Jobless Economy

[abumbyanyothername]

I have a friend with a horse in the race. He's a computer science/programming professor. He claims that within 20 years virtually every job that currently exists will be sourced . . . not to China or India, but to robots.

Please assume for purposes of discussion that this possible/true.

What, if anything, should be done about our economic fruits distribution system when the same standard of living that we enjoy today can be produced with <10% of the human labor currently required to produce it? What does that mean for our "work to eat" mentality/society?

[NMDemDist2]

1. there was a link last week sometime to a online novel with that premise

it was actually quite good

damned if i can remember the name tho.....

[gkhouston]

2. There will have to be some sort of societal shift in our attitudes towards labor.

And it probably won't be pretty.

[WinkyDink]

3. Your friend is greatly mistaken.

[progressivebydesign]

4. Your friend is dreaming... n/t

[BarackTheVote]

5. I work in the arts

Painters thought photography would make them obsolete. Novelists thought movies would put them under. There will always be a niche.

[JaneyVee]

6. Capitalism eats itself.

[Grateful for Hope]

7. There is a little thing called 'customer service'

that kind of guarantees that this won't happen. Most people, imo, prefer to talk to a real person when it comes to complaints about products etc..

Also, I work as a programming developer in a financial environment. One of the hallmarks of development is that a project is never straightforward. It is always iterative, and I can't even imagine using a robot to get to the nuance of a project.

Finally, even McDonalds and other fast food places would need to have those robots programmed to anticipate every single complaint, every single out-of-the-ordinary order, in order to maintain customer satisfaction.

They can try, but they won't succeed.

[abumbyanyothername]

8. Regardless . . .

I was hoping for a discussion of political economy, not programming and technology or market preferences.

[Grateful for Hope]

15. When you speak of robots taking over jobs

you are speaking about those jobs be they programming, etc. This is not a purely political problem.

[Nikia]

9. Everyone that is capable should be a scientist or engineer

Working on important things like medicine, agriculture in the face of climate change, clean energy, space exploration, etc. Humans are much more innovative.
As someone else mentioned, customer service is another area will employ humans.

[Edweird]

10. Why are you friends with an idiot?

[Honeycombe8]

12. Robots can't think, so those jobs will not be involved. Who will manufacture & service the robots?

That's a lot of robots to design, build, distribute, and maintain. They will have complex computers in them, so computer programmers and designers will have even MORE jobs.

The world has gone through major technological revolutions before. It is painful. Things change. Jobs disappear, and new ones appear.

The "robots" we have now are called computers. They decreased secretarial and other jobs, but brought with it a whole new set of jobs.

[TreasonousBastard]

13. A fair amount of bad science fiction has this premise...

and it usually ends up either with the robots owning the humans or the humans becoming awesome spiritual beings.

Sometimes, the humans wipe themselves out and the robots go on evolving, becoming a new life form-- that's what I suspect would happen. Small pockets of humanity coexisting with or hiding from the machinery.

However, the question is-- what do we do with billions of employable people when there is little work for them. It's a problem we have faced in the past, and face now, but not in the numbers possible in this strange future. Look at some countries around the world now with the small armies of unemployed men in their 20's and try to guess their futures... That could be the world's future if this automated dream comes true.

[abumbyanyothername]

14. Maybe I should have framed the OP differently

What I am driving at is . . . are human beings valuable or to be valued only insofar as they can work and produce?

Or to borrow a very misused phrase from the other side do we value human life for life's sake? Are human beings to be valued even when we no longer have any work for them to do?