A very interesting conversation was started in a Robotics Guru group I'm a part of on Linkedi[in], it's one that in the 90's has greatly effected my perception of the future and how we may adapt to it:

"Computers and robots will replace humans in enough jobs that they will dramatically change the economy, said industry watchers and MIT economists at a robotics symposium Monday. And, they said, the transition has already started."

This has been a subject that initially caused me to lean towards more socialistic social remedies, but then I came to understand that even though, I believe in Ray Kurzweil's accelerating change theory which would require a very rapid social response to a radically increasing curve on innovation of automation, we have to remember that automation of jobs is not new to the human experience, computers enabled massive cuts of employees, automotive factories employ a far smaller person-per-car-produced ratio today than ever, and what do we get from all this automated labor force, what do we get when the standard of living (the goods produced that elevate our life experience) is raised with less human hours required, a higher standard of living.

If we didn't have artificially created inflation of our world reserve currency, I think we'd be much closer to living in a price point zero, Star Trek-like world and the class balance would be much less disproportionate. Think of it in a small scale of 10, if the 10 of us were required to hunt and gather, think of how much more time we'd have to build better tools or relax on the beach, or improve our homes, if we were able to figure out how to farm animals and crops, requiring half the human hours.

Another point I hope to make, is that the benefit gained from automation directly depends on who has access to that automation. If a home helper robot costs $500k, then only military, big dollar industries and the wealthy would buy them and they no longer need to hire soldiers, manual labor, yard maintenance, handy men, and house keepers, but if these same machines were only $1k, then most people would have them, enriching everyone's lives.

The understanding I have, is the way we can get to that point of low cost sophisticated robotics, lays in the open source collaborative community. Like the Reprap, individual investment into a robotics project would yield an asymmetrical benefit, very little time and money could produce a wealth of valuable resources.

I've long believed, since working in the electronics assembly industry, that we will see a day when out of a home garage, can be produced most household products, and with projects like Reprap, that's not so far away. Once these low cost collaborative technologies become the norm rather than the exception, and people go to their neighborhood nerd to print them a phone that they saw on their favorite phone blog, rather than buying from some mega-corporation, we will begin to see radical and empowering changes in society.

Typically I believe central planning fails on it's own, large corporations and governments are not capable of achieving the agility of smaller organizations. If robotic technology is available to the lower income brackets, then they will replace the productive capabilities of the larger organizations. Then this great challenge of unemployment will likely be minimized by the self employment opportunity that these low cost self replicating open source robotic projects that are already emerging. Instead of giving someone a fish, I think charitable organizations we will be giving the poor a locally produced robot so he can be self sustainable with the productive capacity of that robot. But I honestly think that's up to us, and our ability to lead the robotic industry with an open source project that is very accessible and reproducible primarily from parts from a RepRap type machine.

We can't look to government to be our safety net when production outpaces consumption and unemployment steadily increases. So then, what is the purpose of Government? Government only knows one thing, the redistribution of resources, all they can do is steal by the threat of violent force from one group to give to another that lobbies for it by special interest groups, campaign contributions or private sector job offers. I believe every service the government provides can either be automated or eliminated. As soon as someone can set up a "free society" in Honduras or some other failed state, implement pervasive levels of automation, with 3D printed concrete houses and no money being wasted on taxation and an effective security being provided predominately by antonymous drones and armed centuries and limited boots on the ground, then a society like that will quickly become radically wealthy and others will quickly emulate their example.

Some people would say let the rich pay for those who are displaced by automation, and those who don't are just greedy and need their wealth stolen and redistributed to the unproductive sector. The question that has been asked me once is, what is greed? Most people think the rich need to pay their "fair share", but if you continually raise taxes on the most successful producers of products that raise our standard of living and employ many people, as we have seen in America, they will find other places in the world that they can move to which doesn't forcibly steal their productive money to redistribute it to the nonproductive at the level America does, so in essence you lower your standard of living by driving away the people that raise the standard of living.

Besides the practicality of not stealing, where is the compassion in theft through threat of violent force. I believe it's better for people to be allowed to give voluntarily, and this kind of giving will be used in a far more productive manner than if Politicians order storm troopers to steal from some to give to others. Politicians are politically motivated, not altruistic angels.

But change does not happen by it's self, like the global social change that we have seen recently, I believe is directly tied to the increased ability for us to communicate with one another by means of the internet. People are empowered by the technology they have access to. No longer are the three major networks the primary source of information consumers, as of May last year, YouTube gets more prime time viewership than all three of the major network television channels combined. With that kind of social and technological change, I believe collaboration in life improving projects, such as the Global_Village_Construction_Set - Open Source Ecology, people are already building the foundation of future self sustainable modern living societies. I believe the natural evolution these low cost DIY society building block machines will be fully automated near price point zero societies.

Why is it today that a predominant perception is that a man's productivity is only found in a job? Why is it that entrepreneurship is such a lost concept? I believe robotics will have the ability of empowering the poor to produce an abundance of products or services that will be needed by others. I think it is clearly immoral to steal, kill and enslave, even if you are the government. Income tax is clearly slavery if you have to work for 3-4 months out of the year for the IRS.

I've found a very interesting article on the economist.com blogs section covering this topic. Here's a few clips, I hope you enjoy:

"Economists see [Henry Ford's Model T assembly line and increased wages] as a classic example of how advancing technology, in the form of automation and innovation, increases productivity. This, in turn, causes prices to fall, demand to rise, more workers to be hired, and the economy to grow. Such thinking has been one of the tenets of economics since the early 1800s, when hosiery and lace-makers in Nottingham—inspired by Ned Ludd, a legendary hero of the English proletariat—smashed the mechanical knitting looms being introduced at the time for fear of losing their jobs.

Some did lose their jobs, of course. But if the Luddite Fallacy (as it has become known in development economics) were true, we would all be out of work by now—as a result of the compounding effects of productivity."

"But here is the question: if the pace of technological progress is accelerating faster than ever, as all the evidence indicates it is, why has unemployment remained so stubbornly high—despite the rebound in business profits to record levels? Two-and-a-half years after the Great Recession officially ended, unemployment has remained above 9% in America. That is only one percentage point better than the country’s joblessness three years ago at the depths of the recession."

"This is what Jeremy Rifkin, a social critic, was driving at in his book, 'The End of Work', published in 1995. Though not the first to do so, Mr Rifkin argued prophetically that society was entering a new phase—one in which fewer and fewer workers would be needed to produce all the goods and services consumed. 'In the years ahead,' he wrote, 'more sophisticated software technologies are going to bring civilisation ever closer to a near-workerless world.'”

"In the end, the Luddites may still be wrong. But the nature of what constitutes work today—the notion of a full-time job—will have to change dramatically. The things that make people human—the ability to imagine, feel, learn, create, adapt, improvise, have intuition, act spontaneously—are the comparative advantages they have over machines."

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/11/artificial-intelligence