This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Will money and economies still exist, if all jobs get automated? If all jobs are automated, what will people work to earn money? If all jobs are automated, will people receive everything they want and need, for free, without having to work?”

Within a fully automated society, people will have their needs taken care of.

Wants are an entirely different beast.

If you want money to travel around the globe, you’ll still need to earn money to afford that.

If you want to buy a sportscar instead of using public transit, you’ll still need to earn money to afford that.

How you make money will be more a choice for you rather than a necessity made of compromise by a perpetual lowering of your expectations.

You won’t be forced to take a job you hate because you’re afraid of being made homeless. You’ll be able to hold out until you find a vocation you like and that brings meaning to you and your life.

You’ll have many more options for being self-employed than now in ways only emerging today as viable systems to help you bring your imagination to life.

I’ve recently discovered an entirely new concept for doing just that. Check it out:

The site is called “Makeship.” What makes it unique is that you can design your character, and if your design is accepted, it will be made into a plush toy that you can sell for a profit. They handle all the “heavy lifting” from converting your design into a 3D plush toy, its production process, and, to a large extent, a lot of your marketing through crowd-funded campaigns.

Makeship

Many new initiatives are sprouting up everywhere that approach manufacturing, sales, and distribution from a service-oriented perspective.

You’ve probably already heard about dropshipping, where you can essentially choose products from a distribution catalogue and assemble them in a store where you handle all the sales for those products. They handle all the packaging and shipping for you.

This is just the beginning of the new world of automation.

Large entities will capitalize on individual ingenuity, innovation, and effort by empowering the little people to go out and carve their niches in the commercial world.

With the assistance of AI, we’ll be able to produce full-scale movies for distribution simply by the prompts and tweaks we make to flesh out our creative visions in ways that others would want to consume.

Life won’t cater to people without ambition or desire to work, but it will become a panoply of options and opportunities everyone can exploit.

With these tools at our disposal, we’ll finally enter an age where merit is not lip service disguising favouritism. Whatever you imagine will stand or fall on the strength of your effort without being buffeted about by the day’s politics.

Instead of fearing automation, we should be learning to embrace it and leaning into it to begin pushing our governments to adapt to a new world without waiting for widespread suffering through the transition process to compel them to solve problems that can be avoided.

UBI will save millions of lives if we begin implementing it now. If we wait until millions of jobs are lost, then we will lose a lot more than millions of lives, and we’ll end up coping with the daily chaos of ongoing riots and widespread destruction of property.