Originally Posted by Relentless

China employs a million people making iPhones. Work so tedious that the factory has a high suicide rate among its workers. Work so repetitive that it is destined to become automated in the near future. Then those people won't be needed. Automation is a major blessing because it can be applied to nearly any task. Google is pushing very hard to legalize and build fully automated 'driverless' cars. We aren't that far away from having them. Bye bye taxi drivers, bus drivers, teamsters and the like. We are too smart and too efficient to pay people to drive us a few blocks when we can build cars that do it on their own.

Any idea how many people make a living one way or another driving a vehicle? Soon all of those people will be 'lazy bums who don't want to work or get a job.' Retraining won't fix the problem, we aren't automating a specific job, we are evolving beyond having to do ordinary mundane work. Many people lack the aptitude to be creative, innovative or inventive. Not from laziness, from not having the talent for it. They may be great worker bees, but that doesn't make them capable of creating new products or services, and even if they do it doesn't stop someone else from copying and automating those ideas. Why do you think Apple, Nathan Mhryvold and that crowd are busy patenting everything under the sun?

Repetitive, mundane, hard 9-5 work is drying up and won't be needed. Add in a glut of intellectual property already protected by law and you will end up with a huge out of work population permanently incapable of getting work. There are many now who lack the skills to work a job without getting fired every few weeks. Most people call them lazy idiots or bums. It will be interesting when they are 50+% of the population rather than 15%.... and we are talking about a few decades from now, not a few centuries.