It's already paid work for some fraction of forward thinking people - a friend has three income-generating houses, the first of which was financed by virtual coal trading in RuneScape in the early 00's.
What bank will finance the mortgage on his incoming generating properties via 30 year mortgages when almost everyone is unemployed? Does the existing massively overgrown and under automated FIRE sector downscale to only 1% of the population having all the income and wealth? If it doesn't downscale, perhaps it doesn't operate at all, then how will he finance his real estate purchases via loans? He will have to pay cash and instead of 1/3 down on each income generating property he'll have to pay 100% for one property. Or prices will have to collapse by a minimum of 2/3 to clear the market.
His properties are not income generating if the renters have no income. The purpose of the discussion is what do we do when essentially no one has income or net wealth anymore? The phrase incoming generating property means nothing if there's no rent to collect because no one has jobs or income or wealth anymore.
Someone without power today can trust the courts and cops to protect his three properties because "everyone owns property or at least half of us or so". How does that break down when no one has any money? If there's only one landlord in the city who owns almost all property and he asks the cops to lean on him to sell his three houses, or squatters take over and there's no government support, because private property as we know it today is obsolete when no one owns anything, what does he do?
Assuming the above is somehow fixed, lets see if its sustainable via replication. How do you get money from trading runescape coal in 2040 if no one playing games has any money? My kids have no money because they're little kids. Assuming they continue to have no money, how many games of tic tac toe do they need to play to afford three houses each if the net profit off each game played is $0 because no one playing has any money to lose?
The future being unevenly distributed, being a slumlord today in Detroit is kinda like being a suburban landlord in 2030 perhaps, or an urbanite landlord in 2040, assuming you believe in new urbanism which is very popular here. The 50th percentile landlord will impact reality like a bug hitting a windshield long before the 90%th percentile landlord, which is a whole nother topic. Eventually only the top 1% of landlords will be in on the game much like only 1% of the population will have old fashioned jobs or participate in the old fashioned economy via pay and wealth, which brings us back to the original macroeconomic problem. Surely you can't be implying that 99 landlords will rent their 297 houses to the one guy who still has an old fashioned job?
(Forced) unemployment won't go over 20% so your question is based on a false premise.
But regardless, rent-seeking can't support the economy. People won't be "employed" as landlords, they'll be employed as property managers. There could easily be a billion property managers added to the global economy. Just imagine everyone starts expecting their homes to be professionally taken care of, every window frame refinished, every outdoor space professionally managed as a farm or native ecology. We could literally employ the entire human race doing only that work.
Because the details of property management are different in every culture, and every neighborhood, and those details are based in vague cultural norms, AIs will never be able to do the long tail. A robot could manage the 50% default "I don't care what my house looks like so long as it's nice-ish" market, but not the other half, "I want home to feel like home" market.
> the first of which was financed by virtual coal trading in RuneScape in the early 00's.
Sure, but this is not work that is useful or necessary to society. It is only possible for some people to get rich by skimming off the top of useless activity given that other people are producing food, electricity, maintaining infrastructure, providing healthcare etc.
Many Samsung buildings in Seoul are simply regular apartments - Samsung and other chaebols (family-controlled megaconglomerates) have divisions in many more sectors of the domestic economy than one sees in the rest of the world. In particular, in South Korea Samsung manufactures a large portion of the country's automobiles, and developed and owns much of the residential real estate.
Many Samsung buildings in Suwon, Samsung's HQ town slightly south of Seoul, are still company dorms. I went there for 10 days and it scared the hell out of me.
