"I think the real question is, how are we going to restructure to deal with high levels of unemployment, so that we stay stable and productive? ..."
The real issue - social issue at least, is how will the people support themselves. As more an more jobs are automated away, it becomes unfeasible for everyone to rely on a paycheck to feed themselves. I am not seeing a Welfare State heavily taxing profits to provide for an increasingly unemployed population. There will be plenty of suffering from the ones whose services are not needed anymore.
For this reason, it is increasingly important for common people to own their means of production. The only job you cannot be laid off is the self employed one. This is more and more an strategic issue for the household economy to have at least one bread winner working on their own venture.
Seems like this century will be very entrepreneurial, or won't be at all,
You're right, I should have been more clear. "High levels of unemployment" isn't right; I should have said something like "increasingly rapid dissolution of the current employment model". I certainly didn't mean to imply I thought the answer was a "Welfare State", though I'm probably not as opposed to the idea of socialism as you seem to be.
Dramatically increased entrepreneurialism certainly counts as restructuring.
Hey, a mild form of socialism is great in many ways.
I have been thinking a lot lately about the rights to "Life, Freedom and Pursue of Happiness". In particular, I don't think the founders meant the right to Life to mean "right to not being killed by direct unjustified violent action". If you have the right to Life, you should have the right to the means to stay alive and healthy.
My critic to the Welfare State idea is not that we should not care for our own people. It has more to do with keeping the citizenship disempowered. If you cannot provide yourself with basic needs by your own means and work, because the barriers of entry are so high... then the only option left is to have someone bail you out of the mess.
As techies, I feel we are very vulnerable. Think Spolsky's Development Abstraction Layer (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstractio...). We can fall in a comfort zone by being productive within a larger organization that extracts economic benefits from our creations... but once we become severed from that infrastructure, many of us become helpless.
The real issue - social issue at least, is how will the people support themselves. As more an more jobs are automated away, it becomes unfeasible for everyone to rely on a paycheck to feed themselves. I am not seeing a Welfare State heavily taxing profits to provide for an increasingly unemployed population. There will be plenty of suffering from the ones whose services are not needed anymore.
For this reason, it is increasingly important for common people to own their means of production. The only job you cannot be laid off is the self employed one. This is more and more an strategic issue for the household economy to have at least one bread winner working on their own venture.
Seems like this century will be very entrepreneurial, or won't be at all,