Robotics alone can make employment obsolete, but add in AI and it's all the more true. This is a real economic conundrum that human civilization has never faced before.
The 40 hour work week was established due to the work of Henry Ford as he discovered that productivity quality dropped off after that many hours a week. The 40 hours wasn't settled upon because society/economy needed it, but because it was the most that could be efficiently provided by a quality worker.
Fast forward to today, and production can be maxed out with less than 40 hours of human work per worker. So fewer peolpe are needed to make things or the same number of people could work fewer hours for maximum production.
But then with less employment, how can workers make enough to buy what's needed? Unemployment goes up because fewer people are needed, and then homelessness goes way up like it is now. It's easy to then see the logic of concluding the world is full of too many useless eaters that should be exterminated with a vaccine.
But I'm not sure there's an ethical solution to a world where anything can be produced cheaply but without having anything close to the whole world working to produce those things.
My big, big question is why are we importing "migrants" (with all the problems they bring) to do work that could/should be done by citizens who are getting a free ride rather than working for a living. It sure as hell seems cheaper to bus morons from Joliet to Des Plaines rather than bus morons from Guatemala while paying for the morons already in Des Plaines to live in Section 8 apartments and do nothing but have more moron babies.
My big, big question is why are we importing "migrants" (with all the problems they bring) to do work that could/should be done by citizens who are getting a free ride rather than working for a living. It sure as hell seems cheaper to bus morons from Joliet to Des Plaines rather than bus morons from Guatemala while paying for the morons already in Des Plaines to live in Section 8 apartments and do nothing but have more moron babies.
Motives vary.
The migrants want to get out of poverty. They are in poverty in their home countries in part because the US dollar is the global reserve currency. It allows the US to constantly run a trade deficit. We export freshly printed cash -- electronic cash at that -- in exchange for the labor and production of the world. That lets the US basically enslave the world, depriving them of the goods and services that are being unfairly sent to the USA. So the world exports goods to the USA, and the USA replies sends cash dollars that basically go only to the elite in these 3rd world countries, not to the populous.
Those in poverty see the US awash in cash and want to claim their share, so they migrate to the USA.
US Elite are happy to have them come for political power purposes.
End the US global reserve currency status and the trade imbalance ends, which brings average people in 3rd world countries more access to goods that are currently being unfairly sent to the USA.
I worked with a guy who was from a very upperclass (and very leftist) background, had a MBA and he told me outright it was cheaper to keep blacks on welfare than to let them destroy small businesses through ingrained incompetence. I was shocked he admitted it, but he had no answer as to why there was no eugenic component in place. I wasn't suggesting murder or spaying, just an end to rewards.
I kind of see things as asking how much did Democrat cronies rake in building millions of public housing units like Cabrini Green? Same thing they are doing in California today with $750,000/each units for the "homeless".
I worked with a guy who was from a very upperclass (and very leftist) background, had a MBA and he told me outright it was cheaper to keep blacks on welfare than to let them destroy small businesses through ingrained incompetence.
Though the fact that poverty & welfare increases birth rates should also be considered.