A thought
 

Here's an interesting read. It's made the rounds on Slashdot and a few other places.

www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm

The short version is, when (not if) robots are built well enough (read useful, powerful enough computing, etc), they will take over a large number of rather mundane jobs.
e.g.: stock girl at the local Wal-Mart, checkout boy at the local supermarket, burger cooker at Mc Donalds, etc

This is going to lead to large amounts of unemployment, and it will larglely be an unskilled workforce (relatively speaking).

The author obviously has an agenda, and while his political ramblings are interesting, the real meat of the story is: what is going to happen to all those people? Oh, and he proposes that this will all come down the line in the next twenty years or so.

That combined with the HP commercial I saw yesterday about nanotechnology got me thinking a bit more on the subject.

Twenty, fifty, one hundred years from now, there will be a "species" of machine that we can call a nano-assembly-bot.

These little critters will work at the molecular level, and will
be able to make basically anything. Need a new dishwasher? throw out some various scrap metal, plastic, and maybe some wood or dirt, add a few thousand (more if you want to, but they can just replicate themselves if they need more) nano bots, program the little buggars (however that will work), let the things work for a few hours, and you've got a dishwasher.

Want a new Toyota? Same basic concept. How about a brand new house? Might take a few more raw materials (and I do mean raw, as in trees, or maybe even just a bunch of carbon based stuff) but it's the same concept, just on a bit larger scale. Oh, and maybe, if you want a few pounds of weapons grade fissionable material, you can probably make that fairly easily too. Maybe a device to detonate it too. I dunno.

We are not far from being able to assemble products at the molecular level. So then what? I really don't think I'm going too far out on a limb here by saying that industrialized society as we know it, will be gone.

Reading back on this post, it almost seems surreal, but from what I've read; this is not too far away, if (BIG if) the technology is allowed to be developed. So, at that point, we have a vast majority of the population with two major attributes: they will be able to aquire (most of) what they need without the aid of industry, and they will not have jobs (those jobs lost when the demand for industry goes away), which equates to a hell of a lot of free time.

Am I way off base here? and if not, then what?

This same question has been posed over and over and over again.

Eli Whitney's cotten gin threatened to take all the farm jobs away, and everyone wondered what would happen to the people it displaced. It took a while, but eventually having the machines do the work changed everything. Until industrialization and transportation, 50% of people were required to work farms in order to feed everyone. Today it's less than 2%.

The economy figured out other important things for those people to do. When there is cheap labor and wealth, people will always figure out things for others to do.

I was more disturbed by the speculation that nanos could be introduced into the human body to repair failed organs. Kidney fails, they go build an artificial one, in place.
This sounds great but what happens when the brain fails? The nanos build an artificial one but then who in hell are you? Better yet what the hell are you?:confused:

"My poor Krell; they couldn't understand what was killling them..." -- Morbius, Forbidden Planet
"Watch out for monsters from the id" -- Doc, Forbidden Planet.

Don't sweat, by that time they'll be backing up all the stuff in your head so they can just restore it. You'll be able to live part-time or all-time in computer memory just like in Greg Bear's "Eon". :3eye:

Soylent green is people
 

The nanobots can take apart the new useless people and use them as raw material.

That's a relief. I'm not new.:p

I don't like people who live forever.

The cotton gin actually created jobs. Picking cotton was becoming very unprofitable, and with Whitney's cotton gin it became profitable again, thus creating a lot of jobs. Granted, they weren't getting money for their work, but they were still working!

And the gin always makes things better. :haha: