The average for 50 would be 800 maybe. Is that enough to live on?

may be the prime example or the canary in the coal-mine.

We are in for a massive paradigm shift to something completely new.

However, we can't sit idle and allow the new oligarchs turn us into serfs. We are half-way there already.

public ownership of the means of production, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the final withering away of the state (the source in the modern age of 'money' and thus 'wages'). Perhaps you are confusing 'socialism' with 'communism'?

Not only is there the human population, and all the things we do, but then we add the technology on top of that, or rather underneath that since it pushes us further away from physical reality, and you can see why our environmental issues aren't going to go away, no matter what we do. You've got two prongs going. The technology doing more of the work, and the seemingly unlimited human imagination imagining what we can do. A dangerous combination.

To answer your original question, it's a difficult situation. We don't like limits. We will find any way around them that we can. That's what civilization is. A resource concentration mechanism that reduces limits for us. Yet at the same time, I don't know if we would know what to do in a potentially limitless world(it won't exist, because of physical reality, but for the sake of argument...).

No working, and no defined job. I would guess that like anything else, it'll be ok for some people, others not so much. I know we like to think that in such a world everyone will become a self-actualized artist, we'll all be productively creative, and we'll all live happy lives until we're uploaded into the universal computer. I think it's fairly easy to picture some people not ending up that way though. Why wouldn't people still drink themselves to death? It might even be easier. Same with any other sort of drug. If you're not really needed, why not just play video games all day?

to get a dialog going.

limitations. Unless this workless world is going to find a way to equalize personal intelligence and disease with those who are the creators.

Jaron Lanier, in Who Owns the Future? addresses the plight of the creative class in this new economy.

The position of the artist, writer, or musician in a capitalist economy has always been precarious; however, since more and more content is being delivered electronically, those creative people find it harder to rely on things like royalties. Musicians are reduced to doing endless in-person gigs to make their money. Which may work when they are young, single and healthy, not so good when they are old and/or sick and/or have a family.

unless an epidemic/plague is utilized to hasten the process. (I'm not usually this upbeat. But matters are coalescing into a perfect, long 'storm').

of the plan. We were not really worried about ebola until it hit our shores.

Make everyone a "trust fund kid" of U.S.A. incorporated, finding good satisfying jobs for the unemployed, and comfortably supporting retired older people, students, and the unemployable.

There's work to be done everywhere I look in the U.S.A..

We could be improving housing, restoring and recreating wetlands and other wild places, retreating from the coasts as the oceans rise and the climate changes, creating low energy transportation systems, reducing school and college class sizes by hiring more teachers and professors, educating and hiring more primary care medical people (physicians, nurses, assistants, and technicians), paying for medical research and releasing successful new medications and treatments into the public domain so all of humanity enjoys the benefits (not just those with money), installing solar panels over parking lots, industrial land, and other tortured landscapes, providing free family planning and birth control to all... the list is endless.

All we have to do is fairly tax those who already enjoy all the benefits and privileges of this society and more. I think it's fair that nobody should make more than twenty times (and maybe less) than what their lowest paid employee makes, or have multiple homes with more than twenty times the floor area of the housing their lowest paid employee enjoys.

Taxes on wealth and income ought to increase exponentially, with people who make minimum wage and having no net worth paying no taxes, and the uber-wealthy paying taxes approaching 90% so they can never accumulate the kind of money and power with which they can buy government and subvert the democratic process.

I'd much rather be working at my 67 yo at my old job at 4 times the money as SS pays. I think it should be made available sooner for those who it would help but not be mandatory though

From a sociological perspective, there are multiple ways to fulfill those human needs that don't involve money.

From a macro economic perspective, people who aren't working are going to be paid simply because the economy needs them to have money.

In the meantime, the work week needs to get shorter, or longer paid leave or some other mechanism to make labor more scarce.

enough people to fill all the jobs?

I think that the idea of paying people for not working because the technology that has emerged from our collective society has rendered wage employment essentially meaningless sickens capitalists in general. And so we have a "service economy" that serves an aristocracy.

eom

Only the 99% need worry about how to survive without a job.

He has a very down-to-earth and honest perspective that I appreciate. Some of his economic and stock market posts go over my head, but the main gist of his work is learning practical skills, self-reliance, and growing communities. I've purchased two of his books, and plan to read his latest "Get a Job, Build a Career...".

The Old Models of Work Are Broken (April 23, 2015)

http://www.oftwominds.com/blogapr15/work4-15.html