[HiTech RedNeck]

Kudos though to Big Robotry. Ever since the combine, men have been engineering better and better ways to automate harvests. People will still be needed to run and service the machines, though. It will never be a people-free industry. Nature is too gnarly for that.

[Rodamala]

Nature is too gnarly for that.

Soylent Green production will be entirely automated.

[The_Reader_David]

Quite right, at least for a while -- eventually machines will fix other machines. The problems which society will need to solve created by increasingly sophisticated mechanization are two-fold, first eventually machines will be able to do a better job at task that can reliably (and enjoyably) done by people of average intelligence or below, and gradually the intelligence threshold needed to do jobs requiring a human being to accomplish will push upward, second the number of people needed to do any human-requiring job will decrease (e.g. we might really only need one lecturer on general relativity to teach all the graduate level courses on the subject).

We on the right had better figure out how to manage the transition to a society in which there are very few jobs and great abundance, because the left already has an idea, and it looks an awful lot like the worst aspects of Brave New World, 1984, and The Hunger Games all rolled into one.