I'm willing to bet that this will not get better. It's going to get worse. Much, much worse. As mass employment disappears, you're going to have millions of people become destitute across the country, and many rural, semi-rural and suburban settlements will simply no longer be viable. Some families will return to subsistence farming, but many others will flee to the larger cities. The current homeless camps will expand into large slums and shanty towns, while gated communities connect into upper class enclaves. When you see in Powell Station will be the general situation across all US cities in twenty years.
This has been feared with every technological advancement for a couple of centuries now, from textile automation in the late 1700s to the 'robots' in the 80s and more. The thing is, it has yet to come true - not even close.
Most of the jobs being done by the people reading this weren't even invented when they were born...
That's fair, but on the other hand, none of those other waves of automation have empowered machines to do knowledge work, the last refuge of human productivity. That's the barrel our generation is staring down.
