1. What stops the engineers from becoming obsolete? We're just further down the line. 2. Only a relatively small percentage of the population has the skills fo

1. What stops the engineers from becoming obsolete? We're just further down the line. 2. Only a relatively small percentage of the population has the skills for creative scientific and technical work such as programming and engineering. (Let's say 20%.) Once robots can do all of the work of individuals 90IQ and below, what do you do with these people? http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/5/8/02946/35811 http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/5/8/02946/35811 has an example of a channenged man being fired from McDonalds. "God, I'm so fucking angry. My brother doesn't care about the pay. He just wants the chance to be out there with people - to feel the same sort of satisfaction that all of us working stiffs experience from knowing we've contributed, however marginally, to the human machine. The kind of satisfaction that only a job can provide. He's upstairs crying right now." (Note: I am not suggesting that anyone is owed a job, here, but rather that there is a dignity involved with being able to contribute to society in some fashion, and that we could see instability with a lack of outlets for individuals.) We already see the problems in Detroit with the lack of jobs and ability to get out. While some of these people could be retrained into other fields, many cannot. We have to figure out how to keep them integrated into society, or present an alternative path. 3. Perhaps we see the example from Elf Sternberg's utopia world -- he presumed that in societies with no need for human production that people would create what they enjoyed and that the system would move to a gift culture. Perhaps. Even with power, however, we're still looking at some way to ration resources...