Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

The vast majority of jobs that sustain our standard of living are blue-collar: farmers who grow our food, textile workers who make our clothes, construction workers who build our homes, plumbers, electricians, waste disposal workers, etc. I'd say it's white-collar work that became overinflated this past century, largely as a reaction to the automation and outsourcing of many traditional blue-collar roles.

Now, with white-collar jobs themselves increasingly at risk, it's unclear where people will turn. The economic pie continues to shrink, and I don't see that trend reversing.

It appears to me that our socio-economic model simply doesn't scale with technology. We need to have a constructive conversation about how to adapt.

The way I see it you only have two real choices:

1. Raise wages to match global increased productivity

2. Democratize ownership

That's it.

I think you’re casting too narrow of a net here. Other options include an automation tax, UBI etc. (unless you consider those a subset of your items above)

Automation tax sounds sketchy. How would that work? All computers have DRM and programming becomes illegal? Unregistered physical automation becomes banned? Man the toolmaker can no longer make tools? What use are a bunch of depersonalized hominids?

It’s been talked about for years, but my lay understanding is that tax is levied on automation that displaces human production. This circumvents the issue where we have a system based on income tax, but a lower ratio of income to production.

So if a factory used to employ 100 people, who were paid a salary, that salary was taxed generating income for societal benefit like roads and hospitals. But if automation comes in and produces the same with just 10 people, the money from income taxes for societal benefit is reduced by 90%. The net effect is that society may have less money for the collective benefit even as production gets more efficient. An automation tax would make up the difference.

It’s not altogether different than the “mileage” tax for electric vehicles to displace the gasoline taxes that fund roads. It’s a different tax scheme because the fundamental premise has changed (road use is proportional to gasoline consumption/tax needs are proportional to human salary). Taxes are systems of convention so we don’t need to pretend they must adhere to some immutable physical law.

To your question about how it could be implemented, I’m sure there’s lots of nuance. But to illustrate it off the top of my head, industries may have baseline rates of per-capita production and if they implement automation to exceed that substantially, that excess production would be taxed. So a craftsman woodworker who makes five items a week wouldn’t be affected, but a cabinet factory making 300 per capita items per week would.

Thanks for clarifying. Concerns: (1) Looking backwards: "a factory used to". That's questionable, we should look forwards. (2) Proxying. "was taxed generating income for societal benefit". If the net outcome of a factory is to give people money, shouldn't we just skip the factory and give people money? Isn't that more efficient? (3) Suggestions around structure and limits. These will be abused. I'm a craftsman woodworker, but so are my family, we in aggregate produce more than the factory, but we're all under the threshold.

I'm not sold. Actually, I think there's more to it. There's been an historical association between people's job and their sense of identity and self worth. The value of work is not just about earning money, or the portion of that money that is transferred to social uses through taxation or otherwise. If you just implement UBI there'll be bored directionless people, drug use, criminality and social problems. What we need is recognition that (a) we don't need the people anymore (b) that's OK (c) different people may freely choose between social engagement and hibernating in a room with VR or going full artist hermit mode or becoming a triple PhD or being a psychonaut or whatever.

The oddball reality is we're sort of there already, it's just not evenly distributed. Ask an anthropologist or an economist or a technologist: what policies should governments put in place to support people and society in a transition to "nobody works or needs to work or engage with one another at all?" Turn them all in to GPS tracked phone zombies? Build sovereign wealth funds? Redefine collective identities in virtual spaces? Slowly introduce methods to reduce fertility? Reject technology and return to nature?

It seems to me that our ape minds are not well suited to the new reality. Most will seemingly choose to live a reactionary life of experiential consumption in a bubble of consensual hallucination crafted by technology that is controlled by others... and soon, controlled by endless generative AI. As a species we are enslaving ourselves to the perpetual feed through laziness.

In an era where similar popular experience increasingly lies at every corner of the globe: ask yourself - what kind of life do you want to lead? As technologists, we now arguably have greater ability to alter humanity's course than the politicians. We should think about how to use it.