our problems.
It's an equivalent question to "If everything we ever needed grew on trees, how would we make money?" The answer is, the same as we always have - by exchanging things and services of value with someone else. Only now, we don't need to include in our price any charges for our consumption of the things that grow on trees. So the cost of what we do depends not on the need to eat (if we had to buy food while we made the item or carried out the task, that sets a lower bound on the money we would have to charge to survive and therefore the range of things that are worth doing) but on what our competition is offering.

The things we would value would be companionship, care, humour, art, watching and participating in sport, music, etc. If I'm Picasso reincarnated, I can charge a lot for my art, but if I'm an average artist, I can only charge what the market will bear. If there are a lot more artists than there is wall space I might not make anything from my art - but that's ok because all of the materials were found on trees. If there is a lot more wallspace than art then I could still make significant money - which I could spend on a sporting event or a play. Which pays the actor or sportsman, and so on.

Now if the guy who owned the land that the trees were on decided to charge us to pick his fruit, that would establish a higher-than zero minimum price for our products and services. The range of things that are worth doing therefore decreases.

That last thought tells us that, as the cost of goods continues to reduce through automation, the number of jobs that become worth doing at the margin, because they allow us to earn enough for our needs, actually increases. This remains true even if all production jobs are taken by robots, because people will always value services provided by people rather than robots in some spheres.

An example: before automation, no-one earned their living through being a sportsman, because no-one else had the disposal income from subsistence-level living to pay to watch them play. Now, not only are the best sportsmen extremely wealthy, more and more sportspeople every year are making enough, just from playing their sport professionally.
When you trace how money flows through our current economy, the answer to this question becomes fairly straightforward to describe. So how does money flow through our current economy?

Money is initially created by the government or the banks (but mainly the banks, up to 97% of it), issued to a few people as government payments or bank loans, exchanged between those people and everyone else multiple times, and eventually returned to the government or the banks as tax payments or loan repayments. Introducing robots into the economy won't actually change this basic pattern radically although it will have some effect on the details. If you are one of the people whose money comes directly from the government or from a bank loan, introducing robots won't change that.

But most of us don't receive our money from government payments or bank loans directly. Instead we are part of the group who get it via exchange from other people. We are the ones who will be most affected by the introduction of robots. So how does the money flow through our part of the economy?

As I mentioned earlier, it flows via exchange. But exchange of what? There are four main things for which people exchange money. The first is for their labour; the second is for goods that they own; the third is for the temporary use of their land; and the fourth is for the temporary use of their money.

The introduction of robots will strongly affect the first of these. In fact it already has. Since the Industrial Revolution got under way a large number of jobs involving human labour have been taken over by machines, starting with the weavers in the late 18th century. The introduction of intelligent machines could lead to the complete elimination of human labour from the money exchange system.

So what about the other methods of obtaining money? Trading for goods is something that intelligent robots could in principle do. So is land rental or money rental (ie making loans). But robots can't own the goods, land or money. This would need a change in the law. At the moment robots can't own anything. Even if they are allowed to do so, there is no reason why that would lead to them owning anything that people don't want to give them. Robots may manage such items on behalf of their human owners but there is no good reason why they should own them. And money goes to the owner -- who is a human.

So when everything is done by robots, people will get money by charging rent or interest on things they own, in particular by renting the land on which the robots carry out their activities; by receiving dividends from the corporations which employ the robots; by charging interest on loans of money to those who need it to buy robots; by assuming risk through insurance; and, possibly, as a direct government payment.

My advice is to get invested. Now!

How does it feel to see machines take over one's job?

There are two possible outcomes depending on the segment of the impacted that I can see (Note: The terms 'unskilled labor' and 'skilled labor' below are official terms in use by the government that I've seen, and I am borrowing these loosely):

Unskilled labor could get agitated because of the possibility of losing employment. Their life can come back to square one, and they might need to get back to fighting for newer opportunities. Usually, in highly democratic setups, labor unions try and fight against these moves, and look for guarantees on job security, although efficiency/cost itself for the company overall is in question. Their situation can indeed become quite sad, a lot of them being pushed to below poverty level.
Skilled labor on the other hand, can get freed to try build solutions (preferably automated ones) to attack hither-to unattacked problems, and are not really under a threat of losing jobs. Often, perhaps, they are 'relieved' to see a largely monotonous task now being automated to be performed by machines, and can move on to take up more intellectually challenging problems to work on. There will never really be a time when these folks will 'not be needed', so to speak.

A thing to note though is that, the above cannot be generalized fully. It is possibly that someone who is skilled in a particular domain can be obsoleted if the 'domain' itself is overpowered and replaced by a new technological advancement (such as software taking over mechanical functions, for instance).

Mis en ligne le 01/08/2014 pratclif.com