Remember how in The Future, the robots were going to do all the work, leaving us free to NOT WORK??!?
What happened to the idea of leisure?
because too much of western civilization and way too much of the USA can’t get over the protestant work ethic crap and it is going to be hard shift in culture to get away from that.
Work ethic? If the owners of the robots saw you working hard, they still wouldn’t give you the profits. Those Sci-Fi utopias were completely naive about economics.
The big secret is that most bank tellers have been laughing it up drinking cocktails on the beach ever since they were able to get ATMs to cover most of their duties back in the late 70s.
I used to work with a not overly bright woman who read some story about one day they’d have robots who were able to do our jobs…“Wouldn’t that be great? We could just relax while our robots did our job.” I pointed out that when the price of the robot that would replace us came down to twice our annual salary, it would make sense for our employer to buy one and fire us.
I, for one, welcome our blah blah blah, etc.
Jobs repairing robots are not going to go to the people whose jobs were taken by those robots. The “new jobs” forecasted aren’t going to come in time to save us from a surge in unemployment. “Creative Roles” aren’t ever going to have enough people in them to let people live and just this
It’s happened, just to a rapidly shrinking pool of persons.
So, The Culture starts here?
Made that a little more specific for you 
I’m not jaded though, noooooo, not me, no sir.
I’m going to visit my favorite robut banker in a few minutes…
“Thank you Mr Robut Banker”
in the future all humans will lead lives of leisure, served by the robot legions. The grom, those lesser animals once mistakenly designated as humans will be harvested for their organs and more delicious body parts. A plurality of the humans, numbering 99 in all will attempt to improve the lives of the grom by only killing them in painless ways, but a small minority believes the grom enjoy to be mutilated as part of the ritualistic hunts because of the inherent sporting nature of the grom.
That’s all well and good until Mr. Spacely catches you slacking during your button-pushing shift.
Look at it this way. All the new automation, all the new logistical efficiencies brought about by the IT revolution, all the huge increases in productivity in the last 10 years…
…and we’re still averaging about 2% GDP growth over the last 5 years. (Even gloomier outlook over the last 10 years.)
Anything less than 2% and the economy starts to implode.
It would be nice if it were really the “protestant work ethic” that’s preventing the gains in productivity from producing more leisure time for workers, but the reality looks to me like there’s an across-the-board slowing in economic growth throughout the US (maybe the world) that’s being hidden by growth generated by three industries in particular:
- Technology (hardware, software, support, and services)
- Finance
- Fracking
The upshot is that all the gains in productivity made through automation and robotics have only been enough to keep us treading water in terms of economic growth.
Why do so few people consider that it might be economics which is naive about science?
LEISURE!!! What are you, some kind of pinko-anarchist-commie-lover? Here in Amurica we work, work, work, until we die!!! Mainly because we have to or we’ll be out on the street, but still!!!
Leisure is for the people whose income isn’t tied to a salary, i.e. the 1%.
Gee, it’s almost like basing your economic system on constant growth even though you know you live on a planet (and for that matter universe, although there’s enough in it it’d be hard to exhaust everything on a human timescale) with limited resources is a bad idea.
Ah, but people cost money to provide with food. The basic premise is that people have no right to exist, their existence is an unfortunate and currently unavoidable side effect of the need for labour.
The only jobs in the future will be for the people who design the robots that build the robots that replace all the other people.
