RE: What are these people going to do with their lives?
Learn to make and program Robots I guess... until the Robots learn to make and program other Robots...
The Robots will be working and living and having romances while we humans are fat and floating around on our hover beds drinking cupcakes-in-a-cup like in the movie, Wall-E.
That’s the standard response.
Unfortunately, the majority of the human race just isn’t smart enough to function effectively in a high-tech environment.
Up to perhaps 250 years ago, the primary demand for human labor was for muscle power. Galley rowers, serfs, slaves, etc. For a lot of these “jobs” even fairly severely retarded people would work just fine.
Starting with the industrial revolution, increasing numbers of jobs required some degree of intelligence in addition to muscle power. This was fine, as most people’s intelligence was underused anyway.
Increasingly in recent decades, muscle power is irrelevant. More and more intelligence is needed for the jobs that are truly in demand.
People dodge this issue by claiming that the problem just means we need more education.
But native intelligence puts an upper limit on the extent to which a person is capable of being educated.
The other issue is that fewer and fewer people are needed in raw numbers. In 1950 GM was probably the most valuable company on the planet. Directly and indirectly it employed hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of people.
Today Apple and Google are probably two of the most valuable companies. They employ, by comparison, very few people, especially Google.
A great deal of wealth is being produced by very few people. Extrapolate this trend a few decades and you have immense wealth being generated by even fewer people.
What is everybody else going to do?