Count me in the boat that says thinking about this now is too little, too late. Will automation lead to economic collapse? What do you think led to the present

Count me in the boat that says thinking about this now is too little, too late. Will automation lead to economic collapse? What do you think led to the present economic collapse? The economy as a whole has bounced back, like it does. Why can't the people who were laid off find jobs? You hear a lot of talk about welfare "paying people not to work"— I think that neglects the fact that, in the United States, jobs are welfare. The farmer who "grows" your corn gets paid to sit in an automated combine all day doing nothing. The factory worker gets paid to watch the robots all day to make sure they're doing it right, and most of the time, they are. Even the computerized desk jobs which are supposed to be the manual labor of our era: how many times have you worked with someone whose job was to sit there all day copying rows from one Excel sheet into another? How many times have you, as a programmer, written a ten-line perl script which makes an entire division obsolete, and watched as that division is tasked with the new job of running the perl script? There isn't going to be another revolution; we're only incremental steps away from these people having literally nothing to do. The farmer isn't going to get a job designing combines. The factory worker isn't going to get a job designing robots. The old lady in the office is never going to learn Perl, and no one is going to get a job flipping burgers or washing dishes or stocking shelves. They're going to go on welfare, or, if we haven't got our heads out of our asses by then, they are going to starve to death.