> What's funny (for some definitions of fun), we will actually need to do that - given how our current economy pushes automation to replace humans everywhere, we can either accept that people should be allowed to live and thrive without having to earn for the living, or we'll see a massive increase of poverty.

Most likely, such a realization will occur, if at all, only after (1) we do see massive increase in poverty, and (2) the people subject to that massive increase in poverty violently demonstrate their displeasure with it, and even then the realization will be far from universal and a matter of lasting controversy.

See, for a historical parallel, how we got from the industrial revolution and how long it took before there was significant effort to provide even basic protection for workers from exploitation. (And how frequently people still argue that some of the basic protections adopted are unnecessary and counterproductive imposition by government on the rights of corporations.)

"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." -- William Gibson

This software/robotics/automation transition (a second "industrial revolution" if you want to call it that) is going to be terribly painful, but it need not be. We just need to reflect on what our values are as people.

> We just need to reflect on what our values are as people.

Maybe, but this seems to assume that there aren't a sufficiently large quantity of the already well off whose "values as people" aren't centered around protecting their own short-term relative position in society. I think the history of humanity and what it takes to get change that distributes some of the benefits of progress rather than concentrating in the already-best-off suggest that this assumption may be unjustified.

> We just need to reflect on what our values are as people.

That's the hard part. Automation is coming whether we like it or not, because is being forced into our throats by the combined mechanisms of our economy (or by The System, or Moloch, call it what you like). But "reflecting on our values" requires coordination of the whole society. Which is hard. We might coordinate eventually, when the going by gets too hard, just like people eventually fixed the industrial revolution - but it took riots and revolutions and communism spreading over half of the planet to get there. If we want to do this before blood gets spilled, we need to find a way to coordinate sooner.

I'm still not sure how we can approach that.

I would like to ask if you have any hard data or studies that prove your first point, or you just feel that this is indeed the case? The reality is that there is no "we", there is no "economy" that pushes something - there are specific people and groups of people, like governments and corporations. Everyone is "allowed" to live and thrive if you have the means to do it. And being in poverty now has much more benefits to it than being relatively rich 200 years ago.

Your last sentence got me thinking about the differences, and it's interesting.

In terms of poor now versus rich a couple of centuries ago, I think it comes down to creature comforts versus power. A poor person today can summon a symphony on command. They can view plays at will. They can travel to the next city in hours. If they're financially smart, they could even take a vacation on another continent every few years.

Yet, they probably don't have very good food. Quantity is fine, but quality lacks. If they do have good food, they almost certainly have to cook it themselves. Servants, in general, are lacking. They have to buy their own clothes. They have to wash them, too, and while machinery makes that way easier than it was, it's still more work than letting a servant handle it.

Furthermore, the lives of the modern poor are fundamentally uncertain by comparison. If they're working poor, they can be unemployed on a whim. Their landlord can raise rents beyond what they can pay. If they're on benefits (either employed, or supplementing income from work) then the political winds can easily change next election. By comparison, a rich person from 200 years ago almost certainly owns land (and, in many places, people) and can be fairly confident that they will remain there, if they choose to, for a long time. They almost certainly have political power as well, so barring a violent revolution they won't have too much trouble with the state.

Medicine is one place this breaks down, since we've decided (in the richer countries) that the poor should still have access to the services of doctors, and those far exceed anything anyone could get 200 years ago. That would probably be the deciding factor for me, at least, if I had to choose between the two situations.

It's also interesting to compare with a rich person today. If they're not ultra wealthy, they probably still have no servants, still wash their own clothes, may still cook their own food, still drive themselves around, etc. If they own substantial land, it's probably as a luxury rather than a productive asset. Many still work for someone else.

> I would like to ask if you have any hard data or studies that prove your first point, or you just feel that this is indeed the case?

I don't think one needs to go and find hard studies to realize that we're living in times of prosperity, producing more food than needed, being able to construct a shelter for everyone and that more and more jobs are getting automated. But for citations and elaborations on that I direct you to any random HN discussion about automation and/or basic income; they seem to happen here every other month.

> The reality is that there is no "we", there is no "economy" that pushes something - there are specific people, governments and corporations.

The reality is, there are no specific people. The world at this level doesn't work like that. Human volition, randomness of individual values, all average out creating a predictable mass behaviour, following the incentive structures as surely and as predictably as water flows toward lowest points, going along the shape of underlying terrain.

This is econ 101, I don't think I need to support that with citations. There is The Economy, we can treat it as a complex system made of individual humans that still behaves in predictable ways, much in the same way we can talk about human beings and their behaviours without referencing all those cells human bodies are made of.

> I don't think one needs to go and find hard studies to realize that we're living in times of prosperity

Almost every generation in history thought that they live in prosperity compared to generations before them. And I don't think one needs to go find hard studies to realize that.

> producing more food than needed, being able to construct a shelter for everyone

Are you personally producing food or constructing shelters? If not, then apparently you expect someone else to construct shelters for everyone because in your opinion they have the ability to do so? If someone has the ability to do something do they have to do it just because of the fact that they can?

> Yes, but for the first time ever, we've reached the theoretical capacity to change that.

This has been predicted for at least the past 100 years it seems; I'm not holding my breath on it panning out in my lifetime, so I don't see how it should affect my short-term behavior.

And the way you'd work on implementing that change, would be, wait for it... Make a ton of money, and sponsor relevant research / lobbying efforts.

You definitely won't make it happen by being a fisherman.

I agree.