Not long ago, an online acquaintance, Jared Kent, pointed out that in the future we won’t need as many people working, basically because all the robots will take care of the labor; everything from autonomous driving and sorting to mail delivery, garbage collection, bus drivers, pilots to robotics instructors, teachers, military personnel, and prostitutes. Wow, forget about that last one, too many sci-fi novels I’ve read lately.

My very wise acquaintance, Mr. Kent, of course had very different examples, as he is an engineer living in an area with a lot of manufacturing, although not as many workers in that sector as in earlier periods. What do I think of this topic regarding the reality that we will not need as many workers in the future?

Well sometimes it seems that way, I mean we have over 7 billion people on the planet, and with the advent of robotics we don’t need that many followers or workers, yikes. Will nature take care of that problem for us? Oh again, that won’t be pretty. In fact, it’s not pretty anymore, and it’s more or less happening right now. In some places, unions welcome robots to increase production, allowing the company to make more profit by offsetting their higher wages, health care benefits, pensions, and other demands, but that’s a slippery slope, isn’t it? I mean, how many times can we bail out the American Autoworkers Union pension funds?

The reality is that other nations will soon have robotic manufacturing as well. Japan and Germany are also leading the way, just as China is advancing rapidly on these technologies. Manufacturers in China trying to stay ahead with rising wages are investing in robotics, so where does that leave them with respect to domestic job growth, spending and the economy? If there are too many people out of work, what do you do with all those humans? That is a scary question for a centralized communist government bent on maintaining control.

What about our own nation? Can we really afford to pay people not to work, and if so, at what expense to our future economy, monetary strength, and social stability? You’re thinking here, maybe you should be, it’s a solvable dilemma, but we can’t wait too long to address these issues, the future is coming, and we already know that time flows forward only in that linear progression in this dimension. Please consider all this and think about it.