See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-world-without-work-as-robots-computers-get-smarter-will-humans-have-anything-left-to-do/2013/01/18/61561b1c-61b7-11e2-81ef-a2249c1e5b3d_story.html
This subject is starting to attract attention in the mass media. I wish cold fusion would. Cold fusion will lead to more unemployment than most breakthroughs, but not as much as improvements to computers. I have a chapter about that in my book. It is surprising how few people work in energy. Here is a thought-provoking table showing all major occupations in the U.S.: http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm That is the entire universe of work. Here are some comments I made about this table elsewhere: The economy has not produced any new "Major Occupational Group" since roughly 1880 (when precision manufacturing began) because every kind of labor we want done for us is already done. As I said, people have moved from one group to another, as the amount of labor ebbs and flows in different sectors. But there are no new groups, and robots will move into all groups simultaneously. . . . Granted, Category 15, "Computer and Mathematical Occupations" did not exist in 1880. But every task now done by "Computer" occupations was done back then by people in category 43, "Office and Administrative Support." All of the other occupations in this list were already in existence by 1880. Most of them existed in Heian Japan, for that matter. There are no new tasks. That is to say, there are no occupations with novel outcomes or purposes that did not exist back then. The methods of achieving these purposes have changed. For example, in category 27 our methods of entertainment have changed, but the purpose -- entertaining people with fiction, music and so on -- is the same. There is a limited market for this. We cannot watch TV or listen to music 20 hours a day. Nearly all of the occupations on this list, and the sub-category occupations in the table, could be done better by a Watson-class computer than by a human being. . . . Someone else summarized the situation quite well: "Until recently, technology advances made machines stronger, faster, and more reliable than average Joes. But, even at the slow end, he was much better at mopping a floor, understanding speech, packing a box, or driving a lorry than even the best supercomputer. So, he had some major competitive advantages for just being human." - Jed
