What do we do as a society when there arn't jobs?

Humans will always be needed to do the thinking. We will manage the robots who are doing the labor of farming, accounting, research.

Robot repair

It’s really complex. For the entirety of our history, the way to have a home/food/care is to have money.

If we could sustain our current level of culture on the backs of robots, with maybe 10% of the population working to maintain those robots, we’d have to rethink things.

Initially, the jobs repairing the robots will be in such high demand, that the pay for that work will approach 0. It’s possible barter will take over, but hopefully by the time we get into that sort of situation, we’ll have a utopia that won’t require money.

Wuffie is one option.

send robots on cattle trucks to disassembling plants in some maniacal Luddite frenzy.

The wave of the future involves more entrpreneurish mindsets.

I have never relied on ‘society’ to employ me, I create my own employment and have my hand in multiple pots at any given time.

As always it will be the innovative persons that are able to risk and have multi-dimensional vision that will succeed.

Don’t worry about ‘society’ find your own niche and run with it.

I’m reading a really good book at the moment on this kind of aspect of the world at the moment. Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind. He talks about how we need to deal with these challenges: technology, outsourcing for cheap labour and rising intelligence levels of populations. Creativity is one major feature that robots are not (as far as I know) capable of carrying out…specifically ‘applied creativity’. That’s where it’s at I think. There are other factors of course…but I think this tops it.

Artists, Artisans, Scientists and Explorers. That is what humans can be in such a society.

It’s a false assumption that “we could run out of jobs”. Consider the radical changes in “home appliances” over the past half-century, for starters.

From microwave ovens, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, clothes (and dish) washers, clothes driers, permanent-press and wash-and-wear fabrics, to name just a few. All of these were touted (and more or less correctly) as “labor-saving devices”. And they really do save a lot of labor. But what happens is that our expectations increase to match the saved labor.

Let’s assume that we have robots to do all of our household chores. Will we then never have to do a thing to keep house? Want to bet? Who could even imagine a robot with the sensitivity to design and furnish a home the way we want. Or to build the kind of custom furniture, cabinetry and objets d’art that we want (and will want—to show that we don’t live in robot garages) in our homes? This is going to take a lot of work from a lot of people.

The more we have, the more we want. Jobs (for humans) will expand beyond our ability to fill them, as they always do.

@CyanoticWasp That’s exactly what I’m talking about! x

The Venus Project gives an idea of how it could be, but probably never will.

Thanks, @nebule, it is exactly what you’re talking about. GAs.

Become professional flutherers

@CyanoticWasp has it right. As it turns out, the more things we have, the more things we want. As we continue to invent labor saving devices, we do more things. When we replaced the horse and carriage with cars, we were able to go further, with more people, faster, at less cost than before. We replaced blacksmiths and stables, but ended up with more repair shops and more parking lots not less. All we do is replace one industry with another.

Hopefully, our work week may shorten and/or maybe our work day, giving us more leisure time. Of course that means we need more leisure stuff. A vicious cycle. And of course someone needs to design it, make it, and service it. Or the way things are going replace it. All require human intervention/control but even though they require less human contact, there are more things.

Well if everything works out okay, a privlidged few will subjigate the masses. Creating different classes to strive for, while paying for their whims on the backs of those citizenry. Thus continuing the need for all to work or die. And if you can’t find a job, you probably didn’t want to work anyway.

The type of work people do will change. In @CyanoticWasp‘s example, he talks about doing interior decorating. The difference between jobs now and jobs then is that, with the gruntwork jobs taken care of, humans will be free to do the creative work. Everything that we do will become an art form.

You know the saying, “content is king?” Most of the jobs in the world will eventually become about content. But there’s a long way to go before that happens. The change will happen first in the most developed parts of the world—but I don’t know what countries will be the most developed at that point.

In any case, I think we will start seeing this happen at a faster and faster rate. Already all the grunt jobs are moving out of the US. There are a few sectors of the economy that are expanding even in the recession. Health care is one I can think of, and entertainment is the other. Oops. Shooting off my mouth on that one. I’m guess entertainment is still growing.

Move into content, and you’ll have a future. Hey! Guess what? Everyone on fluther is creating content! We’ve got a leg up. Although, as @CyanoticWasp and @Coloma note, you’ll most likely be needing to keep yourself employed. The creative professions or activities are full of individuals seeking to hit it big. It’s entrepreneurialism at its finest.

Of course, people like me who don’t have an entrepreneurial bone in their bodies are going to be SOL, anyway.

create, invent, reinvent

The current economic model relies on the false premise that resources are unlimited. Growth in production and consumption cannot be sustained indefinitely. I suspect that as we continue to ignore the inevitable global catastrophes that we are approaching, a lack of jobs will not be a problem as there will be no people to perform them.

@ratboy you are correct that resources are limited on Earth, of course, since we live on a planet with definite limits. But you haven’t acknowledged the ‘human ingenuity’ which has already made expansion possible past the point of any past effort to predict ‘where it will all end’, and still shows promise. The end still isn’t in sight, and there’s a lot more than our single planet ‘out there’, too.

Don’t worry, when there aren’t any jobs Uncle Sugar and Big Brother will take care of us.

@CyanoticWasp: human ingenuity, particularly its unforeseen consequences, have changed the ecology of the planet so profoundly that it is conceivable that the infrastructure supporting our current way of life may fail on a global scale.

Anything is possible. Tell you what, though. I’ll bet you any amount of money at even odds that ‘things in nature will somehow more or less work out – other than war and other deliberate acts – and we’ll muddle through’ for at least 99% of the world’s current population living out their expected lifespan for the next… oh, thirty years? (That’s pretty much the end of mine, and it wouldn’t be fair – to me – to make a bet that only my heirs could collect on.)

That still allows for a, let’s see, roughly 7,000,000-person calamity, which should be a pretty small “failure on a global scale” of the infrastructure supporting our current way of life.

innovate

Yes, innovate like hell, but some will always be left behind, mostly due to bad parenting. For this reason I advocate the reinvention of useful simple jobs.

What most people do is panic on how they are going to pay the bills.I think that were sill going to have to pay bills in the future even though there will be more advantages to technology.