There’s more talk lately about creating some sort of guaranteed basic income once, or before, AI and more automation come online. Basically everyone gets the same monthly amount. It’ll be enough to live on and up to you to pursue more money or other interests.
It sounds radical to most people, but some form of it will probably happen. But it’s not a new concept. A little ahead of his time, in a 1970 issue of New York magazine article Buckminster Fuller said this about the massive economic lever of technology:
We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It’s a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist.
So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.