the past is continuously being exported from the united states to far away lands. currently, there are very few vestiges of our old production economy left. most jobs are service oriented - and once ai reaches a point where their interactions are indiscernible from that of their human counterparts - there will be a dramatic decrease in service jobs.
there will still be some need for some human oversight, but once ai can successfully replace human service industry workers, our economy will experience an intense shift. with production jobs already shipping overseas at an alarming rate and service industry jobs threatened by growing technologies, what will the average human do for work in thirty years?
once technology has allowed us to surpass the crass requirements of manual labor and servicing other humans, how will we spend our days? how will human beings fit into our new economy? what sort of goods other than data will be transporter and exchanged? will data and a few basic other biological supplements be all that the modern human will require?
these are questions that are seldom addressed when innovations capture the imaginations of the public. we all marvel at our collective genius - but how will we adapt to the new path that is ahead of us? is this united states destined to have an enormous population of unemployed, destitute workers and a highly educated and specialized elite group of technologists and business persons?
it is truly frightening to think about this. one point to consider is whether or not there will there be a revolt against new technology. will there be people who destroy laboratories, prototypes - who murder scientists and inventors? this is a very real possibility when you consider the advent of widespread exportation of production and other unskilled jobs coupled with the infusion of technology into our current service based economy.
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The Luddites shall rise again!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
Reading this reminds me that history often seems eternally cyclical. In reading your analysis of the coming future I can not help but be reminded of Ancient Rome. In the early to mid imperial period the slave population in the city accounted for nearly 1/3 of the population. This naturally led to horrible unemployment rates.
In the post-enlightenment, post-civil rights movement west we now consider slavery to be a deplorable enterprise, but your grim vision of the future presents us with similar challenges.
So the question is with the automation revolution seemingly inevitable, how does the United States prevent the undermining of the economy which could result?
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