Quote:
Originally Posted by basilsands
The downside of "robotising" society is that humans don't lend themselves well to sitting around letting others do the work.
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Then find work they enjoy. There's no shortage of needs-human-attention work, especially creative works that can't be mechanized. But we don't need an endlessly-growing number of people to support our current standard of living--we can turn a lot of the grunt work over to machines. We *have* -- traveling thousands of miles no longer takes weeks and a couple of animals and food for them; communicating with relatives a hundred miles away no longer takes days and a courier.
We don't have to turn people into slugs in order to replace much of the unpleasant parts of work with technology. More people could focus on work they enjoy and find fulfilling... if we weren't tied to the notion that you have to earn the right to eat by expending a certain amount of effort, regardless of whether it's useful effort.
I'm not advocating for socialism; just pointing out that, at some point, the tech should mean shorter workweeks, more leisure time, better education opportunities. And we've got some of those; we should be working on more, not on having more people to maintain the current level of comfort.