Kantor said:
I, for one, will welcome our robotic overlords. To be serious, though, we are already seeing a trend towards service economies in the developed world; more and more jobs require college degrees and other advanced training. Factory jobs and farming will of course be the first to go to automation. They are already there, for the most part. The real problem arises when the robots gain the ability to think independently and can conceivably work as doctors, lawyers, teachers and researchers. That will be one of the great challenges we face in the future, but I don't see how a larger government would help with that at all. |
The challenge of a service economy is that there are plenty of people who aren't able to gain the skills necessary for such work, and in many cases (at least around here), gaining the skills for such work can be an outright pain in the ass if you don't have the money or connections to do so. Furthermore, society only needs so many doctors, lawyers, and so on. Even now, the lawyer market is quite oversaturated, from what I understand, and nursing has quickly become one of the most popular areas of study in college, so I can't see there being much room left in that field for long. Then there's budget cuts that are leading to teacher lay-offs in many states here in the U.S.
As for the role of government, they'd be crucial in ensuring that the owners of production are making sure everyone gets some - at least enough to live reasonably. At that point I'd probably recommending the nationalization of most production, thus ownership transitiong to the general populace.
It seems silly to me that we could conceivably reach a point where on the whole we are richer than ever, practically reaching post scarcity, but a majority of the population will be dirt poor simply because they are unneeded by the capitalists.
