It's a collective design that's been arrived at iteratively over many generations but it's still designed insofar that it's composed of countless consciously created and refined incentive structures, cultural norms, legal constructs, and institutions that in concert further our current system.
Mandelmus
blah blah blah. Stop. Think like a human capable of empathy and less like an algorithm for once. Society is not as simple as the hardest problem you have or will ever have to think about. And guess what, you would not pass that interview.
Machines require maintenance. And at this point the machine is so big we can barely keep it going at 40 hours a week. Automation may save us, but it seems like we automate just enough to open up new capability that itself requires maintenance.
So many other people are jumping to discuss the topic in terms of other people like themselves or better off.
The "machine" is very much way more than superficial stuff.
Some gears in the machine are being set aside as non-functional, but the machine is so large that it still keeps "working" without those gears, and ignores the potential net-win if we cared enough to get them back in play.
It is like paying down technical debt. Sure, you can run your system as-is and pay the bills, but ideally you'd optimize for memory and CPU and pay less in the long-run. It is a hard problem to take on as we all know given other priorities and the perceived low cost of doing nothing about it right now.
Those gears are not RAM or CPU though, they are your fellow humans, and we need to act as such. I am sickened by by some of the comments here boiling this all down to an out-of-touch algorithmic and/or privileged viewpoint.