Humans need not apply

[Simon_Jester]

I think the same thing will happen that happened in the past, during the Industrial Revolution: there will be large sections of the population that will be forced to do illegal or otherwise socially disruptive jobs for no other reason that they cannot get any other kind. They were born to educational values that became obsolete by the time they reached adulthood (for example: you don't need to know how to read, but you need a plethora of skills needed around the farm and you'll always have work). For example, there will be a large number of women who will have no other option but prostitution if they wish to make a living simply because they cannot find any other job.

We have been here before and of course the lessons learned there will be ignored. The large number of unemployable people who want to be employed, will be looked down upon as scum. And because they will be treated as scum they'll end up as scum sooner or later. They'll tie the right to vote to having a regular income. They'll make up pseudo-scientific ideas as to why unemployable people are unemployable due to some inherent failure or fault on their part and thus deserve their status. Then they'll just ignore the large number of unemployable people as they have done in the past. The police will be given the right to treat all of these people like criminals, as they do with certain minorities. Then politicians will have the bright idea to just exterminate the unwanted, inherently-criminal, useless underclass through forced sterilization, letting an epidemic run through, raising food prices or whatever.

Then again, I'm fatalistically pessimistic about the future.

The reverse may happen precisely because the battles over tying the vote to a regular income, forced sterilization, and so on, have already been fought and won before. The means exist for the underemployed public to resist; the question is whether they can be used. I would not be surprised if they are.

I once read something to the effect that the last thing capitalists will ever sell is a device that does all of our work, and thus makes communism/socialism mandatory for the continuance of human civilization. Wish I could find that quote now.

Except that the capitalist will not sell the device, they will rent it. To the capitalist, the best device is one that once brought will replace all human labor the capitalist has to pay for. Then the capitalist will have nothing to do but sit back, earn pure profits and complain about how he is unfairly taxed by the government so welfare-queens can live off his honestly-earned money.

This changes essentially nothing- the point remains that if human society cannot continue to exist along capitalist lines, people will tend to revolt against and modify the system before it collapses entirely. The peasants don't keep starving indefinitely while the aristocrats eat cake, especially not in a society where famines are not normative, are not a customary thing that happens all the time as a routine affair.

I tend to agree with you there. The only reason why the upper classes tolerate the lower classes is because the lower classes are still needed to do work. If automation reaches the point where it can replace the vast majority of human labour, I don't fancy my chances very much.

The flip side of this is that the lower classes tolerate the upper classes because the upper classes are needed to organize and control the structures that keep civilization running. Someone has to run the government and the economic enterprises that provide for our daily existence, and so long as they continue to do so in a vaguely satisfactory way, revolutions are very unlikely.

But if the people in charge essentially abdicate their responsibilities, make it clear they aren't even trying to govern for the benefit of the governed, and tell (say) 50% of the population "we no longer care," then you get peasants storming the Bastille.

Why would governments want to have to take care of billions of unemployed people? That's just asking for trouble. If human labour is no longer necessary, it makes more sense in the long run to simply eliminate the vast majority of the human population, either via starvation, sterilization, epidemics etc.

Necessary to what? A government that thinks this way gives nobody any incentive to be loyal to it. Why would people bother to fight for it or support it or even listen to it? Sure, in theory they can attempt to rule by force, but I see no reason to assume automation will make it more practical to rule by force, unless you get leaders who are willing to methodically butcher 80% of the population to protect the remaining 20%. And I really doubt that normal human politicans are going to order that kind of madness, or find it easy to do anything involving governing other humans if they try.

As a more general version of this, if automation means we have no need for skilled workers... frankly we have no need for owners either. Owners are only socially necessary insofar as they coordinate enterprises that the public somehow benefits from. Owners who fail to be beneficial may be tolerated, but that doesn't mean the toleration extends indefinitely.

[Elheru Aran]

You lot are bloody cheerful, y'know that?

For the next... well. Maybe decade or so at the most, I guess, depending on how fast technology like this sandwich-maker is put into motion, fast food is probably okay. One big reason for this is that a huge amount of it is franchised, rather than operated by the brand itself. As such, a small Mom-and-Pop franchise with five restaurants in Nevada is less likely to buy something like this than the consortium who runs two hundred establishments in Florida-Georgia-South Carolina.

Delivery-type services are probably also okay. They'll still require someone to drive the cars and someone else who can check the product being made to make sure it's okay.

And 'slow food' establishments like Cracker Barrel or slightly more upscale like Applebee's, TGI Friday's etc, probably won't get very into this kind of thing for a while. The reason? Human touch. People like the notion that someone actually touched their food (to some degree). Expect a lot of show-kitchen setups to pop up (Look, Janet, he's actually cutting that meat!). Of course, the converse is true-- a burger-making machine could be the centerpiece of a fancy restaurant if you incorporated bits like Plexiglass windows to watch everything in motion.

Now if the minimum wage goes up significantly? That may be quite another story. I suspect that as long as service-industry wages stay where they are, the owners and operators will be fine with keeping their employees. If they go up that much? Forget it. The up-front cost would be a bit formidable though, and it's a new technology, so there would be some serious teething problems...

[Eulogy]

As a more general version of this, if automation means we have no need for skilled workers... frankly we have no need for owners either. Owners are only socially necessary insofar as they coordinate enterprises that the public somehow benefits from. Owners who fail to be beneficial may be tolerated, but that doesn't mean the toleration extends indefinitely.

It also assumes that the public does not directly benefit from the automaton - that burger machine could be owned by a landlord for the use of any tenant who supplies the ingredients, or for the use of a large family, to help save time on cooking.

Besides, people will find other things to do if machines do the dirty work, such as maintaining those machines.

[Zaune]

Now if the minimum wage goes up significantly? That may be quite another story. I suspect that as long as service-industry wages stay where they are, the owners and operators will be fine with keeping their employees. If they go up that much? Forget it. The up-front cost would be a bit formidable though, and it's a new technology, so there would be some serious teething problems...

And there we have the problem, because if the minimum wage doesn't go up significantly in the near future then all those striking fast-food workers are going to give up exercising their 1st Amendment rights and move on to the 2nd Amendment.

[Simon_Jester]

As a more general version of this, if automation means we have no need for skilled workers... frankly we have no need for owners either. Owners are only socially necessary insofar as they coordinate enterprises that the public somehow benefits from. Owners who fail to be beneficial may be tolerated, but that doesn't mean the toleration extends indefinitely.

It also assumes that the public does not directly benefit from the automaton - that burger machine could be owned by a landlord for the use of any tenant who supplies the ingredients, or for the use of a large family, to help save time on cooking.

I love the theory- but one of the basic principles that makes capitalism work is that the capitalist's funds allow them to buy property, machines, capital, that it would not be economical for a small business-owner to purchase or operate.

McDonalds needs an automatic burger-maker a heck of a lot more than a family with eight kids, and can therefore afford to pay two or three thousand dollars to buy one... whereas the family cannot reasonably afford that.

So automation tends to go to businesses before it goes to private citizens. We had steam engines powering industrial machinery before we had internal combustion engines powering cars. We had business mainframes before we had personal microcomputers. And so on.

Besides, people will find other things to do if machines do the dirty work, such as maintaining those machines.

The issues with this are twofold:

One, while there is a strong precedent for automation creating new jobs to replace the old ones, it may be... premature to assume that this trend will continue indefinitely.

Two, we're hitting the point where fewer and fewer of these jobs can be handled by anyone other than a trained professional with years of training, experience, or some kind of special qualification. If all unskilled jobs can be automated, then there's a couple of rungs missing on the ladder to success for the average citizen. And a ladder where the third and fourth rungs are missing isn't very useful, even if there are plenty of jobs to provide the top rungs of the ladder.

[Zixinus]

This changes essentially nothing- the point remains that if human society cannot continue to exist along capitalist lines, people will tend to revolt against and modify the system before it collapses entirely. The peasants don't keep starving indefinitely while the aristocrats eat cake, especially not in a society where famines are not normative, are not a customary thing that happens all the time as a routine affair.

My fear is that the peasants will starve until there are no peasants left and that famines will be made normal and routine. Things do not have to go from large middle-class employment to crushing poverty in one go. Not everyone but the most privileged will die. Just a large tail-end that never got the opportunity to be anything but victims.

Capitalism may change or be replaced by something else but I am sure that it will still keep to largely economic rules. Now that something has been made cheap something else will become expensive. Resources will still remain finite and still distributed finitely, no matter how many times more resources are available per population. Resource use will still matter.
The new system might be better. But the transition in of within itself is very likely not be.

I have read comments regarding this that the coming changes will finally allow communism to come around. I am extremely skeptical of this because the historical examples of communism coming up from surplus has been rather piss-poor and produces dictatorships with a privileged caste instead. Which seems to be more likely in human nature.

But again, I am aggressively pessimistic about these things.

[Simon_Jester]

This changes essentially nothing- the point remains that if human society cannot continue to exist along capitalist lines, people will tend to revolt against and modify the system before it collapses entirely. The peasants don't keep starving indefinitely while the aristocrats eat cake, especially not in a society where famines are not normative, are not a customary thing that happens all the time as a routine affair.

My fear is that the peasants will starve until there are no peasants left and that famines will be made normal and routine. Things do not have to go from large middle-class employment to crushing poverty in one go. Not everyone but the most privileged will die. Just a large tail-end that never got the opportunity to be anything but victims.

I honestly don't think so. Current welfare systems, even in the more right-wing nations, are strongly oriented around keeping people from actually dying. They're devolving toward a criminalized underclass, but not dying.

The reason for this is that the deaths of millions is very disruptive, especially when there exists the opportunity to violently resist it. The social order created by the rich, for the rich, will not necessarily survive such mass upheaval.

I have read comments regarding this that the coming changes will finally allow communism to come around. I am extremely skeptical of this because the historical examples of communism coming up from surplus has been rather piss-poor and produces dictatorships with a privileged caste instead. Which seems to be more likely in human nature.

I think that whatever would emerge from automation causing high permanent unemployment will not be clearly recognizable as communism. But I doubt it'll be clearly recognizable as anything else either.

[NoXion]

Interesting semi-related article from Jacobin magazine that I thought I'd share:

In his speech to the Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zuccotti Park, Slavoj Žižek lamented that “It’s easy to imagine the end of the world, but we cannot imagine the end of capitalism.” It’s a paraphrase of a remark that Fredric Jameson made some years ago, when the hegemony of neoliberalism still appeared absolute. Yet the very existence of Occupy Wall Street suggests that the end of capitalism has become a bit easier to imagine of late. At first, this imagining took a mostly grim and dystopian form: at the height of the financial crisis, with the global economy seemingly in full collapse, the end of capitalism looked like it might be the beginning of a period of anarchic violence and misery. And still it might, with the Eurozone teetering on the edge of collapse as I write. But more recently, the spread of global protest from Cairo to Madrid to Madison to Wall Street has given the Left some reason to timidly raise its hopes for a better future after capitalism.

One thing we can be certain of is that capitalism will end. Maybe not soon, but probably before too long; humanity has never before managed to craft an eternal social system, after all, and capitalism is a notably more precarious and volatile order than most of those that preceded it. The question, then, is what will come next. Rosa Luxemburg, reacting to the beginnings of World War I, cited a line from Engels: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” In that spirit I offer a thought experiment, an attempt to make sense of our possible futures. These are a few of the socialisms we may reach if a resurgent Left is successful, and the barbarisms we may be consigned to if we fail.

[bilateralrope]

I honestly don't think so. Current welfare systems, even in the more right-wing nations, are strongly oriented around keeping people from actually dying. They're devolving toward a criminalized underclass, but not dying.

The reason for this is that the deaths of millions is very disruptive, especially when there exists the opportunity to violently resist it. The social order created by the rich, for the rich, will not necessarily survive such mass upheaval.

That and, even if some form of social order does survive the upheaval, it will still necessitate a drastic change from what we have today. Businesses need customers to remain functioning. If too many people are too poor to buy from them, the business is in trouble because there aren't enough people who can afford to be customers. If the poor are wiped out, the business is in trouble because it doesn't have enough customers.

Guaranteed Minimum Income seems like it would come about as an attempt to get through the automation crisis with minimal changes to how society operates. One that note, if the guaranteed income is sufficient for a comfortable lifestyle, would minimum wage laws still be necessary ?

[Guardsman Bass]

I can't really see an end to capitalism anytime soon, even if we end up with some serious welfare state modifications (like a basic income, or more speculative stuff like "all public companies now must be elected cooperatives"). The system is built on top of markets and exchange, which themselves tend to be extremely durable depending on what's being traded - just look at how difficult it has been to kill off the drug trade despite massive international efforts and spending to do so. And capitalism, for all its flaws, seems to line up with a lot of people's individual aspirations and promote efficiency and effort.

[K. A. Pital]

I can't really see an end to capitalism anytime soon, even if we end up with some serious welfare state modifications (like a basic income, or more speculative stuff like "all public companies now must be elected cooperatives"). The system is built on top of markets and exchange, which themselves tend to be extremely durable depending on what's being traded - just look at how difficult it has been to kill off the drug trade despite massive international efforts and spending to do so. And capitalism, for all its flaws, seems to line up with a lot of people's individual aspirations and promote efficiency and effort.

That is unless the system self-destructs, being unable to either handle unemployment and/or environmental impact. Since capitalism is a short-sighted system, that is very much possible.

[Guardsman Bass]

That is unless the system self-destructs, being unable to either handle unemployment and/or environmental impact. Since capitalism is a short-sighted system, that is very much possible.

It survived the Dust Bowl, massive economic collapse and dislocation in the 1930s, several major wars, a massive revolution in Russia and other countries, and (depending on how far back you want to trace it) some bad climate change in the form of the Little Ice Age. It's resilient, partially because the system allows for a lot of modifications and rules around the edges and because markets and trade tend to be resilient.

[K. A. Pital]

That is unless the system self-destructs, being unable to either handle unemployment and/or environmental impact. Since capitalism is a short-sighted system, that is very much possible.

It survived the Dust Bowl, massive economic collapse and dislocation in the 1930s, several major wars, a massive revolution in Russia and other countries, and (depending on how far back you want to trace it) some bad climate change in the form of the Little Ice Age. It's resilient, partially because the system allows for a lot of modifications and rules around the edges and because markets and trade tend to be resilient.

It did survive many things, but it did so having lots of environmental reserves to burn through, abundant cheap labour and natural resources. Perhaps the reserves for each of the three components aren't yet close to full attrition, but it does seem that this time the system already controls all there is to control and extracts all there is to extract; no more labour reserves, not of the magnitude necessary, and environmental protective buffer is wearing damn thin.

If, as this thread argues, machines are good enough, there is nothing to be done about unemployment.

[Beowulf]

Guaranteed Minimum Income seems like it would come about as an attempt to get through the automation crisis with minimal changes to how society operates. One that note, if the guaranteed income is sufficient for a comfortable lifestyle, would minimum wage laws still be necessary ?

I doubt the guaranteed income would be sufficient for a comfortable lifestyle, but it would be sufficient for a lifestyle. Keep a roof over your head, and food on the table, even if that may require room-mates.

That said, I don't think minimum wage laws would still be necessary. With a basic income, it's more difficult to exploit workers by a unreasonably low wage, because they can walk, and still be able to survive. Most conceptions of GMI/BI indicate that it would take over from a host of welfare programs. This would also remove some traps, where you become ineligible for certain programs over a hard income cap, thus providing incentives to not work full time.

[Darmalus]

Guaranteed Minimum Income seems like it would come about as an attempt to get through the automation crisis with minimal changes to how society operates. One that note, if the guaranteed income is sufficient for a comfortable lifestyle, would minimum wage laws still be necessary ?

I doubt the guaranteed income would be sufficient for a comfortable lifestyle, but it would be sufficient for a lifestyle. Keep a roof over your head, and food on the table, even if that may require room-mates.

That said, I don't think minimum wage laws would still be necessary. With a basic income, it's more difficult to exploit workers by a unreasonably low wage, because they can walk, and still be able to survive. Most conceptions of GMI/BI indicate that it would take over from a host of welfare programs. This would also remove some traps, where you become ineligible for certain programs over a hard income cap, thus providing incentives to not work full time.

If I had guaranteed income enough to cover a shoebox of an apartment, food and basic internet my "life plan" would be much different. I'd do more than just sit around, but I won't lie that a lot of my decision making is driven by a desire to not starve and/or die of exposure instead of any enjoyment or desire to do what I do.

[bilateralrope]

Guaranteed Minimum Income seems like it would come about as an attempt to get through the automation crisis with minimal changes to how society operates. One that note, if the guaranteed income is sufficient for a comfortable lifestyle, would minimum wage laws still be necessary ?

I doubt the guaranteed income would be sufficient for a comfortable lifestyle, but it would be sufficient for a lifestyle. Keep a roof over your head, and food on the table, even if that may require room-mates.

Possible. The biggest step would be the guaranteed income. After breaking that ideological barrier, increasing it would be a smaller step for governments. I can see a few reasons why it might be increased beyond the bare minimum:
- Maybe increasing it would benefit the economy the same way minimum wage increases can.
- Maybe increasing it is a cost effective way to keep the unemployed population peaceful. Bread and circuses
- Maybe they are a large enough voting block that politicians have to care about them, so they get bribed with increased minimum income. Even when increasing the minimum income to far could be bad for the country as a whole.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, the minimum income has to be increased at someone's expense- i.e. a taxpaying demographic.

If the guaranteed income only applies to a minority, this will be unpopular past a certain point, even if the taxation system is highly progressive. If it applies to a large minority or a majority, well... frankly, the group you're taxing becomes smaller and smaller. And it's highly debateable whether you could extract enough wealth from the top brackets in this context.

We're basically contemplating a highly automated society where ownership of wealth is super-concentrated. Where it's gotten so bad the median citizen can't realistically find a job that's worth enough money to support themself in a first-world standard of living, by what admittedly may be a shifting standard of "first-world." So you're essentially stuck taxing the income of the small minority of people who own all the robotic capital that provides for the world, wealth that while they may want they won't actually miss.

[Guardsman Bass]

Well, the minimum income has to be increased at someone's expense- i.e. a taxpaying demographic.

Not necessarily true. At first it would certainly have to come from taxation, but you could gradually build up a gigantic Sovereign Wealth Fund to the point where you could fund the basic income stipends from interest/capital gains earned on its balance. Some countries are close enough to this in the present - some of the Gulf countries could do it, Norway's Sovereign Wealth Fund is almost massive enough to do it, and so forth. Explicitly guaranteeing its returns up to a certain level with the Full Faith and Credit of the US government, or even more radical proposals like giving it a minority stake on all public IPOs, would go even further to build it up.

Even a smaller SWF could pay helpful stipends short of a Basic Income while that's going on as well.

If the guaranteed income only applies to a minority, this will be unpopular past a certain point, even if the taxation system is highly progressive. If it applies to a large minority or a majority, well... frankly, the group you're taxing becomes smaller and smaller. And it's highly debateable whether you could extract enough wealth from the top brackets in this context.

You'd want it to be the broadest base possible, with preferably all adult citizens and legal residents getting a stipend of equal size. I think the experience of receiving that check alone would create a psychological support for the program once it was in place, like how people look forward to their tax refunds. In terms of tax size, the US had about 236.8 million people 18 or older in 2013. If you had a $11,670/year stipend (the current individual income poverty line in the US), then that would cost $2.76 trillion/year to finance. That's a lot, although it would replace many federal and state level income support programs. You'd have to figure out something with Social Security, probably a partial replacement phased in over time.

The tax wouldn't necessarily have to be income taxes. It could be partially income tax, partially consumption and land taxes, and partially other taxes. If you wanted to phase-in a carbon tax but had to make it "revenue-neutral" in order to get it through Congress, having the revenue be paid out as a stipend or put into a Sovereign Wealth Fund for that purpose down the line would be beneficial.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, the minimum income has to be increased at someone's expense- i.e. a taxpaying demographic.

Not necessarily true. At first it would certainly have to come from taxation, but you could gradually build up a gigantic Sovereign Wealth Fund to the point where you could fund the basic income stipends from interest/capital gains earned on its balance.

In which case the state owns a large enough fraction of the nation's capital that it's essentially taxing itself. The biggest obstacle to 'bread and circuses' becomes the bureaucracy. Theoretically such a state could be sunk by the people clamoring for minimum income increases that the treasury/wealth fund cannot sustain. But that's a special case of the general phenomenon.

Some countries are close enough to this in the present - some of the Gulf countries could do it, Norway's Sovereign Wealth Fund is almost massive enough to do it, and so forth. Explicitly guaranteeing its returns up to a certain level with the Full Faith and Credit of the US government, or even more radical proposals like giving it a minority stake on all public IPOs, would go even further to build it up.

Notice that the Gulf states and Norway are to varying degrees petrostates- in other words, they have a huge source of income that isn't associated with the overall population size or industrial development of their country. This is not a normal condition, although if mass automation makes the economy hyper-productive it could become a more normal condition I guess.

But as noted above, in this case the state is simply cutting out the middleman and taxing its own controlled capital to provide the minimum income.

You'd want it to be the broadest base possible, with preferably all adult citizens and legal residents getting a stipend of equal size. I think the experience of receiving that check alone would create a psychological support for the program once it was in place, like how people look forward to their tax refunds. In terms of tax size, the US had about 236.8 million people 18 or older in 2013. If you had a $11,670/year stipend (the current individual income poverty line in the US), then that would cost $2.76 trillion/year to finance. That's a lot, although it would replace many federal and state level income support programs. You'd have to figure out something with Social Security, probably a partial replacement phased in over time.

Well. There's a valid argument for means-testing, but I do see your point about making it a general/universal thing. Also, looking at those numbers it does sound like something that we can't really do yet, but could do soon if the economy got sharply more productive.

At the moment, "give every American twelve thousand dollars a year" is still about 1/4 of our national per capita GDP, so you'd be taking one quarter of all wealth produced in America and redistributing it through this program, which is kind of grandiose for something to be done soon. In a hyper-productive economy it'd be more practical... IF the definition of 'poverty line' doesn't get revised by changing economic circumstances. But then, it probably will.

[cosmicalstorm]

I think the best case scenario us humans can hope for at this point is that a machine intelligence will collect our brains, upload them and let us spend an eternity in digital wonderland. Best case.

What seems a lot more likely is that resources will continue to gravitate to a few big players who will buy protection from the masses via drones and other automated defense.

[Sea Skimmer]

In which case the state owns a large enough fraction of the nation's capital that it's essentially taxing itself. The biggest obstacle to 'bread and circuses' becomes the bureaucracy.

But isn't this whole debated hinged on the idea of so much automation that in effect the bureaucracy is just going to be a bunch of computers anyway? After all the US government is the biggest employer in the country, and it isn't the only country where this is the case. At that point they'll go whatever way programming and the top leadership allows. Automation should increase corporate profits much faster then it does the taxable wealth of even the richest individuals, that's just a reality of way most western companies are structured, and all that money is open to taxation without specifically hitting specific citizens pocket books.

Theoretically such a state could be sunk by the people clamoring for minimum income increases that the treasury/wealth fund cannot sustain. But that's a special case of the general phenomenon.

You could make that argument about any sort of system! People will demand too much or the government will decide to spend too much until everything implodes. This has happened to all sorts of systems in the past, Royalist France and the Soviet Union being prime and already cited examples with dramatically different baselines, but all this really means if we cannot expect any one system to be indefinitely stable. Which is fine. Why should we expect civilization to be static? By the time the state socalism approach fails we might be so advanced people are just jacking themselves into computers or something, and society as we know it implodes anyway in favor of meat locker storage of warm bodies.

Though its worth considering that if a highly automated economy can start exploiting space, and effective generate enough wealth to make that self sustaining then it could well become possible to increase standards of living every single year until people don't even know what to spend money on. At least until we start having hundreds of billions of humans.

[Darmalus]

Though its worth considering that if a highly automated economy can start exploiting space, and effective generate enough wealth to make that self sustaining then it could well become possible to increase standards of living every single year until people don't even know what to spend money on. At least until we start having hundreds of billions of humans.

Given that increased standards of living are associated with negative population growth (without immigration the US population would be shrinking) such a future would probably see a population crash rather than growth unless governments start cloning new citizens or incentivising having children.

[Sea Skimmer]

Indeed it is likely that populations would become stagnant, but its not a given that this would be the case either. At least it isn't likely enough to be a sound basis for planning purposes.

Present day developed country population stagnation has been the result of industrial and post working conditions; but if people don't have jobs, and they don't have to worry about getting and holding a job because the jobs just don't exist, we can't plan on the basis that they will still have the same disincentive to have kids. At least not if the state is in fact willing to pay for say, ~2-3 per family. If it became socially accepted and indeed expected that the state will ensure the stability of your family then more people would have families. I don't see why they wouldn't. Humans are wired on average to want kids, modern society has to suppress that urge in an active sense.

High levels of automation in the ~2050 era would also probably bring about things like nanny bots which are advanced enough to help raise children without emotionally stunting them or causing other problems we could expect from present levels of technology. Such technology on its own could have a big effect on family dynamics in the worst case example of say, modern Japan, where people simply physically don't have time for kids even when they can afford them.

[Guardsman Bass]

Present day developed country population stagnation has been the result of industrial and post working conditions; but if people don't have jobs, and they don't have to worry about getting and holding a job because the jobs just don't exist, we can't plan on the basis that they will still have the same disincentive to have kids. At least not if the state is in fact willing to pay for say, ~2-3 per family. If it became socially accepted and indeed expected that the state will ensure the stability of your family then more people would have families. I don't see why they wouldn't. Humans are wired on average to want kids, modern society has to suppress that urge in an active sense.

We've seen massive drops in the birth rates of most poor countries as well (including many that haven't gone through major economic expansions), so I don't think it's about the modern economy and costs of child-bearing. I think it has much more to do with modern medicine and reduced infant mortality rates - you don't need nine children when all your kids are going to survive to adulthood, and effective contraception and abortion means you can choose whether or not to have children. Instead birth rates tend to converge down towards the replacement level, with approximately two children being the average in countries with good medical care and good social spending assistance to all income levels for families (such as Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia).

Plus, if it was about money and time, you'd think we'd see much higher birth rates among the rich. But birth rates among the high income folks are low by US standards.

That's why I think you'll end up converging around the replacement level, barring massive expansions in life expectancy due to technology.

[Simon_Jester]

One minor note: the rich are often no less busy than the poor. Most wealthy people spend vast amounts of time and energy on their work; the reason they got rich is that they felt very, very motivated to work at it.

On the other hand, they are well equipped to pay for things that support their lifestyle choices (i.e. nannies).