Sure, you've got jobs in robot building and such but when a robot shop with 20 employees turns out 200 robots in one year and displaces 4000 workers...
Sure, you've got jobs in robot building and such but when a robot shop with 20 employees turns out 200 robots in one year and displaces 4000 workers...
So the buyers of the product have extra money to spend - which opens whole new fields of products and services for them, which will (at first) be run by humans and have jobs.
It's a cycle that repeated many many times in history. It's just happening faster now. So if you want to always be employable (and you are not particularly skilled) be flexible - don't get stuck in a single field, but be willing to constantly learn new ones. (This is hard for some people, but some extra funding for adult vocational school should help.)
My artisan economy I mean handmade paintings, handmade food, plays with actors instead of CGI movies, musicians, bars...
Yes, people have more money to spend, but no, trickle down economics doesn't really work out for the jobless.
Until they get spooked and cut back discretionary spending just in case. So-called service economies are not stable.
Example: If we have 10 guys making hydrogen cells, and all the sudden we can replace them with one robot and one guy, and that takes an unviable industry to a viable one, well then they are going to need a lot more robots and guys, a lot more than the 10 they previously had.
Today I was at lunch in what's left of our downtown district, and there were old photographs on the wall of business that used to be in the area (mostly manufacturing). I was amazed that some of the photographs showed huge rooms of women sitting at work tables assembling parts, folding boxes, and packing items.
That stuff is all gone. I could imagine a handful of machines replacing that group of people. When you go from a city having 50,000 factory workers to the 4,000 or so that we have now, it's a huge deal.