Quote:Stripped down to the basics, it's clear that without production, there is no economy.
This is the key. Production is the engine that drives the economy. But when a small few can produce enough for all, then there is ample room to employ everyone else making life more pleasant. We can have yoga instructors and baristas*, scientists and historians, cab drivers and hairdressers. The more each manufacturer/farmer/miner can make, the more support personnel we can have - or, more pointedly, the more those things are *worth*. The value of a good or service is not an objective measure, but a ratio with other goods and services. This ratio is driven by their relative scarcity. A world where we can make a trillion cars with a snap of our fingers is a world where cars are cheap compared with haircuts, or massages. This is why a plumber in the US still makes a damn good living.
Nor are these human-specialist jobs just high-end creative jobs. My hairdresser is a lot brighter than he needs to be to do his job, but all attempts to replace him with a machine have been failures, to say the least.
Are we ever going to reach a point where we run out of such tasks? Not until we have functioning AI, at least. From what I can see, computers are still pretty damn stupid. Heinlein got that much wrong, along with almost every other science fiction author.
Re: Unemployment - I don't mind what statistic you use. We are nowhere near the kind of thing you're talking about, and no plausible rate of technological change is going to get us there in my natural lifetime. Maybe by Star Trek times, but not soon.
-Jester
*and Berkeley Econ profs...