I think that you may be failing to separate the dissimilarities between two different ideas, "service economy vs. industrial economy" [1] and "robot revolution"

I think that you may be failing to separate the dissimilarities between two different ideas, "service economy vs. industrial economy" [1] and "robot revolution". The two share the single commonality that I think you've latched on to, that they both involve people whose entire job is to build ideas that they don't manufacture themselves, but are otherwise completely separate and the thoughts you've noticed don't transfer. The "land of smokestacks and cheap labor" thought comes solely from the division between service and industrial labor, noting that, at the present moment, someone has to be doing the industrial labor. The badness of industrial jobs is an unfortunate consequence of bloody evolution horribly murdering anybody that tries to fix it [2]; service jobs bottom out in overwork and psychological problems, while industrial jobs bottom out in pollution, disease, and dismemberment. The problem is now is that part of the global economy is forced to remain on industrial labor when they should have advanced to service labor. The "in the future we'll live off our ideas" thought is entirely derived from idea of the robot revolution, which explicitly rejects the very existence of the "land of smokestacks and cheap labor". Indeed, the robot revolution will force everybody into service jobs, because it will do to industrial jobs what automation has already done to agricultural jobs: automate them all away. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_economy#/media/File:Gdp-and-labour-force-by-sector.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_economy#/media/File:Gd... 2: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/