"Manna" by Marshall Brain

I will have you know that I got out of my swimming pool and did my part to support the local economy by getting a $5 massage.

Make poverty history!!!

I think it's a genre convention of utopian fiction -- take an observer from the mundane world (which may be a crapsack, and plant them in the midst of the wonders of Utopia. For me, given the strong resemblance of the Australia Project to the Culture, it's impossible to imagine that they don't have their equivalent of Contact (and Special Circumstances), but that the narrator never was introduced to them. I lean towards the Author Failure explanation, though I don't think it's actually possible to be less skilled than Ayn Rand.

My comment there:

Assume robots are the same as humans.

A situation which is very unlikely in the first place - and extremely unlikely to last for very long if it somehow magically happened. Machines already vastly exceed human capabilities in many areas.

This essay stops before things get interesting. What will politicians do if they have a big mountain of unemployed human voters to feed?

"Post-scarcity economy" is an impossible concept even in principle (assuming a human society, at any rate). Beyond a certain minimal standard of living, which is in fact quite low by today's standards, most of the things people really care about are zero-sum. They will struggle just as mightily and eagerly to wrest those for themselves no matter how cheap, plentiful, and high-quality non-zero-sum stuff gets. Moreover, habitable land is always zero-sum, which further complicates things.

For those with less ambition and/or ability, this has a twofold effect. On the one side, it benefits them because in a decently functioning polity, people's efforts to get ahead in life in the hope of zero-sum gains will result in a growing economy making non-zero-sum stuff increasingly cheap, plentiful, and high-quality. On the other hand, it is bad because some things are zero-sum but nevertheless essential for life, most notably habitable land, and people's struggle to get ahead in zero-sum efforts drives the price of these way up. This makes it necessary to work almost as hard as the most ambitious and prosperous folk to be able to afford the increasing price of lodging and other essential access to zero-sum things.

Thus in the contemporary developed world we have a situation where nobody is in danger of starving or not having warm enough clothes, but homelessness is a very realistic threat for poorer people. (As an even more striking illustration of the same phenomenon, in recent years even cell phones and computers have become affordable to many of the homeless folk.) The Manna story also illustrates the same principle accurately: the state finds feeding and clothing the unemployable masses adequately a trivial expense, but the land to house them is expensive and scarce so they have to live packed together like sardines.

Well, clearly the owners of robots are unlikely to risk losing their capital by assigning their valuable property to tasks in which the robots face the probability of being blown up. So, it is likely that the fate of the poor will be to serve as soldiers in the various armies of the future - whether revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, imperialist or anti-imperialist. Cannon fodder. Except in peace time when they may be kept docile with bread and circuses. If there is much peace time.

I have no idea why you think that the cost of feeding a human soldier, even if you sent him to the battlefield naked and unarmed to fight other waves of human flesh, would be lower than deploying a drone.

Population reduction tempered by charity efforts by the robot owning humans seems more probable. Also over time the majority of non-robot owning humans might be part of feral populations if there is any natural habitat left.

Many office employees get advice and guidance from machines with high frequency. However, they usually come through screens - not earpieces. Earpieces are an inferior message delivery system for most kinds of machine-originated messages - through being too invasive, and having poor bandwidth - compared to vision.

I've worked with people who would rapidly become comfortable with minute-by-minute instructions... though they might complain about it a lot, for a variety of essentially signaling reasons.

In general, my rule of thumb about giving detailed instructions to people is that it's a bad idea, not because they hate it, but because they become accustomed to it. If I solve the "what should I do next?" problem for someone enough times, they start expecting me to solve it for them in the future as well. I have a hard enough time solving it for myself.

//Not an economist//

The minimum wage creates a class of people who it isn't worth hiring (their productivity is less than their cost of employment). If you have a device which raises the productivity of these guys, they can enter the workforce at minimum wage.

Additionally, there may be zero marginal product workers - workers whose cost of employment equals the marginal increase in productivity that results from hiring them. This could happen in a contracting job market if the fear of losing employment causes other workers to increase their productivity enough. Then you could fire Jack and see the productivity of John increase enough to match the productivity net of costs that Jack provided. If such workers exist, then they can provide a new source of labour even in the absence of minimum wage laws.

I agree with you that there's a lack of economic logic in the story, though.

Well, as labor becomes less scarce, you don't have to care if your employees hate it or not. Enough people will be desperate enough for some sort of work that you'll be able to find people.

Nothing like "about half" of American workers work in environments routinized enough to use something like manna.

Do you have anything to support this? It seems to me that organizational charts are usually pyramid shaped, and the lower parts of the pyramids are where the most employees are, where less decision-making jobs are and where such a system would be more useful - and so a lot more employed people are doing jobs which a less skilled / lower cost person could do with guidance than are doing jobs with tough decisions and responsibility or creativity.

Also, that a lot of people have factory / processing jobs which are right now such fixed routines that a manna-like system would skip over them.

The employees would hate it

The point of the system is that the fast food restaurant is able to pay people less and guide them to doing a better job than was done before. That is, people who couldn't get a fast food job before and were unemployable can earn money. Those fictional unemployable people who can now eat are hardly going to complain that their job isn't as much fun as they want, are they?