1/6/18 Still Thinking About Our Future?

    Still intrigued by Wife's conversation from Monday, I say that part of advancing science means we need fewer and fewer skilled people to take care of the masses.  I saw it in the fabs making our microchips from when I started in 1995 to twenty years later where almost everything was automated.  I cannot imagine needing tons of people to run the fabs of the future.  A handful of engineers and a handful of technicians to keep the robots happy and running should be enough.  This has to be translating in other industries as robots gradually do the work of man.  Because of this, again, fewer skilled humans will be necessary as we move further into the future.

    I say we are still relying on the same 20% of the population that goes on to college and gets further educated.  The number may be more but it isn't much more than that.  I realize that real ingenuity and life changers don't necessarily need college.  These people that change our lives for the better or worse see things differently, they didn't need to mature in an educational environment.  I don't know that the Henry Fords, or the Bill Gates's, or even a Richard Branson would have gained much from the learning that happens at a university.
    I am talking about the working man of the future, the one who will keep the robots running to keep them making cars, or other technical doodads.  Work and learning can be focused on to what kind of job one will be employed at.  Maybe trucks with products drive themselves to large warehouse destinations outside of towns, and then smaller manned vehicles deliver within a city, this would require a certain amount of people still being able to drive, even when they tell us automated cars are right around the corner.

    We may get to a society which ironically makes newer gadgets for a society that won't be able to afford them.  But then what?  Maybe at that point the robots become customers.  A buddy at work keeps telling me capitalism doesn't work because it relies on a pyramid scheme type of a few at the top profiting from a huge ignorant base.  I don't see that changing, as long as the products keep selling at a price any Joe can afford, our economy will continue.  Some people may not like our capitalist ways, but I don't think another system would have allowed so much growth so fast.
    We went from discovering flight in 1903 to flying turbojets in 1939, that is crazy, but maybe that was the push of a wartime effort.  We have just seemed to accomplish everything quickly.  The big IBM mainframes started in 1952, to the smartphone in the late 1990s.  Who can compete?  Communism went bankrupt trying to keep up the arms race, nobody else has even made it to the moon.

    I still think we are okay.  There may be fewer people working in the future, and the bulk of society living off of welfare or some other creation, but as long as we still get to make creative products, the world is still going to need good ole US of A products