In my country we had always had massive unemployment rates.

People just live with family and keep studying until they can land a job. Plenty of people here hasn’t got a job until their thirties, and rarely in the field the initially thought they’d be working.

It’s shit living with your parents until you are 35, but it has been the deal here until very recently.

What does “can’t be trained for a new job” mean? Why? What’s keeping them from learning a new thing?

Universal Basic Income.

You are making it seem like this is a new problem. And it isn’t.

Centuries back it was weavers who were displaced by the industrial revolution and automated spinning machines. Coal mining went unfashionable from the late 1970s onwards and miners had to find new work. Industry in the US closed up shop and moved to China. These are just three examples of workers being made redundant in their then capacity. Two out of these three went by without much loss of life, the majority of the workforce found new jobs over time, and only some of them were screwed on a more permanent basis. Unfortunately, that’s the shitty bell curve of these changes. But another thing that’s been proven again over time is that we always think these miners or these factory workers are completely unhireable and it turns out the majority isn’t. People thought MS Excel would eradicate the entire bookkeeping profession. And they are still around and I think actually grew in numbers because they are free from pencils and calculators and could do more interesting stuff instead. Don’t fall for the so-called AI will replace everything talking point. The people who say this are either invested in so-called AI companies or drank the koolaid. All we hear for the moment is how theses models do a good a lot of the time and then break catastrophically bad somewhere. Humans still need to have a look for the time being. And thus a new job is born: chAIperone.

The problem these days is how the state responds to massive shifts like that. Social security nets have a finer mesh in the developed world outside the US. It’s much easier to go from no job to living in a car to living under a bridge in the US. A lot of people in this thread call for UBI, which is sensible but isn’t even likely in the more socialist Europe. UBI is a good answer though. Education is another one, e.g. free training programs or college classes for long term unemployed. None of that seems likely under 47.

Since this question is asking “should”, I think it’s fine to answer with a rational but radical answer:

• People can be useful to society even if they aren’t employed in our current economies. Retired people may not have jobs, but often still perform productive or necessary labor, like maintenance, artistic contributions, child care, historical preservation. When someone isn’t working for money, they still often voluntarily work for society!
• I believe that, generally speaking, it’s within society’s best interest, even just from an economic standpoint, to support these people even if they aren’t formally employable.
• Looking at most capitalist countries, overproduction is normal. Usable property remains empty just because an owner wants more money for their investment. Perfectly edible food is systematically thrown in bins rather than given to hungry people for free, or rejected by stores because it doesn’t look perfect (like an oddly shaped carrot). Clothes are thrown out once they’re “unfashionable”.

We have all the resources needed to support everyone, and it wouldn’t take much extra effort from a determined government to get those resources where they need to go. There’s no reason why unemployed people should be left to starve and freeze simply because they don’t have enough income. In our society, the scarcity of basic needs is artificial (‘artificial scarcity’).

Automation is seen as a bad thing, a threat, because workers in society are threatened with starvation if they don’t have the income needed for food, shelter, medicine and perhaps basic luxuries. But if our political economy were first-and-foremost based around society’s needs instead of profiting, and therefore we used our modern technology to automate the production of these basic needs and distribute them, then suddenly automation would mean free time and easier labor!

People have a right to exist and society has a responsibility to care for those who cannot work. The whole point of society is to ensure the health and well being of their members as a WHOLE. If a society cannot or will not care for their elderly or infirm then that is a failed society.

Work less as a society, so finally switch to the 32h weeks and setup the Universal basic income, it would allow to share the work (because someone needs to pick-up the thrash) and leverage on the productivity gains to benefit to everyone.

Provide training, and support life-long education, you should keep your unemployment rights while attending university as an adult for example, but also offer more short training including some level update for people whose skill got rusty in a previous job.

Promote non merchant activities. A volunteer who coaches kids sport or plays amateur theatre in nursing home and hospital does more good to society than a marketing corporate executive, why are the latter seen as more important ?

More importantly, what should be done with him to make him useful or at least neutral rather than being a negative on the society?

They are part of the society. Stop pitting the individual against the society and vice versa, if a society can’t support its members it needs to be abolished.

I thought the rule was “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”.

That would imply easy jobs should be reserved for those who can’t do anything else.

Soldiers. All those weapons from the automation don’t carry themselves to the front. Robots would be too valuable for that.

I mean, it’s not really a new problem, although it’s just been ordinary health issues rather than AI.

Usually disability has been addressed very poorly, though.

Those who can work, should. Those who cannot should be taken care of by those who can. Comprehensive training programs and free education helps both, as well as subsized or free necessities.

Done by who? Done how? Tf does this mean

There are plenty of societies that have strong state-backed training and education programs. The AI narrative is majority a smokescreen for financialization and downsizing of firms and privatizarion of the state

Just like with the blockchain, China’s been the first to implement a power and resource efficient version of an overhyped tech financial bubble buzzword technology, because they don’t judge its utility differently than any other technology.

They will likely be the only nation other than close regional SEA allies to implement AI in governance effectively instead of using it to somehow make servers using UI from 2014 worse + more insecure & strengthening the Tesla/Palantir/Anduril investor pitch " The Evil Privatized Government Has Anointed Us Chief Devourer of the State Social Services/Tech/Green Energy Budget" where everyone can stuff the 1 trillion dollars the fed prints daily for banks

First worlders who want to pull themselves back out of the hole somehow should stop focusing singlemindedly on minimum wage struggle and public debt, and start worrying about land reform, access to hours + employment, and public housing.

• create government bureau that figures out how many people a company would need to employ without automation

• tax that company the equivalent of those people’s salaries

• fund UBI

Fuck capitalism.

Look again at why these people no longer have work available to them.

If advancements in technology mean that a machine can do the job more efficiently than a human, then the value of that labour still exists, we just need to legislate a redistribution of it now that human employment is no longer doing it directly.

Once we update our tax codes to ensure that the wealth of automation is shared equitably, the question then becomes “what do you want to do with your free time?”