Human (Western?) societies are sprawling fields of assembling/distributing machines (businesses) coupled to hierarchies of regulatory machines (governments), all floating in a heat-bath of humans.
The dynamics of these machines are interesting, but they are not what I will focus on now.
I want to outline my most basic train of thought regarding a prescriptive politics.
I acknowledge that anything I say could easily be wrong, I just consider this a reasonable-seeming line of intuition.
Our society is capitalistic, in a certain sense, and I think it's going to stay that way (the "in a certain sense" is doing a lot of work here, arguably).
The revolution is not coming to save you, sorry, I just don't buy it.
And even if it did come, I suspect things would get much much worse before they got slightly better, if even that.
So I will be ignoring this possibility.
Capitalism will die, I imagine, but it will either be a slow starvation, or a supernova phase-transition, and either way, it will probably take you and me with it.
Our goal is to keep ourselves comfy in the meantime.
The 2 capitalist problems that stick out to me are centralization and automation, I will focus on the latter for now.
Humans work jobs to get paid so they can survive.
Capitalist systems seek the most "efficient" way to complete their jobs.
(The definition of "efficiency" and what exactly "their job" entails may not be what you assume.
I'm waving my hands a bit, something something autopoiesis.)
Over time, this may (it empirically does, I think) increasingly involve automation, which (definitionally) removes the humans from the process.
These displaced humans now have no job, so they don't get paid, so it becomes harder for them to survive.
But we like humans, and we want them to survive, so we should probably do something about this.
To me, the most obvious "root" of this problem is that first part, the fact that humans need to get paid to survive.
The economic system is much bigger and stronger than humans, and its values tend to supercede ours.
(I'm taking for granted that the economy can be coherently said to have values. I think it can, but it isn't trivial.)
Humans intrinsically value the lives of humans, but the economy (roughly speaking) only values profit, so humans are only allowed to survive insofar as their ability to generate profit.
So... what do?
Well, I personally can't do much of anything, really.
But, just for a moment, let's play the politics game, and arrogantly pretend we are the gods of the government, with total control over how its laws are handled.
Safely within the confines of this delusion, we ask again: What do?
Our goal, if possible, should be to align the larger system's values with our own.
In this case, that means making humans intrinsically economically valuable, most straightforwardly accomplished through some flavor of Universal Basic Income (UBI).
The obviously ideal end-result of automation is that all the hard work gets automated away, leaving us free to do whatever we want.
The fact that jobs being automated away is a bad thing seems very silly, and it's a result of this misalignment between economic and human value, I think.
UBI seems capable of partially solving this problem.
I like UBI.
It sounds nice.
Many claim that life without a job sucks, because "you have no purpose".
First off, UBI doesn't stop you from getting a job, it just takes away the punishment of starvation for not working.
Second, this argument suffers from extreme capitalist brainrot.
These people are conceptualizing their life as a back-and-forth of "work" and "leisure", and assuming that having no job means their life would be 100% leisure.
Yes, humans need work, and a life of pure leisure would suck.
But not having a job doesn't mean you can't work!
All it means is that you are free to work on whatever satisfies you, rather than being forced to work on something that generates profit.
The fact that people actually make this "no purpose" argument is really interesting.
Humans are embedded within a larger system with its own values, and the larger system's values will win against ours ten times out of ten.
The Marxist strategy is to kill the larger system, and build a new one out of its corpse (no easy task).
The UBI strategy is to modify that system's values to align them with ours.
Capitalists take the opposite approach, willingly or otherwise, modifying their own values to align with the larger system's.
This is apparently a common phenomenon, sometimes called "value capture".
It is literal capitalist mind control, it's crazy.
Basically, I just want everyone to become NEETs who put all their energy into passion projects while the robots do all the slave labour.
I don't know if this will happen, but it seems like an obvious optimistic future.