Would a robot economy eventually mean no minimum wages and no strikes?

[Philosophy Explorer]

What type of economy are we headed for?

PhilX

[Dalek Prime]

One where everyone starves, except a few rich cockroaches who have to eat their money because everyone else has starved, and can no longer enable them.

[thedoc]

One where everyone starves, except a few rich cockroaches who have to eat their money because everyone else has starved, and can no longer enable them.

So when it all hits the fan, a few will revert to a more primitive life style and grow their own food, and the starving have-not's will try to take it and either kill or be killed. If they get killed, all's well and good because the food producers will continue to grow food. If they kill they will eventually eat everything and then starve, and it's still all good.

[Conde Lucanor]

Besides sci-fi fantasies, what exactly is a "robot economy"? Is such a thing possible?

[The Voice of Time]

Would a robot economy eventually mean no minimum wages and no strikes?

No. More likely we'd have greater quality of work and greater wages, because humans would become easier to satisfy for the business owners.

The only threat to improved working conditions, is less education. When people stop educating themselves, they become easily replaceable and burdensome to the rest of society.

[Greta]

We are already in a fledgling robot economy. Many will remember the promises made in the 70s and 80s as workers were increasingly losing their livelihoods to machines - that the machines will usher in a new "leisure age" where machines did most of the work,, proving ever greater prosperity, freeing people from work. There was talk by the capitalists of special leisure industries to give people something to do with all their free time.

Instead, the machines allowed for greater productivity, productivity so great that employers required ever longer hours of work to remain competitive. So the prosperity was not shared as "the trickle down effect" was championed as the rational way to balance prosperity and equality. That too was a con. Naturally, if resources gush upwards but only "trickle down" the disparity between capital and labour will naturally increase. The natural upshot of the robot economy and the "trickle down" lie is that today eighty billionaires have as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion people.

Those eighty billionaires have enough technology at their disposal to maintain this state of unprecedented inequity in the modern age.