>Silver halide won't be the first technology to disappear. Who makes buggy whips today? Phonograph records? Slide rules? Dislocations happen every day. Freedom and self-interest solve the problem.<
Dislocations happen daily, but the destruction of manufacturing is something different.
One more time: what becomes of the kind of people who fit into manufacturing operations, but who have NO aptitude to become much more, mostly because they lack the inherent intelligence?
It's well and good to talk about dislocations and self interest fixing everything, but if you have ever worked in a manufacturing environment, you know perfectly well that there are a lot of guys suited to an assembly line or a plant who will never be able to morph into something more intellectually demanding. Many of them are perfectly decent, hardworking people; I knew one guy well into his 50s who worked 12 hour shifts week after week with all the additional time he could scrounge to put a daughter through college--but he was not qualified to do much else. 50 years ago these people were the core of the middle class. "Service jobs" do not financially compensate the way manufacturing jobs do, even non-union manufacturing jobs.
Few buggy whips are manufactured here today, but truth be told, not much of anything else is, either. Processed foods, scientific instrumentation with the nameplates of "US" companies on them, personal care items such shampoo, are increasingly coming from somewhere else.
I think that it will not be very pretty in the short term.
In the long term, it may be that the world's productivity will soar to the point that nobody goes unfed, unclothed, or uncared-for medically.
This unintelligent 50-year-old you are describing is going to have a standard of living which is lower than a more intelligent and productive Indian or Chinese, assuming that India and China continue on the road of capitalism and freedom.
If the Chinese Communist Party attempts to maintain their power, this will act as an impediment to eventual Chinese productivity. Chinese standards of living will rise but will stop rising at somewhere less than the US has now. But the difference will not permit the US to subsidize their less productive people. They will be stuck with working very hard to make very little.
These are predictions I am making. It is not that I want this to happen. It is just the inevitable outcome of economic freedom on a global scale. Americans have had the luxury of subsidizing unproductive people for generations now. It will be sobering for them to realize that they no longer have the wealth to do so.
Tell me what YOU think is going to happen to such people as you have described. Such people expect to live better than Chinese or Indian people who are more productive. How can it be accomplished? I don't know of a way.