Taffy you won't be around to reassure your daughter that everything will be OK during the great dislocation, but you can do something for her right now: Make sure she chooses an occupation that will still be around when she is old enough to start working.

Well, the good old days are gone, and a story on the Futurism website demonstrates why: Changying Precision Technology Co.’s cellphone factory in China recently replaced 90% of its workers with machines and saw productivity increase by 250% while the number of product defects fell by 80%. This is great news for the company, not so great news for the now-unemployed workers.


Because free-market capitalism moves relentlessly toward innovation and efficiency, this is a phenomenon that will be repeated in small steps and big leaps in every industrialized society.


And he quotes perhaps the brainiest guy in the world, scientist Stephen Hawking, as saying the “rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining.”


There is something bigger than retraining and education to be considered, though. On some not-too-distant day, it will become clear that our civilization has become so reliant on highly efficient, wondrously intelligent machinery that we simply do not need that many people to work in traditional jobs. There will be plenty of wealth to go around, but not that much work. Unless we want millions to starve or go homeless or riot in the streets, our society will need to guarantee a minimum income for everyone by letting all citizens share in the vast wealth created by robot labor.

I can't copy the whole article unfortunately, but here are 2 points in the conclusion that most of us will have to address in the next 10 years maybe, and that our children definitely will have to address (they apply to Europe as well as to America):

• In a country built on self-reliance, the Protestant work ethic and meritocracy, can we adjust to a very different idea about how we spend our lives?

• Can the antigovernment philosophy that infuses and informs much of American politics ever accept the redistributive mechanisms that would be necessary to provide a minimum income to all?