automation - kiss job goodby...IRON MAN suit

[billlll]

Iron Man Suit just now on CNN. Fits around you, has motors so you can lift heavy objects like they were feathers.

Made for Army but can also enable ONE truck unloader to lift massive weights tirelessly for hours.... Replacing say, five pure humans.

Corporate economy just fires the unneeded four folks. "Starve", GOP says to the new homeless.

Progressive economy "shares the work"... One job divided into two , 20 hrs/week, each job. And all get pay hikes from the higher output machines cause. Jobs are in the framework of the Co-ops model, not corporate. Co-ops exist for the benefit of the employees.
Someday machines will do ALL the work and people will play.

Heaven or Hell
Progressive or Corporate

Which side are you on?

[Silent3]

1. IF we can manage to find good renewable energy sources...

...and not wreck the environment before we do that (big ifs), then more and more automation is pretty much inevitable.

In the short term it's always sad when people lose jobs to new technology, but that's why we need a much better economic safety net than we currently have, it's not a reason to be Luddites.

Would it really be meaningful employment, for example, if we kept "lamplighter" as a profession, and either went back to manually lighted candle or gas street lights, or used electric street lights, each with manual on/off switches high off the ground, so that every night and every morning still-employed lamplighters could do their job of turning the lights on and off?

I'm not sure how we'll deal with it, but I can easily imagine a future where clean renewable energy is the input to a largely automated economy that produces economic wealth, the way the biosphere turns sunlight into trees and antelopes. There will be more than enough wealth to go around, even for people who don't work at all, but will at least a decent minimum standard of living be ensured for everyone, or will even wilder extremes of wealth distribution than we have now occur?

[jtuck004]

2. I am on the side of more investment in new technology so there are

new jobs in addition to the ones taken by the folks in the "iron man" suit.

Because if we should have learned anything it's that if we don't take advantage of it, someone else will, and they will kick ass in the markets.

The real answer is more taxpayer (government) investment in the technologies we will need for the the next century in transportation, energy, health care, agriculture, etc., and how we can use those to our advantage as a country.

'Cause this aint 1920 any longer.