> When we moved from more physical jobs to desk jobs many of us became sedentary and overweight. Now we are in an "obesity crisis". There's multiple factors to that, it's not just being in desk jobs, but being sedentary is a big factor.
Sure, although I think our lives are generally better than they were a few hundred years ago. Besides, if you care about your health you can always take steps yourself.
> The only one who benefits are the owners
Well yeah, the entity that benefits is the farm, and whoever owns whatever portions of the farm. The point of the farm isn't to give its workers jobs. It's to produce something to sell.
As long as we're in a market where we're selling our labor, we're only given money for being productive. If technology makes us redundant, then we find new jobs. Same as it ever was.
Think about it: why should hundreds of manual farmhands stay employed while they can be replaced by a single machine? That's not an efficient economy or society. Let those people re-skill and be useful in other roles.
> If technology makes us redundant, then we find new jobs. Same as it ever was.
Except, of course, it's not the same as it ever was because you do actually run out of jobs. And it's significantly sooner than you think, because people have limits.
I can't be Einstein, you can't be Einstein. If that becomes the standard, you and I will both starve.
We've been pushing people up and up the chain of complexity, and we can do that because we got all the low hanging fruit. It's easy to get someone to read, then to write, then to do basic math, then to do programming. It gets a bit harder though with every step, no? Not everyone who reads has the capability of doing basic math, and not everyone who can do basic math has the capability of being a programmers.
So at each step, we lose a little bit of people. Those people don't go anywhere, we just toss them aside as a society and force them into a life of poverty. You and I are detached from that, because we've been lucky to not be those people. I know some of those people, and that's just life for them.
My parents got high paying jobs straight out of highschool. Now, highschool grads are destined to flip burgers. We've pushed people up - but not everyone can graduate college. Then, we have to think about what happens when we continue to push people up.
Eventually, you and I will not be able to keep up. You're smart, I'm smart, but not that smart. We will become the burger flippers or whatever futuristic equivalent. Uh... robot flippers.
What if all work is no longer necessary? Then yes, we're going to have to rethink how our society works. Fair enough.
I'm a bit confused by your read on the people who don't make it through college. The implication is that if you don't make it into a high status/white collar job, you're destined for a life of poverty. I feel like this speaks more to the insecurity of the white collar worker, and isn't actually a good reflection of reality. Most of my friends dropped out of college and did something completely different in the service industry, it's not really a "life of poverty."
> My parents got high paying jobs straight out of highschool. Now, highschool grads are destined to flip burgers.
This feels like pure luck for your parents. Take a wider look at history -- it's just a regression to the mean. We used to have _less_ complex jobs. Mathematics/science hasn't always been a job. That is to say, burger-flipping or an equivalent was more common. It was not the norm that households were held together by a single man's income, etc.
I don’t think we need to get to a point where all jobs are eliminated to start seeing cracks in the system. We already have problems. We’ve left a lot of people behind, we just don’t really care.
> Uh... robot flippers.
Prompt engineers
You are spot on with your analysis. At some point there will be nothing left for people to do except at the very top level. What happens then?
I am not optimistic enough to believe that we create a utopia for everyone. We would need to solve scarcity first, at minimum.