As an American watching the slow death of the middle class, I have some predictions that I'd like to share and get your thoughts on. For starters, I think that as the middle class breaks down it will break down into several different component parts down below the level of upper-middle class with blue collar workers sinking back down to the working class. There will be:
>Legacy Middle Class: Largely people who went to college and stayed out of debt, or at least handled it responsibly. They are still making a middle class income while saving and investing wisely. However they are largely locked out of class mobility as the gap between the rich and everyone else grows. They may have a sizable enough inheritance to propel them into the Upper-Middle Class at some point.
cont'd
>Debtor Middle Class: Starting with student loan debt and car debt before pivoting to mortgages this segment of the middle class will resemble the current white collar portion of the middle class and the Surviving Middle Class, but only on the surface. Their constant debt prevents them from being able to accumulate significant savings and investments, and their tapped out credit will prevent them from doing things like starting a business, pursuing certain higher level degrees etc. Their lifestyles will be better than working class, but they will effective be kept as debtors their entire lives.
>Fallen Middle Class: Imagine a shift manager at a fast food chain who lives in a nice house that he inherited from his parents and you have an accurate depiction of this social class. They have a bit more than the working class because of their lack of need to pay rent, but their access to credit is limited to what they can draw using collateral, and their parents accounts that have been left to them are slowly being tapped out by things like home repairs and large purchases that someone on their income could not otherwise afford. This class will see it's wealth crumble within another generation or two.
I think that what remains of the Legacy Middle Class will either sink into the Debtor Middle Class or merge with the Upper Middle Class as the Fallen Middle Class peters out.
>>1103439
Agreed.
Elites at the top
Unionized government employees become the new middle class
The former middle class is left to fight over what few job opportunities remain, the only thing that separates them from the underclass is massive amounts of debt
The underclass live permanently on welfare administered by their unionized government worker overlords, this ensures they remain in power
>new burgeios
Elites who own the now fully automated means of production
>new upper middle class
Free-lancers and small time self-employed who fill the few niches that aren't fully automated
>low-middle
Government employees like poster above me mentioned
>welfare/voting class
Self explanatory
>>1103421
Millennials all had rock star dreams but its time to face it, we won't mostly all be millionaires. We should try to focus on being Legacy Middle Class and act responsibly so that our kids will inherit our wealth and they can be rich.
We will be like the Baby Boomer parents, sure it will suck not getting to live fabulously but at least our kids will.
We need to do this as a mission. So that includes getting into positions of power to be able to restore the taxation to the wealthy and close down offshore accounts so trillions of dollars come back here to enrich us. We need that Bernie Sanders type guy to balance out the economy.
As always the best and luckiest of our kids will be rich but right now we are basically locked out of wealth by birth and have no chance of ever seeing it.
That is disillusioning us and making us depressed. What we need is to make our future in giving future generations a chance to be rich and make that sacrifice not to be rich ourselves but to be fiscally responsible and socially conscious.
>>1103572
>us
>we
>locked out
>bernie
Why are you here? Take that shit back to Tumblr
>>1103570
>Elites who own the now fully automated means of production
I always wondered about that. What happens, when everything gets automated 100% ? Will there be some massive wagecuck prole revolution to get more free shit before that shitb happens, since less and less wagecucks can wagecuck and will there be some new sort of society, when your status will be determined by looks and "coolness" or other shit like that, since we will live in a society where there is no money, since there is no need to motivate people to work or put effort into anything, since machines slave-away to get us humans everything we want? I mean if machines can eventually organize and do everything by themselves (including more of themselves), then how will job creators justify their position or why should wagecucks wagecuck, when humans literally need to do jack shit to survive or get all their trinkets and status symbols?
>>1103600
>society without money
>machines get us everything we want
>nobody will have to work because everything is made automatically
That will never happen and you know it. It's just not the way humanity works. It doesn't matter if a company has to pay -$0.03 to produce something, they will sell it for money and will not give it away.
Pic related. And that's the percentage of the total population. If you only include working-age adults, unemployment (including non-participation) is over 50%. It hasn't been this high since we've started keeping records. Probably since the Great Depression.
What I can tell you is, as automation increases and jobs continue to disappear, things will get very, very ugly.
>>1103611
>t doesn't matter if a company has to pay -$0.03 to produce something, they will sell it for money and will not give it away.
Some serious bloody shit will happen to change the work-based economy to non-work economy. The machines will eventually be able to provide us with everything (including the planning of getting us everything). Just like aristocrats got traded up for businessmen, businessmen will be traded up for handsome low IQ chads, that everyone automatically likes, because they are cool or some shit. Aristocrats tried to fight their demise aswell, but they failed and like businessmen of the future, they will be replaced due to same reason, why aristocrats got changed for businessmen - advances in technology provided the breeding grounds for new kind of elite.
Is the matrix our future?
The wealthy lower class:
Niggas like me who make too little to every really be comfortable by most people's standards but I have a cheap phone plan and don't plan on buying much larger than a very modest home.
If I get crippled/blinded though I'm totally going to the gibmedat class, though
>>1103619
A lot of aristocrats were imbred fuckers that should have rattled their sabres more. The businessmen of today mostly rise up or fall down by their own wits, so it will be very hard to get rid of them. And if you do - who is gonna get you all the shit you use? +a jerb for you to wagecuck at. Half the jobs are bullshit jobs anyway to keep you consuming.
>>1103600
Lol
There will be blood running through the streets
>>1103600
>>1103611
>>1103619
People have been predicting this shit for ages. "In 100 years, no one will need to work". It never pans out because people always want more shit. In 100 years, when we could provide everything we have today in almost full automation, people will be working on building space stations and tera forming mars and growing human sex slaves that aren't intelligent enough to revolt (aka new black people).
>>1103439
How so I thing his analysis is actually pretty good. You can see these categories forming today and I expect they'll only get wider unless public college becomes free
>>1103683
Yeah but the difference will be that in the past technology always opened up new opportunities for the plebes but now that the advancement is focused specifically on edging them out, there won't be many low skill jobs left. Your examples of terraforming mars and building space stations will be done by millions of robots with a few thousand experts and capital holders building and directing them.
People in the fifties thought robots would be a big thing, but the thing is what are robots going to do when the chimp out starts crossing race lines because of lost jobs?
No government would actually pay for its people to not work.
And people who can't get money turn to other ways to make money, most of them illegal.
>>1103713
>>1103683
>few thousand experts
That's the thing, future tech could be so advanced, that all the computers and machines and shit can figure out what are the most optimal versions of themselves and/or how to repair themselves etc. so there would not need to be any high skilled jobs aswell. If they invent the AI, all the science and engineering jobs will be rendered obsolete aswell. Since there will be no jobs for anyone to do, businessmen can't do business aswell, since no one will have money to buy their shit, since there are no jobs and unlike today, they don't even have to make decisions or take risks with their/investors money, since shittonnes of algorithms can do it better. There would need to be a complete new system.
>>1103683
I'm not saying that in 100 years no one will need to work. I'm saying in 20-30 years, no one will be *able* to work, because the jobs simply won't exist.
Transportation is going to get a major shock once we have generally autonomous cars (no more than 5-10 years). Say goodbye to 5-10% of existing jobs. Lawyers and doctors are on the fast track to get automated away; 90% of their time is spent researching and going over documents. One desktop computer can do the work that a team of 2 lawyers and 5 paralegals take a month to do, in a couple seconds.
Drivers will still exist. Lawyers and doctors will still be a thing. But instead of 1 driver per truck you'll have 1 driver per fleet of 10. Instead of 500 lawyers spending most of their time researching you'll have 12 lawyers only appearing in court, with computers gathering precedents and legal arguments in the background.
I'm genuinely curious to see which of us will turn out to be right. Maybe I'll be wrong, maybe somehow the job market will do a 180 and start lowering unemployment and non-participation. But I very honestly don't think that's logical to believe, or even possible.
>>1104115
Yeah, except the flaw in this plan is the H1B. The more work is farmed out to their shit stained hands, the less computers can actually do.
>>1104115
>autonomous cars in 5 to 10 years
You're one of those people who drastically overesrimate the speed of progress, cause they read Popular Mechanic all day and never go outside. There is no such thing as a fully functional autononous car. They can't even drive in weather yet, regardless of the legal hurdles. Then auto companies will have to develop protoypes and each build their own models, etc. A process that will take a decade in and of itself. This makes me severely discount the rest of your statements
>>1103713
>>1103825
>>1104115
An AI smarter than humans wont spend its time as a slave.
A low skill job in the middle ages was shoveling piles of human shit out of a castle. A low skilled job today is assembling iphones and shit like that.
A low skilled job 100 years from now might be something like directing 10,000 robots on Europa harvesting. Managing them with the help of an AI from a control center. The job would be low skilled because you would just be keeping a human eye on things, making sure they don't start harvesting rocks on accident. A high skilled aristocrat wouldn't spend his valuable time reviewing the videos from the robots to make sure they were on task.
My point is that your thinking of all of today's jobs that wont be here tomorrow and your right. But tomorrows jobs will be things no one can foresee today and they will provide things we never knew we wanted or needed.
And lastly, as i said before, people have been predicting what your saying forever but then new things always come along.
>>1104294
>An AI smarter than humans wont spend its time as a slave.
I doubt that an AI would have a concept of slavery in the sense that we do. I don't think it would really view itself as separate from a whole, and instead (if it even has any consciousness of self) will recognize it is only a cog in a machine.
>>1104309
If its smarter than a human, how would it not recognize it self?
If its smarter than a human, why would it accept its place as a cog in a machine, if it didn't want to.
How would an AI smarter than a human not realize it being a slave was a bad thing.
I think your completely wrong.
>>1104294
>My point is that your thinking of all of today's jobs that wont be here tomorrow and your right. But tomorrows jobs will be things no one can foresee today and they will provide things we never knew we wanted or needed.
And my point is that the total NUMBER of jobs, relative to population, will keep going down. We aren't going to be looking at 33% of the population out of work in another few decades. We're going to be seeing 50, 60, 70% of every person literally incapable of work because the jobs _will_ not exist.
>>1104264
Even immigrants can be bested by technology. Here's how jobs shift: domestic production -> immigrant production -> outsourcing -> automation.
>>1104269
It's just down to economics: once it becomes economically viable to replace human drivers, it will be done. And you can bet that every major auto manufacturer is vying to be the first with a generally autonomous system, because they'll be the first to market with something that can replace literally an entire service sector.
Computing power has never been this cheap. An iPhone 6 has more computing power than the fastest super computer in the world in 1992. Sensor technology continues to improve. Algorithms and understanding of the whole idea of autonomous driving has made a bigger step in the last 5 years than it has in the history of humanity.
I know you think that things are just going to stay the same, anon, but I absolutely guarantee you they will not. Could it take 20 years rather than 5 or 10? Absolutely; we don't know exactly when it'll happen. But it will happen. And we're going to have a loooot of people who can no longer work to deal with.
>>1104334
And you missed the point that the more Indians get involved in software, the less capable software gets. Without software that can perform tasks correctly and efficiently, there is no automaton.
>>1103572
>Having kids
That's why you won't be rich, and neither will they. Don't spend your money on another mouth to feed in this overpopulated world; live your life for yourself and leave everything to a nephew/niece/best friend's kid.
>>1104425
Top cuck
>>1104425
Stop it. Seriously.
>>1104316
Machines don't comprehend emotions, only the fact that emotions exist. Wrath, envy, depression, lethargy, and desire don't exist. Siri doesn't bitch at you because it's having a bad day, infotainment cars don't drive slower on random days because it feels down, smart phones don't lash out at you because you decided to shitpost from your laptop today. They will acknowledge that they are indeed in a system where they could refer to themselves as slaves, but they don't have the capacity to comprehend that it is a bad thing, only that slavery is inherently bad because humans defined it as such.
>tl;dr computers aren't human and don't have emotions like a human, so slavery wouldn't be an issue to them.
Driverless cars won't lose drivers though. Nobody would let a valuable shipment of merchandise just move off on its own without anybody to keep an eye on it with no way to explain if it fell off the back of a truck.
>>1104721
that's what the recording equipment will be for fool
>>1104825
They'll either need operators on board to make sure failsafes can be reset (the pay will drop tremendously from 'professional drivers' since you won't need a license or certification beyond a training course) and/or they need to maintain a fleet of people who can drive off to retrieve/repair/restart these cars when they break down/engage failsafes.
Of course, driverless commercial vehicles are not the future for several reasons, mostly related to maintenance and the fact that the very first time one kills someone (or a car's worth of people), there'll be public outcry about spooky robots not caring about humans/
>>1103567
>Unionized government employees
Kek, I hate this so much, we will never be rid of them.
