In the 19th century, for instance, there was a class of physical laborers whose numbers in the USA reached the tens of millions. But as technology--particular the combustion engine and fossil fuel refining--took off, they became surplus unusable labor that literally was more valuable being turned into glue, or letting them starve to death.
Yeah, horses.
"But it's different this time! Horses aren't people!" you say. Sure, things are always different. But you're burying the actual argument into the assumptions you're making: that people are infinitely moldable and infinitely trainable, and every person is capable of creating value in modern economies.
It's not some logical contradiction for "people want more stuff" and for "the most useless, marginal workers can't provide value by participating in the economy" to both be true. Dismissing the second idea requires a bit more than a pat answer.
Even excluding government policies like a minimum wage and required healthcare benefits, lots of people are simply too expensive to employ. Anytime you hire someone, it adds administrative costs. It adds management costs. And the more marginal the worker, the more they need to be managed and administered. At some point any value they could hypothetically provide is outweighed by the cost of employing and managing them and the risk that something they do could expose you to substantial costs, and it's simply cheaper to replace that labor with capital.
In a capital rich environment, and in economies where complex organizations can fail catastrophically because of a single node failure, it's simply far too risky to employ a certain class of people. We already do that with many of criminal backgrounds, the physically disabled, and people with substantially reduced mental capabilities. New technology has simply expanded that unemployable class to include lots of people who just don't have much going for them, at least in terms of providing economic value that's legible to corporations and the State.
I'll grant your premise, for the sake of argument.
So where's the big negative fallout? If the set of unemployable people has been growing for centuries, where is the mass starvation and misery? How can it be possible that the 20th century -- well into the process you describe -- saw a burgeoning middle class in the West, and then later a burgeoning middle class in Asia?
Clearly the benefits of productivity growth have been bigger than the overhead required to support the people who cannot contribute.
I'm not arguing that everybody is infinitely retrainable. I think the biggest problem we face is several generations of existing people with completely obsolete mindsets, who are too old to relearn.
Your whole argument is written in terms of employment at a job. But that's precisely part of the mindset that is obsolete. The idea that "getting a job" is the best option for most people is historically recent and already dying. There are plenty of other ways to organize an economy, and there's plenty of historical precedent for the idea that common people can successfully operate far more independently than they do under the industrial model. In a capital rich environment, you teach people to be capitalists, and let a million independent experiments blooms.
The alternative is you keep teaching people to defer to the boss, and the boss evolves into the Lord, and we go back to serfdom. That could happen too.
Assumptions about what "average people" are capable of need to be judged against the system that's training those people. Our present system was consciously designed to make them into good industrial widgets. But the malleability of children is absurdly high, and from directly experience I see no reason you couldn't turn nearly all of them into creative capitalists.
I didn't intend to suggest we see mass starvation and misery now, simply that a larger and larger proportion of the population of working-age population would fall out of the workforce. Which we've seen for men for decades, and women as well recently. We've dealt with this by a hodgepodge of measures, from a hacky attempt to patch those weak portions of the labor market using SSDI; to kids living in their parents' basements and sharing their family health insurance; to extending unemployment for periods much longer than it was originally designed; to encouraging early retirement. We've muddled through, basically. As the tendency intensifies, it'd be worthwhile to figure out a solid way to rationalize and optimize all those programs.
Your other points I'm in broad agreement with. More and more of the economy will shift from hierarchical, institution-oriented "jobs" to something more freeform. This effectively amounts to shifting management and monitoring costs to the individual instead of the organization, which I think makes loads of sense and is a practice that'll end up outcompeting others. I don't think the average worker will end up screwed in the next ten or thirty years. I'd expect that a surprisingly large number of them will be working in autonomous jobs outside of corporate environments.
But many of those new freeform activities will be marginal, and many of them will involve barter as compensation or even be wholly uncompensated.
So, I'm not so sanguine about the bottom 20%: even if we do manage to revamp our education system to deal with contemporary economic problems better (a huge, giant if that'd take decades to implement), it'll take time to replace the whole workforce (40 years!), and there will always be students who end up performing significantly below average. Retraining programs of older workers haven't shown exceptionally promising results, either.
One of the things I like a lot about the Basic Income is that it provides a way for those displaced workers to experiment with new ways of work without the vigilant eye of the State trying to shove them into legible, easily-taxed, and controlled corporate employment.
In the 19th century, for instance, there was a class of physical laborers whose numbers in the USA reached the tens of millions. But as technology--particular the combustion engine and fossil fuel refining--took off, they became surplus unusable labor that literally was more valuable being turned into glue, or letting them starve to death.
Yeah, horses.
"But it's different this time! Horses aren't people!" you say. Sure, things are always different. But you're burying the actual argument into the assumptions you're making: that people are infinitely moldable and infinitely trainable, and every person is capable of creating value in modern economies.
It's not some logical contradiction for "people want more stuff" and for "the most useless, marginal workers can't provide value by participating in the economy" to both be true. Dismissing the second idea requires a bit more than a pat answer.
Even excluding government policies like a minimum wage and required healthcare benefits, lots of people are simply too expensive to employ. Anytime you hire someone, it adds administrative costs. It adds management costs. And the more marginal the worker, the more they need to be managed and administered. At some point any value they could hypothetically provide is outweighed by the cost of employing and managing them and the risk that something they do could expose you to substantial costs, and it's simply cheaper to replace that labor with capital.
In a capital rich environment, and in economies where complex organizations can fail catastrophically because of a single node failure, it's simply far too risky to employ a certain class of people. We already do that with many of criminal backgrounds, the physically disabled, and people with substantially reduced mental capabilities. New technology has simply expanded that unemployable class to include lots of people who just don't have much going for them, at least in terms of providing economic value that's legible to corporations and the State.