rbanffyIn Japan, the robot isn't coming for your job; it's filling the one nobody wants
"No one wants" usually includes an insufficient wage, sometimes also an issue of insufficient investment in training for skilled folks. eg if you need a doctor in 12 years you have to start more or less today.
A quick google suggests ~18% of their working age people do not have jobs, which naturally could be shifted by incentives like money or training.
(Edit, because people are confused, I'm not talking about unemployment rate, i'm talking about labor non-participation rate as a measure of people who could be enticed into the workforce with a living wage)
18% is one of the.lowest rates on the planet. 4th in fact.
This includes early retirees, full time students, home makers and people unable to work for health related reasons.
It's still 10s of millions of people who could be given a job (and some hope and purpose too btw)
Edit: btw I agree there's more to life than work. But when you're unemployed and hoping for work, competing against robots and LLMs is quite crushing.
Why would the retirees want to be put back to work?
Why would the students want to have to do two full-time tasks at once?
Why would the homemakers want to add another full-time task?
Why would the people with cancer want to have to work from their hospital bed?
There's more to life than work. Get a hobby! Hope and purpose doesn't have to come from menial labor.
Money, money, money, and money. We need it to survive. Until people's basic needs are taken care of for them, they need to do what they can to live.
Humans are older than money, so evidently we don't need it to survive, but there is more to existence than mere survival. I agree that people's basic needs to be taken care of, but I think that is an issue that needs to happen because of automation. It needs to happen because it is simply the right thing to do. I would go as fas as saying It shouldn't just be basic needs. Society should be aiming to provide the entire hierarchy of needs for everyone.
I think having employment delivers some of the higher needs to a subset of people, but it is a privileged few. A huge number work just to provide the basic needs. Advocating using the advances in automation to raise everybody up is what we need. Instead we seem to be maintaining a system that gives a few what we want and the rest of us are too busy with the survival part to influence that change.
> Society should be aiming to provide the entire hierarchy of needs for everyone.
I don’t know. Society should provide the framework within which people can achieve their needs (and wants), but not the needs and wants themselves directly.
Otherwise you put an artificial cap on human growth and inefficient allocation of resources.