[nathanbedford]

50 years from now, it would not surprise me to see

Fifty years from now, it would surprise me to see anything but you are no doubt younger than I am and, anyway, I take your point.

We conservatives face the challenge of shaping an economy that somehow distributes wealth generated by robots to people who are no longer on the assembly line. Somehow the distribution must be made or the status will come in and seize the means of production. Somehow we have got to reward initiative, diligence, productivity and risk-taking in a situation in which those to succeed will perhaps largely succeed in doing it without others, that is with drones.

As technology becomes more sophisticated it will unquestionably spin off more jobs in new industries that we cannot even now conceive of but history shows us that there is always a lag time in such developments. One need only consider the Luddites in the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution to see how dislocations can occur. Those lag times are open season for leftists.

[rbg81]

As technology becomes more sophisticated it will unquestionably spin off more jobs in new industries that we cannot even now conceive of but history shows us that there is always a lag time in such developments.

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Will new job categories be created? Sure. But they will employ far fewer people and require skills that the vast majority of the population won’t have. Technologies like 3D printing are still young, but will also impact the workforce greatly. In short, 10-20% of doers will provide for the rest. A lot of people will have jobs that aren’t real jobs. Of course, at the low end, you will always want people who are caregivers, servers, etc. [I don’t think people will like to be served or taught by robots, but I could be wrong]. Even now, many “knowledge” workers are being replaced. Anything that can be boiled down to a set of rules, even a complex set, is a candidate for replacement. Jobs that require knowledge and complex movements (plumbers, electricians) are safe.