[ExI] Economics of SENS

[BillK]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 1:11 PM, Aleksei Riikonen wrote:
> You're limiting yourself to thinking only about relatively wealthy
> people who have jobs that they like, even though they are a small
> minority of humans in the world as it currently exists. For most jobs
> that the economy currently relies on, one cannot find people who would
> do them if they had a bit more choice in the matter.
>

You don't need to speculate. Retirement has been much studied and
society is changing.

Of existing retirees, about one third have retirement jobs (at least part-time).
But the baby boomer generation don't want to retire.
80% want a retirement job, though only about 7% want a full-time job.
<http://seniorliving.about.com/od/workandcareers/a/retirementjobs.htm>

There are four main reasons the boomers want to keep working part-time
in retirement.
MONEY—The chance to earn supplemental income
LOVE—Some people want retirement jobs because they just love to work.
FRIENDS—Retirement jobs may provide a vibrant social life and a
built-in network of professional colleagues and potential friends.
FEAR—Some people have devoted themselves so completely to work before
retirement that they prefer to keep working at retirement jobs as long
as possible to delay any need to adjust to a different lifestyle.



> On the other hand, I guess we *are* only talking about wealthy people
> when talking about (S)ENS. I mean, it makes no sense to provide ENS to
> someone who is still struggling with getting clean water and feeding
> their children. Before one gets around to offering ENS to them, one
> has presumably already dealt with their more pressing concerns,
> thereby making them wealthy in the sense of the word used here. So if
> we were in the position to offer ENS to everyone, we would anyway by
> some other means have transformed the economy so that there wouldn't
> be so many horrendous jobs as there currently are. (And I find it very
> unlikely that those horrendous jobs will be dropped before we have
> machines/AIs replacing the humans doing them, since dropping them
> earlier would hurt the economy and us rich folks, most of whom don't
> really care about the less fortunate.)
>


Machine/AIs to replace humans will be expensive.
By the time they become cheap so much else will have changed in
society that it doesn't even make much sense to talk about 'jobs'
then.

BillK