[edvinbesic]

Does that mean we live in a happy utopia where 95% of the tedious/dangerous work has been taken care of and we instead get to spend our time focusing on what we find inspirational/creative, or do we live in a dystopia where 95% of job opportunities have vanished and we can no longer sustain a consumption based economy.

Maybe those are one and the same.

[diskcat]

Well when the cars were invented did people start living in a dystopia where the car moguls owned mobility itself or did people just got around much faster and had better lives in general.

[TulliusCicero]

It was mixed. People got around faster and stuff was cheaper. On the other hand, we got fat and dependent on cars, which is particularly bad for the poor (since cars are inherently expensive), and for kids' independence. That's why you're seeing many metro areas starting to prioritize walking, biking, and transit.

On balance the development of cars was good, obviously, but let's not kid ourselves, the downsides were significant.

[davidiach]

I'm not sure if it is an established fact that people got fat because cars came along (before cars there were carriages). I'd rather bet that diet is the culprit.

[TulliusCicero]

Probably both, but I think they've shown at least a correlation between car commute time and obesity.

[txdv]

horses have had a pretty rough run

http://www.humanesociety.org/assets/pdfs/hsp/soaiv_07_ch10.p...

[seren]

If we look at agriculture mechanization, we went from 80% of the population to 5% to feed everyone. While this is good for everyone, I don't think farmers are living some sort of utopia.

Rather most of them are indebted for decades to pay for their complex equipment.

I believe the introduction of robot will follow a similar pattern, some industry will see their number of employee reduced drastically but they won't necessarily increase their margin. The customer will likely win.

The thing is that people who were employed in farms moved to factory. Nowadays I don't know where people who lost their job to robots will move.

[galfarragem]

As before, people will move to the new world. This time it is called Mars.

[zardo]

You think 75% of the population moving to Mars is a likely outcome?

[dajomu]

More like the virtual world.

[lbebber]

There were still plenty of jobs that could only be done by humans though. We might be reaching a point where there will be very few.

[dillon]

To extend your point. The jobs that are easily programmable like farming, and warehousing are easily replaceable. Some tasks may even require using humans and robots together like construction or search and rescue.

Some things are indeed not replaceable by robots and I think "most" professions* may not be able to be replaced by robots. These could be things like professional chefs (not fast food), programmers, and masseuse.

*By professions I mean the raw number of unique jobs not the number of people who work in those positions.

That being said in the U.S. with the "College Driven" economy I doubt it will ever affect 95% of the population at once. Generally professions will disappear one by one, but those people can retrain and if they don't it won't matter as the next generation will obviously not train to fill positions that don't exist (that's not logical). Eventually the new generations train to fill different job positions.

[Futurebot]

That's far from guaranteed, and looks less likely all the time. See, the "Luddite Fallacy Fallacy." Gwern gives it a nice treatment here: http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes?cx=009114923999563836576%3Adv0...

[visarga]

First will come the dystopia, the utopia might be later. In the early years the best positioned companies will reap the huge benefits of this new field. In time, the benefits will trickle down to ordinary people. The same was with cars and computers.

Even when ordinary people will reap benefits from robotization, the big bucks will go to the Google or Apple of the day. We might have our daily needs met by the future economy, but big companies will dominate the finances. We'll get to play with the new toys, though.

[bobajeff]

There's a TV show (haven't watched it yet) about a future where society is split between something like 15% employed and 85% unemployed. The unemployed live in this desert wasteland or whatever while the employed are living in a big o'l building structure.

I would say it's far fetched and unlikely except that's kind of how the world is today.

[JoeAltmaier]

Zardoz!