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A welfare state is not a post-employment/automated society. In a welfare state as you describe, productive people are doing productive work and the rest are taking advantage of their production to avoid doing so. But all the necessary productive work is being done and ultimately being done by people (even if they use machines as force-multipliers to do it). This is different in kind from an automated society where the productive work is done without the people.
The question is who exactly are the "productive people" keeping all of us afloat.
How many people performing some activity for money are really necessary for society to function, and how many of them are just UBI in the most wastefully imaginable form?
Is this popular meme right?
Is Nicolas really the Atlas holding up the world by typing on his laptop all day?
If so, then utopia is really there. AI can do whatever Nicolas does faster and better, and Nicolas can be hanging on the beach with his friends.
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It's an interesting question, but not relevant to the difference between a welfare state and a post-employment/automated society. All that matters is that category exists. And it does. At a very basic level, someone driving a tractor, operating mining equipment, or working on an assembly line making (e.g.) ovens, is doing useful work. From this flows more; there's some level of supervision necessary for that. There's some level of accounting needed. People have to build and repair on the machinery used. We need people to see to the health of the people doing all that. There's transport needed to get this stuff around. Etcetera. And each of those things themselves need some sort of support, and you can follow it out until a very large number of people who are many levels disconnected from the traditional "agriculture, mining, and manufacturing" are in fact doing productive work. We may suspect there's also a large number of people doing bullshit work (certainly I suspect that), but we know there's a lot of non-bullshit work being done by humans. In a post-employment/automated society there is not.
As for the meme, I have no idea what it's trying to express. If AI takes over one job category, and the people who do it go hang on the beach with their friends, we don't have a post-automated society, we just have more leeches. If AI takes over everything, that's another story.
That the "social contract" is the system by which the average frenchman subsidizes Africa, Africans coming to his land, boomers travelling the world and, and this is the amusing absurd addition, certifiably insane right wing degenerates like Varg. It's a common French complaint about taxation and rent seeking which are staples of French society.
The underlying impetus behind this is a truth that is conspicuously absent from the french debate on pensions, which is that as it stands the working man lives a worse life than a pensioner, and has no hope of ever living the life pensioneers are living today.
@Eetan is criticizing this view because the average white collar Frenchman is doing make work for his money and AI can also send emails around to make things happen, maybe.
In your words, the meme is saying boomers and foreigners are leeches, and the question is whether the people that work aren't already leeches also.
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