Now society should become more productive, but many of the workers are going to fall into more general and less useful professions. EX: We don't need vary many farmers today, yet we produce far more food than ever. IMO, this suggests the introduction of basic welfare state funded by the increased prosperity. But we can also just waste the extra productivity with a huge military, increased litigation, and a truly massive prison system.

The extra value created here can be traded for things that would have previously been unattainable, which in turn grows other industries and markets. A good example is the relatively recently materialized cell phone industry, which was viewed as a luxury not but 15 years ago, and is now practically ubiquitous. This has added $40-$100/mo to the average functional adults expenditures. While it may have replaced the $50/mo spent on the home phone line, you're replacing that with $40-$100/mo for each person in the home. Mobile phones increase our productivity by saving time and nowadays allow us to make more informed decisions on the spot.

This example continues because there was a fundamental shift in the type of labor employed by these mobile phone companies. In the early days of the industry, specialized salespeople pulled large salaries selling expensive phones and highly trained technical people answered technical support calls. Now that costs have dropped massively and reliability has drastically improved, these people have been replaced by relatively low wage employees (customer service reps and salespeople), and opportunity has opened at the "bottom."

I do agree that we waste a ridiculous amount of our capital on societal "overhead" that could otherwise be put to good use.

I like many people on HN are at the extreme edge of the bell curve and can easily find work. My point is simply that the need for a highly skilled workforce seems to be shrinking. Starbucks could probably replace 1/2 their workforce with automation and produce better coffee. They don't do this for several reasons, but mostly because there is such little demand for their workers.

I'd suggest education would be a preferable alternative to either of those.

In other words, automation and technology are tools in human's hands, and we still have to fight for our material/educationnal/environmental/human desires.

That's the way it's worked out in the real world. About 1% of the population produces all our food. And that frees the rest of us up to make movies. And write novels. And organize the world's information. And allow people to live 30 miles from their jobs. And let them cross the country or travel the world on a whim. And live in climate-controlled boxes with nice furniture.

That's also the long-term solution to unemployment. Eventually, somebody figures out something else that the rest of the population would like to have, and puts all of those out-of-work workers to work doing it. The computer industry didn't even exist 50 years ago. The automobile and household appliance industries didn't exist 50 years before that. The oil, railroad, middle management, engineering, and office worker industries didn't exist 50 years before that. These have all been born out of workers being freed up from previous shrinking industries (eg. manufacturing, domestic servants, farming, textiles) and put to use in new emerging ones.

You didn't include it in your comment, however it is important to note how much each producer is producing. With economies of scale, it is likely both producers create enough goods to exceed the demand of either consumer. Rationale being if "food producer" became efficient enough to put all other food producers out of business, they likely can feed more than just the clothing producer.

The reason why competing food manufacturing would be impossible to start in the era of absolute automation is that you need the machines to do that, in other words you need the capital. Who in their right mind would provide capital to manufacture food for people who have nothing to offer in return?

I'm stretching the argument here, but only to illustrate the problem that I see - automation satisfies needs and thus destroys jobs tied to satisfying those needs. I see only two ways out of this - create new needs (which we've been doing successfully so far) or exert the power of the state to take the products from producers (progressively heavier taxation).

You're implying that, in this (dis)utopian future, luxury goods don't exist?

Once you have those three things, you have an entire economy. Heck, arguably clothes are a luxury good, so all you need are food and luxury goods.

Not if companies own most of the arable land and IP on harvesting machinery.

Intellectual property laws are based on the concept that ideas and goods are scarce. If automation makes physical production as cost-free as digital production is now, then all IP laws (not just copyright and software patent laws) will have to be revised to accommodate the fundamental change in the nature and abundance of goods and ideas.

Plus, as they say, there's more than one way to skin a cat. Someone can design a harvester based on old technology, or a radically different design.

So it will be a group of people who own resources, one guy who makes food and one guy who makes clothing. These are the only people who will get to eat.