And if the congregation has no jobs and no money for the collection plate, how will your pastor live?
Your son the doctor might still have a job, but might not be paid all that much, again because it will probably be the state who pays him because being out of work, most people will be on the dole.
And anyway, some in the medical profession are already having their services replaced by robots.
The first to go will be dental hygienists, the demise of which profession is already showing up on endangered profession lists.
Actually its my daughter training to be a doctor. And I think they will both live just fine, even if we end up back at a barter society, which I doubt.
Cleaning teeth is a lot harder than picking strawberries. And picking strawberries is hard enough for robots that it makes news when they do it.
I suspect, if dental hygienists are in danger of unemployment, it's not robotics, but rather advances in medicine that make dental hygiene optional (ick!).
I agree with Age of Reason. Times are changing and there will be a different landscape in tomorrow’s economy. I have a friend just finishing seminary and he said they were admonished to cross train in another field to support themselves as pastors. I agree with this for many reasons but it is going to be increasingly difficult to be a Bible believing pastor in the American tradition of the last hundred years and make a living from your ministerial duties (sounds incongruous, doesn’t it?. I believe this is a step in the right direction, again, for many reasons. Most pastoral duties should really be the province of the flock doing their jobs. Also, if a church leader is in the world as his flock, his perspective is far different from one in a cloister delivering weekly homilies.
The MD, too, will be far different in the future. I have a kinsman about to retire from practice and his view is that about 20% of medicine today (his field) is actual practice. The rest is hoop jumping and compliance to someone’s regulations and directives (Re: the gub’mint).
I’m convinced that the future will not hold a return to the Reagan years or prosperity. From here on out it is going to be a bumpy ride and the old prescriptions will be something of a fool’s paradise. Ask yourself this, if you were living on the leading edge of a post-Chrisitian socialist era or governance in a world of unstable interconnections and terror threats, what would you do differently than what you have done in the past?
The first to go will be dental hygienists, the demise of which profession is already showing up on endangered profession lists.
_______________
Why dental hygienists? I don’t see robots filling that role.