FYI - $6.55/hr is the federal minimum, and in some states it is higher. (Santa Fe, NM - Highest min wage at $9.50)

Paperless office is a joke, its proponents never used their full brainpower.

Sure, people use electronic mail, texts, instant messaging, the works now. But what happens if your network gets a virus or worse, crashes completely. You need proof of everything thats happened. So, in my current job, we print off a copy of *everything* as a redundancy. We also did this at my 2 previous jobs, which were, as zach loves to say, .govs.

The reason is, machines break. Far too often. A business simply can't risk losing all their data, so keeping hard copies is a logical way around this.

My question is when robots take over a majority of the work how will the majority of humans earn a living?

Tech support for their breakdowns!:haha:

Until it is outsourced to Mars.:DL

Funny but it was a serious question. The more we automate the less work there is for human beings. How are these billions of people whose jobs are replaced by robots supposed to earn a living?

Oh don't worry - we'll ALL have more govt handouts to help us live :salute:

Seriously though, you're right, it is a concern. The only real answer I can think of is that they get employed working in robot-producing factories - at least until robots are built to build the robots...:doh:

As much as I hate to say it, the only real solution might well be trekkish - they don't use money. People get given to them what they need, provided they abide by the rules and regs put in place. Hrm.... can anyone say handout?

Not true. The more efficient labor becomes, the more different work is for human beings. Every agricultural and industrial revolution has shown this. There is always a market, and there is always money to be made somewhere. No matter what machines do,or how many jobs they eliminate, there is always some other market niche for people to expand into.

Assuming that machines are someday capable of performing all jobs that a human can do, it is simply a question of divding the fruits of their labors amongst ourselves.
Or they rise up and kill us. Whichever.

Sounds good but we've never had the numbers of people and technology has never moved as fast as it does now. I would expect there is going to be some extreme growing pains on the path to that utopia...

Well I "need" my own spaceship complete with phaser banks and a full complement of photon torpedo's, oh and at least three, i mean four, hot green alien babes. :up:

Oh I don't think it will be a utopia. In fact, I think we'll face a lot of the same problems we have today. The same problems we always have. Even if we had unlimited energy and resources and free labor, we'd have problems.
People compete with each other, and they always will. They have no choice.
They are genetically programmed to do so. (sounds crazy, I know)

You're right that there will be growing pains, though. A lot of them. People will die and there will be wars. Every major shift of human development has been accompanied by a power struggle and this one, when it comes, will be no different.

Bingo! Finally some get the point.

There is a way around this which of course the right will call socialism out the ass but when half the nation is unemployed you run the risk of insurrection if they aren't "Assisted"

The solution is simple in my view. The companies will of course pay high taxes but only if the robots are seriously turning a profit. Which is not hard to do because of how quickly they can extract or work.

The resulting funds will be used as a hybrid deal with the populace. You have to attend .gov approved colleges (Tech, LSU or something similar) You have to homeschool the young and so on and so forth. The result is a huge jump in education at the same cost it would be to just hand out money every month for someone to sit on his ass because a robot has taken over his job type.

If we dont do somthing that involves "activity" the populace will demand (And make no mistake get) .gov welfare and get fat and lazy and before we know it we will depend on robots to do anything and everything. Stagnating advancement and ruining the arts.

I cant tell you how old this 'fear' is... but probably goes way back to the early 70's and as yet has to be realized.

Robots have yet to replace a large enough segment of the working population. Give it time.