A lot of times, people worry about new prosperity, automation, and technology. This is from a Hacker News comment -
"You really gotta wonder how this is gonna turn out. How are dumb people supposed to earn a living when technology makes all the jobs for dumb people obsolete?"
My reply:
Every time new automation is invented, people think is going to happen. Seriously, this goes back to pre-Industrial Revolution times. Any time part of the labor process is automated away, people think that there's going to be permanent economic damage, and they're consistently wrong.
We'll adapt. There's always new things to be done. Personally, I'm betting on a greater diversity of creative and artistic work happening - people in core industries that are going to remain and grow in profitability (technology, raw materials, energy, consumer goods, construction, etc) will have more surplus income to spend on personalization, customization, different and more unique kinds of entertainment, etc.
We're going to seem a massive boom in people able to make a basic living from pure creative professions enabled. There'll also be more personal services offered. Ideally a lot of ineffective governmental costs can be optimized down, and more of government spending can go to refining and cleaning up the environment too, planting more trees and flora and fauna, things like that.
I think a lot of excellent jobs that don't exist today are going to be created. I also think many more people will learn basic technology skills than perhaps is commonly thought. A few hundred years ago, no one - and I mean no one - would have believed you if you told them what literacy rates would be in developed countries. They just wouldn't think it possible. So, more people will get on the tech bandwagon as time passes and kids grow up with it. Computer literacy will become like language literacy.
Good things are happening man, we're living in the greatest era ever. God damn I'm so optimistic and grateful to be alive right now.
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And yeah, that's how I feel things are going to go. People typically panic because they see that the old way of doing things won't cut it going forwards - but it's not clear what all the new options that are going to be invented and created are. But there's always new options - people have been panicking at greater productivity and new inventions for at least a few hundred years now, but it's consistently been wrong. It's a really good time to be alive.