"A society where you only have to work three days a week, that's probably OK," Bill Gates said.
Bill Gates says a 3-day work week where 'machines can make all the food and stuff' isn't a bad idea::"A society where you only have to work three days a week, that's probably OK," Bill Gates said.
Sure. Give the wealthy and powerful ownership over literally everything in the world and as long as you follow the rules you can get your survival allowance. Shit maybe even some entertainment if you’re really good.
But that's how things are now... We work 5–7 days a week for the wealthy and powerful to have more ownership, while getting a survival allowance in exchange.
The parent comment was about the current system, where labor produces everything. If your labor can be easily replaced, your labor isn’t that valuable and you won’t be compensated well for your labor. If your labor can’t be replaced easily, it is valuable and you will be compensated well.
That’s pretty much the opposite of this fictional future dystopia where there is no labor at all and everything is produced by automation. In that world, you as an individual have no value at all. You’re just a leech. There won’t be any innovation, because that’s driven by labor which doesn’t exist in this scenario.
0 forced labor doesn't mean that humans stop doing things. We are a species which psychologically have a need for something meaningful to do, it's just that our personal resources are spent after all the meaningless stuff we have to do for the ones in power.
Working 0 days doesn't imply we can't collectively own things. 20% of Norway's population democratically own their houses (housing coops) and like 90% of the Finnish population are member/democratic owners of consumer coops (Walmart grocery stores). Neither of these are workers of the respective coops they're members of.
The overlap between the kind of people wanting to do 0 work and the kind of people willing to actually physically fight for it is virtually nonexistent.
Who is going to enforce communal ownership of the means of production and all products in the economy when those in charge decide they should reap the benefits of managing that? It certainly isn’t going to be the lazy asses who don’t even want to work literally one day a week.