“In the year 2525...”
>>Vardi poses an equally scary question: Are we prepared for an economy in which 50 percent of people arent working?<<
That would be called “the obama economy.”
Skynet??
The Matrix??
If we are so dependent on machines that nobody knows how they work, that would be a critical point where Man would be obsolete.
I remember them predicting that computers would eliminate paper and we would become a paperless society. Hasn’t happened. I think we use more paper now than before computers.
Well, we can always become government “workers.”
Roll in the socialist workers utopia.
We all get paid equally via the government printing press.
We would probably be fighting the androids.
Sure we will...fixing robots and computers.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote a prophetic book in 1952 called “Player Piano” that addressed many of these issues. While he got some of the technology specifics wrong (e.g., use of vacuum tubes), he got right that most jobs would be eliminated due to automation. There were basically two classes of people: a relatively small group of manager & engineers and citizens. A small sliver of citizens did jobs that could not be automated (like barbers), but the vast majority either joined the military or worked in the “Reeks and Wrecks” (e.g., roadwork), Almost all citizens got a standard package that included housing, food, and healthcare, but little $$ for vices. In contrast, the managers and engineers lived like the 1%.
Funny that Kurt never addressed what became of lawyers....
Yep. Whine and complain.
Hopefully more people will take up Bridge.
Just wait till you can get a totally artificial, interactive, yet realistic porn experience injected right into your neurons. When that happens, look out. Civilization may not survive it.
A normal society has 3/4 of the adults working at or around home ~ whatever that entails, and 100% of the children engaged in serious learning.
A normal society isn't what we've been living in since the Medieval Warm Period.
maintenance of robots.
Fact: Robots and automated machinery will replace human labor at an ever increasing rate.
Question: What should we do?
Answer: Learn how to design robots and automated machinery.
And there are a lot of other answers, very few of which start with an education in Women's Studies.
Thanks to the steam engine and the McCormick Reaper none of us work now!
Well, a few people are still needed for the buggy industry.
Goodness if the buggy industry wan’t needed there would truly be no reason for anyone to work.
Also, people will give up eating food and consume flavorless soy pellets instead of choking down a nasty plate of slow-roasted barbecue.
Here is a more uncomfortable question, but it will get asked. If society can function without input from the bottom 50%, why do they need to be here?
The left may split as Margret Sanger's real social darwinism aims come back to the forefront.
"Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good is extreme cruelty. It is a deliberate storing up of miseries for future generations. There is no greater curse to prosperity than that of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles."
"Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents. My criticism, therefore, is not directed at the failure of philanthropy, but rather at its success. p. 38." - From Margret Sanger's Pivot of Civilization
"Choice" was a gimmick in th 1970s to get the foot in the door. But the left, as we know, is always about force. I can see the left splitting over this issue, because on the one hand, the unemployed will keep voting them into power. Yet the Al Gore wing of the party will increasingly not support a population that does nothing but consume scarce resources and burns carbon. And the immigration wing will be finding it ever harder to fight for immigration when our collective consciousness will soon have digested the thought of a generation or more of high unemployment.
On an optimistic note...humans have all the talent they need to rise to that occasion. On a less than optimistic note, the unmotivated ones will die as they should (Darwin Award winners).
Sink or swim.
Reality is non-revocable...it cannot be banned...it cannot be avoided or circumvented.
Maybe they will just kill the non-worker.