[Predarat]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

Do they have to?

If we hit the point where robots can do the manufacturing, there won't be manufacturing jobs anywhere. But goods will be so cheap that we'll replace those jobs with poetry jobs and skateboarding jobs.

This ties in to my radical theory that I proposed a while back. We dream of a Jetsons world where machines do all the work and people live lives of leisure. There's going to be an order in which society moves down that path, and perhaps the order is not what we think.

An easy initial assumption is that the upper classes would enter the life of leisure first. They have more income or wealth to do so.

The truly rich have always lived lives of leisure, but perhaps the second group to enter that world is the unskilled. The skilled are needed to design the robots and machines (including the robots and machines that make robots and machines). The unskilled don't have a role. So they enter a life of leisure made possible by high incomes of the skilled and the cheap goods made by the robots. Their life of leisure may be at a lower standard than the skilled, but it's still a high standard of living by objective standards. They have big-screen TVs and smart phones and stuff.

Over time, as the required skill level increases and the need for even skilled labor decreases, the remaining workers make more and more money, and more people enter the leisure class. Those who don't work have a reasonable standard of living that improves over time as technology continues to develop, and they essentially become the new middle class. Those who still work have a very high standard of living.

In the end game, the technology becomes completely self-sufficient and no one works. They all just watch robo-TV and eat at robo-Chilis and play in bands on the weekends.

That means we will all get fat like in that movie Wall-E. Omaha is going to hate that.