[quote=bearishgurl]
America needs and will continue to need all kinds of workers, not just “creative types.” It’s not for elitest-types (or wanna-be elitest-types) living in SoCal (where fresh produce is in abundance and relatively cheap) to decide whether a midwestern diet of home-canned fruits and vegetables from a home garden, meat butchered and packaged locally or fish caught locally, milk pasteurized locally and real mashed potatoes with homemade gravy isn’t “nutritional.” Nor are they qualified to decide whether most Americans possess the “raw life enrichment experiences” or “family dynamic” necessary to develop the “raw mental horsepower” or whether they might already possess the “raw mental horsepower” to begin with.
Get up at 4:00 am 6-7 days per week to start chores on your “working farm or ranch” and tell me how much “raw mental horsepower” is needed to sustain that type of discipline, year in and year out.
Sorry, but it’s not the same thing as stopping off at Starbucks on your commute to a desk job in SoCal where you will report to a cubicle between 8 and 9 am, immediately put your flip-flopped feet on the desk and pipe up your laptop for the day in your supposedly “creative job.”[/quote]
I don’t think anyone is disparaging people who obviously work very hard in more physically-oriented jobs, or discounting their discipline or worth to society. The point is that like it or not, these jobs will gradually go away. Hell, so will most “creative” jobs (already happening to travel agents, accountants and lawyers are next). The free market demands that profits continue to grow every quarter, and the easiest way to achieve that growth is to reduce labor costs via automation. It has been happening throughout history and will continue to do so. Whereas many farmers used to be required to tend to one farm, now a single farmer can manage a much larger land area through the use of technology. And one day, almost no farmers will even be out physically on the fields; a small number of them will just be overseeing the operations of robots harvesting the fields.
I agree with others that say there will be some sort of major upheaval, probably in my lifetime. The only hope I can see to alleviating this outcome is something like essentially free universal power (fusion or similar), or mass rollout/usage/hacking of 3D printing. For the time being, wealth will continue to flow upward at an ever increasing pace, since the already wealthy are the ones who will own the profits from increased automation.
