[Born to Conserve]

It’s already here. Has been for a long time. The first robots and automation have displaced the underclass — they can’t hope to get a job. The lowest working classes are about to be displaced in large numbers with ordering kiosks and automated food prep. Students and the elderly are goners. I think the breakeven is somewhere around $15/hr now. It will go up. If you make less than $25/hr, you’ve got about five years. Ten years from now, most long haul truckers will be robotic. Traffic cops are also on the extinction list — cars will have self reporting, on board supervision. It will keep getting worse until the first computer designed computers are produced, then skynet will be self aware. That will be about 2035.

[GeronL]

and nobody will have a job

[Nowhere Man]

I think by that time where no one will have a job, there will be a move to provide everyone with a living wage just by being alive where it will be enough to get a basic house/apartment, car, etc., and have enough change to go out to dinner every so often much like Star Trek, The Next Generation. It's either that or as a society, there will be pressure against the use of robots, even to the point to where they could be outlawed for jobs a human can do with the exception of hazzardous jobs like inspecting the inside of atomic reactors and so forth. I'd favor the latter, idle hands are the Devil's workshop.

I think there is a side of me where this will be moot, between the proliferation of cellphones, the internet and now these robots, we are building a modern day Tower of Babel where if there are hits take on a few key parts of the whole thing such as from an atomic war, natural disaster on a near global scale or just plain bum luck, the whole thing will come crashing down and we will be thrown back to something resembling a mix between the late 1800's to about 1950 or so. As much of a geek as I am, there is a side of me that welcomes that, we are becoming too dependent on that stuff and I think we are seeing a ruination of society accelerate. My late mother said "we are not ready for all of this technical stuff" and I think she is right. If God came down and offered me a button to stop cellphones and the internet and return us to a world resembling the 1950's to 1980's, I would do it.

[Ramius]

So we should have people in certain simple repetitive jobs merely in order to keep an underclass employed? There’s no chance that there might be something else they can do?