October 29, 2025
Retire at 18 or pay rent forever?
Life After Work
Robots take the jobs, who gets paid? Internet splits: retire at 18 or rent forever
TLDR: The piece argues full automation could crash wages but boost living standards through investment and social support. Commenters clash: some cheer “retire at 18,” others warn land and AI owners will hoard the gains—and one asks if the robots should get the paycheck, not us.
The article promises a sci‑fi future: machines do all the work, wages collapse, but life gets cushier thanks to investment income and government support—just like automation once ended child labor. Cue the comments lighting up like a fuse. The loudest skeptics say online utopia talk is a coping mechanism while real life feels pricier and bleaker. As one vibe goes: people can “afford less,” so why should they trust a tomorrow where “trillions of digital workers” make it all better?
Then comes the fight over who gets paid. One commenter fires the big question: if bots do the jobs, why would their earnings go to humans and not the bots—or their owners? That’s where the culture war spills in. An early zinger mocks the piece as for “e/acc” diehards—short for effective accelerationism, a crowd that wants to push tech faster—while others dunk on a Qatar comparison about citizen-only benefits and ask if our future welfare depends on who holds the keys to the robots.
The optimists bring confetti: a tenfold GDP boom, fixing Social Security, and even retiring at 18. The cynics clap back with land-and-capital math: when labor is worthless, landlords and owners win. Meme watch: “trillions of interns,” “CEO of Roomba,” and a new genre—AI labor rights fanfic.
Key Points
- •Economic theory suggests full automation could collapse wages to below subsistence levels.
- •Authors argue living standards may still rise through investment income, property rents, and government transfers.
- •Historical mechanization reduced child labor by increasing productivity and wealth (e.g., reapers, plows, combine harvesters).
- •Industrial automation (assembly lines, electric motors, power looms) enabled abundant goods and shifted social norms toward schooling.
- •Public social spending has risen from single-digit GDP shares to roughly 15–35% in developed nations over the last century.