Here’s a YouTube video about how automation is making humans obsolete for an increasing number of jobs. WIth that in mind, and extrapolating to the future, more and more people will be unemployed because their job is taken over by a robot in some form or another. Technology might actually be pushing us to a world where the majority of people don’t actually have a job anymore but still need an income.
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I always find such prognoses about how the future will be rather obscure. Of course one can estimate all kinds of stuff, but how true will it really be (this also includes a problem with such future-related research, where mainly the dramatic messages are transported by the main stream media, whereas just “normal”, i.e. one that can be expected, prognosis get mainly ignored). This is one of the reasons why I personally can’t really agree with all these thesis about automation making humans obsolete. There is no clear quantitaive indication for this thesis, to my knowledge.
First of all, I find the future far too unreliable to predict reliable. 20 years ago I guess not many would have said that we hold in our hands a device with more computing power than normal PCs had at the time - by a factor of hundred or thousands. So who is to say that not in 20 years there are so many inventions that they actually create more jobs than get destroy by replacement by robots?
Also, I would argue that history teaches us that technology never really destroyed jobs, but transformed them. Yes, today the number of coachmen is certainly lower than 100 years ago, but this didn’t put people permanenetly out of work. The main problem is to transition into new jobs and to match qualifications with actual demand. Yes, automation may result in the temporary destruction of workplaces. But the raise of new technologies also brings new jobs and even creates new industries which simply didn’t exist before. Take for example the app industry of today: Of course traditional software development has and will get some cutbacks because of an increasing number of mobile apps which are produced. But this number is far greater: Simply, many companies are just created because of mobile devices and couldn’t have existed before.
So, I wouldn’t see it as pessimistic and predict futures where humans are “obsolote” and just the machines work. i think we should wait and see for this to be really happening. There are many factors involved here and predicting that is a non-trivial task (and I doubt it can be done reliably; neither by humans nor machines).
Al Jazeera just recently had an article about the Mincome Project in Canada: http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/8/26/dauphin-canada-cash.html
if a person is a working fulltime, minimum wage job and ending up with just enough to keep a roof over their head, food in their belly and clothes on their back; where is the spare time, money or capacity they would need to do anything with greater benefit to themselves or society at large?