For many of us wedded (especially boomers) to the work ethic, it seems to be an anathema. What, pay people for not working! You have to be kidding me! Some might say that is the situation we have today with welfare, but this goes way beyond welfare.
It is a cartoon movie, but think of the situation in the movie Wall-E. Not the part where the earth is consumed with trash, but back on the spaceship where all the humans have gotten to be totally absorbed in pleasures and robots do all the work. This is where we are headed with automation. The situation will be few jobs, especially manual ones, and thus what will people do when they have no work?
This is not happening tomorrow, but you can see how it is coming. 60 Minutes had a show recently where they showed an area of Mississippi that is attracting new modern manufacturing plants. One was a steel plant that in the old days would have employed 4,000 people, but now just a few hundred. If manufacturing jobs are returning to the United States they will have a significant technological component.
