this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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I'd genuinely be interested to know how many human beings need to work a 40-hour week in order to produce and distribute enough food, medicine, clothing, shelter and education for all 8.2 billion humans, and how many of the rest of us are really just building follies purely just to keep everyone busy.
If tech billionaires insist on continuing to make jobs like "taxi driver" and "checkout operator" obsolete via automation while also refusing to share the proceeds of that automation with the humans whose expertise was used to train said AI and then got replaced, then the question of "exactly how pointless do the new jobs (I mean, 'influencer'? Really?) need to be before we accept that money has ceased to make sense as the way we incentivize people to not have more kids than the global industrial output can sustain?".
It depends a bit on what we need strictly necessary to keep people alive and happy. Also we probably only need people to work 6 hours days iirc, it would be the same efficiency. Let's assume there is no money and everybody gets what they need, like when we lived in smaller self sustainable communities.
We would need transport for a lot of things, we also need people to repair that infrastructure. At the same time, we also need more people to do sports to keep healthy, so you need to be able to do that. You don't strictly need a lot for that, but still. We also need things like swimming pools on top of normal education to teach people how to swim (more important in some countries than others)
Don't we also need some way for people to have hobbies etc to keep everybody sane and happy?
I like the thought process of how many people have essential jobs, this also started for me during covid when the Dutch government didn't make concrete lists of what was essential.
I also don't believe that we need more people on the planet, we need less people to help with climate change. Yes we will have issues with the ageing of people, but automation should help fill the gab with when those people retire.
It's about 20%, according to Ricardian Theorems.
You can have 80% of the population unemployed given the 20% are elite workers using automation and nearly perfect/efficient automated systems (i.e: Not farming by hand trowel, but one person controlling 10 combines/tractors simultaneously like they're playing Factorio or Farming Simulator)
You're thinking of garden hermits who often hang around follies.
And yes, most clerical offices and upper management dudes have them buzzing around them in swarms looking busy.