As you said, there's not enough money to pay everyone. But the strange thing is, the productivity has increased a lot. It is not convincining to say people get less because they now can produce more. It just indicated that they now work less and produce the same amount as before, but due to they work less, their income dropped (this is the current system: if you work 4 hours, you get 50% the payment than when you work 8 hours).

Borrowing from future is based on the assumption that future productivity will be higher and future income will also be higher. But current situation is that future income will drop due to "productivity increase-> jobless rate rise-> total demand drop". If the future income is constant, then the current debt will become a huge burden

In the past decades, people continously moved into new industry area (IT, financial derivatives, housing), this kept the jobless rate low, but now it seems difficult to find another new industry that can digest that amount of jobless people

Basically, there are 3 ways to deal with the fast rising productivity (or say over supply):

Reduce working hours (this is the best solution in my opinion)
Charge high tax on high productivity companies and increase the lower social wellfare
Move people into new industry

The first 2 reduce the supply, the last one increase the demand through the attractive new products from those new industry

Most of today's economy model is studying the scarcity, it uses lot's of assumptions in a scarcity dominated society, but we already passed that stage long time ago. Keynes discovered that over supply is dangerous, he tried to increase the demand to match the increased productivity. But why not reduce the supply? Because in a credit based economy, you have to increase future income (thus increase supply) to payback the loan and interest, everyone is driven by profit/earnings/loan interests, this makes everyone works like a slave

I think there is a critical point when BTC value and difficulty combined cause that each mined BTC can not pay for the electricity, then most of the profit-driven mining operation will stop

Bitcoin is just too difficult to use in daily life, especially that terrible account number which is constantly changing, will scare most of the users who is get used to a fixed bank account number in decades.

Yes, reduce working hour is actually a very good way to solve this problem, and it is very scaleable!

Let's say from tomorrow, all the people who have the job should only work 4.5 days a week, at the same time their salary reduced by 10%. What happens then? All the companies will have to use those saved 10% salary payment to hire 10% more workers to keep the productivity up, then the jobless problem solved right away!

The biggest resistance might come from those who have the job, and since they are the majority, this solution might not get passed!

Either trying to prove it will not happen, or trying to make the plan when it happens, the latter I think is more positive:)

I never think "super powerful rich guys" have any intention to eliminate others that is in a weaker position. On the contrary, it is those weaker guys  make those stronger guys can show off and feel good:) But even for those powerful guys, they could still be very simple thinking from their own point of view, thus not seeing the whole picture

This is the key difficulty: Even machine can provide enough necessities to all of the human, they will not be distributed to each one that requires them, without a big change in today's economy/society model. And I strongly doubt that such kind of change could ever happen, since human's nature has not changed that much in the latest 1000 years

They do not, and that is the purpose, less and less people need to work in future. Work is no longer a means to make a living, the society already can provide each person good living condition with the help of robots and machines.

Saving action is bad for today's economy model, since it will cancel out many of the monetary policy efferts generated by government and FED. This can be explained by a very simple example

Actually I think that is one of the good solution. And of course those paychecks comes from tax (or debt)

Raising tax might stress business, so it should not be taxed on income or revenue, but rather on cash: The more cash holded, the more tax, this also encourage companies not hoarding cash and activly spend and invest

Good point, as long as people are aware and worried about an unfair distribution, there is hope a system can be invented to prevent that from happening

Good topic and I'm also discussing same thing in another column: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=33267.0

I think the QEs have done quite good, but not enough, the big problem is that printed money should lend to those companies who are willing to create new jobs, instead of lending to those big companies who just hoard cash and cutting employee (they do this because their market analysis showing the market is going down), but the current credit system prefer lend to these cash hoarders

We already had the technology that can serve almost everyone, but still lots of people suffering, it is definitely a system problem, not technology

Today's ISM data is a good example, while industry continously improve the productivity, the whole manufacturing volume is shrinking due to less and less demand

Of course not, it has nothing to do with the minimum wage, the market-based resource allocation will not work after productivity has passed certain level

see my other post at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=33267.0

Ok then I know where is your positive attitude coming from, since you are belonging to those 10% who making robots.

But this does not solve the problem of the whole society.

Let's say: For each good programmer, you can replace 9 traditional worker, thus create 9 jobless people.  The problem is, this good programmer seldom have 10 times the income of those 9 people (maximum 4x), thus he never could spend as much as those 9 people added together.

You see? With the increased productivity, the total demand decreased, thus bring the whole GDP down, and drag the whole country into recession, this is unavoidable in today's economic system

To keep the total demand up, even these 9 people lost their job, they still have to spend as before

I think I will keep most of every spending, then I have to print money to pay them, so debt ceiling must be raised!

As Buffet said, as long as the debt can be paid by printing US dollar, there is no problem. Of course USD will drop in value, but this has already been discussed many times in Keynesian Economics.

More money will be printed, but there will be no significant inflation, inflation comes when demand is higher than supply, currently it is definitely not the case.

Big international companies sit with tons of cash and loans but never spend, hope government will make an example by spending those loans and create some new projects

IMO, any single person's life is pretty meaningless(always end up in the tomb),  but if for some reason you becomes valueable for someone/somthing, your life start to gain some meaning

That means there is a systematic problem, we'd better find where the problem is

I think the purpose of making AI and robots is to free human from reputational labor, thus gain more time to enjoy life and create new things, so even if 90% of people do not have a job, they might have some more meaningful things to do

US workers can be enough competetiv against chinese workers, but they have no way to be 1/100 competetiv against a robot, you have to rely on AMD cards to do the mining

I like this positive views

Continuous structure change will constantly put people into new works, with more and more division of the work, more and more new products will be generated, this has been the case during the last several hundred years

But computer/software/robot is a little bit different, they are actually much higher efficient workers with very little paied(electricy), and it works in all the branches in the society, thus put almost everyone in danger, a very fast structure change that can cope with the exploding speed of AI adaptation do not exist today

By the way, new works normally comes from new demand, as more and more people's demand are filled, less and less left. Housing might be the biggest demand for many human, but when everyone already have his own house, what could be the next even bigger demand? An IPAD?

Not necessary immigrants, just some very low paid chinese workers will put all the US manufactoring job in danger

But my question is regarding the human being, not particular one race/nation, since this happens anywhere in the world

If the technology has evolved to such a level that robots took over most of the human jobs in 2050, will most of the human become jobless and only those working for robot companies have a job?

Obviously this day is approaching, the using of computer and software has eliminated countless jobs today, and will continue to do so in a much faster rate, due to the whole IT industry is getting more mature and efficient

I think this has much to do with most of the problems we are having today: High jobless rate, lower social wellfare, government debt, etc...

We definitely need a new finance/economy model which can cope with a computer/automation based society

To be more abstract: How can we deal with the fast increase in productivity but slow and uneven increase in income/demand?

Anyone interested, welcome to give your thoughts!