Are jobs obsolete?
http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/09/07/rushkoff.jobs.obsolete/index.html?hpt=hp_bn1
I was sort of thinking along these lines when I was working on my trillion person population paper (which has sort of faded away, like so many of my writing projects, largely because no one seems interested). If very little effort/energy is required to achieve self sufficiency (meaning a place to sleep and calories to eat), then what would people do? I was sort of envisioning a society where people live in a sort of real-life virtual reality where they have no need to leave their home and can interact with anyone else, anywhere else, via virtual reality. If we just call this virtual world video conferencing we have already achieved that state and I feel confident that in just a few decades (if that long) we will be able to plug in and get audio, touch and vision piped directly to our brain (Matrix anyone?). As more and more manufacturing gets automated, there is less and less need for people to do physical stuff, which naturally leads a giant feedback loop that inevitably leads to people having nothing to do all day. As suggested in the article, we can either penalize people for being part of a society that has evolved beyond physical labor or we can find a way to evolve our society to the level required by our brave new world.
