&gt;increased pressure for automation<p>I doubt this. There&#x27;s plenty of pressure for automation now, and I don&#x27;t see wages increasing as being the final straw to accelerate automation research.<p>The argument I&#x27;ve seen elsewhere is the other way around: that once we develop better automation, the demand for labor will drop enough that BI will be feasible. But until we reach that stage, I&#x27;m not convinced that BI will be sustainable.<p>&gt;Another possibility appears if we consider the following model, which may or may not be related to reality:<p>I expect the group of workers that have negative marginal productivity (or, less marginal productivity than their salary) is chiefly those people that are good at fooling the system into thinking they&#x27;re productive, and not necessarily intersecting heavily with the group of people that would leave under BI. But this is very low confidence.<p>&gt; I can&#x27;t speak for the parent; I would weakly guess that their response would be that they never specified that they were talking about &quot;traditional measures of production&quot; but were specifically objecting to traditional measures. If that&#x27;s the case, they should have done so more clearly at the outset.<p>If that&#x27;s what they mean, then I&#x27;d ask specifically about food and other essentials. How would those be guaranteed production? How much would the cost of those go up in response to higher wages, and how do you protect against  a vicious cycle of &quot;inflation-&gt;BI increases-&gt; higher wage demand-&gt;inflation&quot;?<p>And if they think that production of those won&#x27;t go down, then which people are doing &quot;art&quot;? Who&#x27;s doing their current job, etc?