| Not sure whether to consider this a mental exercise or if this author is serious in his assumptions. If he is serious, the author seems to have forgotten about all of the jobs that cannot be automated. Book writing, art, entertainment, inspirational speaking, posting funny cat pictures and original memes to the internet, innovation and clever software development, music and musicians, and more. Prostitution, legal services, etc. Even if all of these were to somehow be automated people would still need each other. Service industries are also important. Could you imagine living in a reality where every job is done by a machine but because there is only one person running the show there is no one around to support or improve on the code? None of society would move forward. We'd be running on legacy architecture and legacy ideas. And then what would the point of living be? Likely we'd see a whole lot of anomie and disassociation. What would be the point of learning if there were no purpose in applying it? The "logic" fails when the author assumes that society in the future will be an "either/or" instead of the spectrum of human experience and automation that it always has been and always will be. We are nothing without machines, and they are nothing without us. They need us to reproduce them and improve them, and we need them to help us to maintain homeostasis with our environment. It is a symbiotic situation, not one of bleak and utopian/dsytopian absolutism. |