12-11-2016, 01:53 AM
(12-11-2016, 01:33 AM)JustWinBaby Wrote: This deserves it's own topic. I'm hoping to make it to retirement before I'm obsolete, but it's a reasonably good bet in my lifetime I'll see almost all jobs done by AI and robots. Energy is the last "limited" resource, and we're close to solving that - I think fusion is a reality inside 50 years. Water is not a problem when you remove energy costs (just all that salt to dispose of), and that leaves food always struggling to pace population and you have to think we'll solve that, too.
All that idle time and many in their 20's will be in almost perpetual party mode. It's hard to envision new frontiers creating jobs that won't be done by AI and robots. Such a world where we don't want for anything or work for anything might create inescapable boredom that people are always trying to defeat.
I really don't get the long game with that sort of thinking. I mean, if you put 80-90 percent of the world's workforce out of work, who the hell is going to be able to buy anything? People talk about the jobs disappearing, but what about the overall commerce? IMO it's the destruction of (practically speaking) the entire consumer market as we know it.
I did a lot of "experimentation" with drugs in my 20's. I didn't get married til I was 34. We didn't have a kid til I was 36. However, I quit using drugs when I was 27. I wanted a real job and real money to build a life with. That's a lot easier to do when you're clean. Without those incentives or the prospects of a future, who knows? That creates a pretty nihilistic class of young people with virtually no reason to give a shit about anything.
And aside relating to the mining industry: That particular demographic was ripe for the heroin trade IMO. I went to college with a shitload of Eastern KY kids, and pills were a major thing with a lot of those people. Mining is a dangerous job that breaks down the body and many in that occupation were already on some kind of opiod painkiller. Same story as always. Begins therapeutic, turns into a habit. Once those pills got scarce, in came the heroin. Anyone could see it coming.
