[Julian]

Yes, indeedy. The World is still reliant on labour, skilled workers are part of a service economy which is managed anmd controlled by mulltinational corporations and all workers are subject to pressures on wages. A socialist economy will involve some skilled workers providing labour and being supported in the lives by the Community.


edited for clarity

[Lagrange]

In the modern world, that capital isn't necessarily machinery, but could instead be something as simple as patents, copyrights, or trademarks-intellectual property, not factory tools.

This is an important point -- but you have to remember that intellectual property is a legal artefact. Engineers would continue to create without a patent system.

In the event that the worker were made completely irrelevant, as you describe, we would have already transitioned to a post-scarcity economy, and questions like "how can socialism work?" would be quite meaningless as the answer would be practically self-evident.

I'm not so sure about that. In the scenario I spelled out (and that I find far more likely than true post-scarcity), you still need a class of skilled engineers to create software or design products. This isn't a singularity scenario.

People think that jobs with high skill requirements will always protect them from the alienation of capitalism, but that remains true only so long as the job remains a "highly skilled position" and technology has a habit of reducing the skill requirements to fill a position. Even through means that might have seemed fantastic just a few decades before.

I'm operating under the assumption that singularity is very far off and that we will always need engineers. Technological advance would only serve to make this class smaller and wealthier.

Even if capitalists were not made redundant in this scenario, it is easy to imagine how the engineers could operate without them. Capital investments necessary are negligible (if intellectual property is abolished).

[Someone5]

This is an important point -- but you have to remember that intellectual property is a legal artefact. Engineers would continue to create without a patent system.

Yes they would, but for reasons I will discuss in the second section. As for intellectual property, that is not a "legal artifact", it is a collection of law that was intentionally designed to allow capitalism to persist into a technological economy. It is a way for capitalists to retain ownership of the product of skilled intellectual workers. It's not going to go anywhere so long as capitalists remain in control of the means of production--for intellectual workers, that intellectual property is the means by which their output is controlled. It's not some archaic legal artifact of the past--it is more necessary for capitalists today then it ever was a century ago.

I'm not so sure about that. In the scenario I spelled out (and that I find far more likely than true post-scarcity), you still need a class of skilled engineers to create software or design products. This isn't a singularity scenario.

I'm not talking about a singularity. Post-scarcity is not the same thing at all. While a theoretical technological singularity might result in the creation of a post-scarcity economy, it's hardly the only way to get there or even a requirement for doing so. Simply put, a post-scarcity economy is an economy where the large majority of people are no longer required to work in order for the economy to function at a level that the participants find generally acceptable. One way for that to be achieved might be to have extensive robotics and complete AI direction of industry... but another way to do that is to use technology to assist human productive output to a degree that just a handful of people can do the work of hundreds or thousands. If only, say, 10% of the population actually needed to show up to work, then almost certainly those positions could be filled entirely by people who want to do it because they find it interesting--not because they find it necessary to pay their bills.

This is not actually the case. While I do believe that we're at a point technologically where we could build such an economy, that's a far cry from insisting that it will eventually be built, or that such a transition is imminent. Our institutions and population are far too attached to archaic forms of capitalism to strive for such an economy--changing those structures would be a very severe change to the prevailing culture.

I'm operating under the assumption that singularity is very far off

So am I. This doesn't require a technological singularity at all. Expert systems aren't that unusual these days. This is already where a lot of fields--like, say, finance and medicine--are going. Suggesting that similar expert systems might develop sufficiently to radically reduce the number of engineers and programmers a society needs to meet its demand for new products (which IS limited) is not really that radical. That doesn't even require genuine strong AIs.

To provide a theoretical example, consider the impacts of an expert system/IDE that starts filling most of the traditional roles of software engineers in group management, or one that genuinely does a good job of testing software for bugs that meet certain criteria. Far fewer programmers--and certainly fewer software engineers--would be needed if such a product were commonplace. These roles would not be eliminated--because at some level a group of people are going to insist on people communicating--but one person could do what once might have required a few people. That sort of slow transition can reach a point where you have an extremely small number of people doing work that once would have required dozens of people. This seems fantastic and hard to imagine, but similarly revolutionary software packages have arrived for other fields.

and that we will always need engineers.

We still have skilled weavers too, they just aren't the cornerstone of the textile industry and there aren't nearly so many. There will probably always be some level of demand for engineers... but it is not hard to imagine a situation where there are way more people wanting to be engineers than there are positions for engineers. Because ultimately engineering positions are created according to the needs of capitalists--and in the modern world, the needs of finance capitalists specifically.

This is kind of the essential nature of structural unemployment, and there is no real reason to assume that engineering is a field that is inherently immune to it.

Technological advance would only serve to make this class smaller and wealthier.

Smaller I'll buy, but I don't buy that it would make them wealthier on the whole. I mean, let's just ignore the theoretical futurism here, just plain old economics can explain why that would be so. If the only jobs available are for programmers and engineers, then there will be a glut of engineers and programmers coming out of universities. Demand for engineering positions wouldn't even remotely come close to meeting the supply, if there really were only jobs available for engineers.

Even if capitalists were not made redundant in this scenario, it is easy to imagine how the engineers could operate without them.

An engineer without capital can do almost nothing.

Capital investments necessary are negligible (if intellectual property is abolished).

You might as well say "if capitalism were abolished, no worker would be alienated." What on earth makes you think capitalists would abolish their own system?