“The crucial problem isn’t creating new jobs. The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms. Consequently, by 2050 a new class of people might emerge – the useless class. People who are not just unemployed, but unemployable.”

From:

The meaning of life in a world without work

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/08/virtual-reality-religion-robots-sapiens-book

Article written by Yuval Noah Harari

Yaval in his article appears to assume that employment is based on an economic criteria whereby people get paid for the work that they do. that the owners of business, where there is a profit motive profit motive, will employ an algorithm to perform work rather than a human. it ignores unpaid work. although, he does go on to examine, as the article title implies, meaning, where there is no work.

although generally accepted, employment and work does not necessarily involve payment. throughout history the most important jobs are not paid jobs, such as life creation and child rearing.

What Yaval appears to be actually saying is that at some point in the future certain people will not be able to be paid for what they do. if enough people end up in that category, the concept of trade could possibly fail, simply because there won't be enough people receiving payment for their labour to be able to purchase the items that have been made by the people that use the algorithms to make thing. hence his reference to universal basic income.

everybody does something. it's just that because of the economic system (a human invented concept) that we have, only some of the things we do, we actually get paid (as in money, another human invented concept), for.

when I think about it, most of things we do, we don't get paid for. most of our time, is unpaid time. especially so when you consider that below a working age children don't get paid and after retirement retirees don't get paid. in Australia the average paid worker only gets paid for 11% of ther lifetime.

The Wikipedia article on employment depicts a relationship between two parties. below I take a different meaning and consider employment as doing anything, even sleeping. considering that a person can employ themself, self employed, I don't see a need for two parties.

the average Australian paid worker is employed without payment for 89% of ther lifetime.

by far the vast majority of ther life time.

the average Australian who has never been in payed employment is without payment for 100% of ther lifetime. that's not a lot of difference between them.

based on those figures it would appear to be pretty easy to even things up. of course there are many other issues involved. however most of them are conceptual, not physical.

even the traditional unemployed cannot be classified as a useless class, because they are useful, even in economic terms, in being consumers. even the right side of politics recognises this. some might classify them as undesirable but they are definitely not useless. they are employed as consumers.