Things are different now
I'm really pleased that the discussion here focuses on the very real problem of job loss or and dislocation (aka, "creative destruction," great if you're not the one destroyed). But Christie's figure for jobs for robots by 2025 in the US is 50%. That's just 13 years! Right now unemployment is at 9.1% and that's stuck. Everyone out there is screaming "jobs, jobs, jobs!" but there is stagnation and ideological gridlock on what to do even with that.
Technological change is moving much, much faster than during the Luddite era in the early industrial revolution. If anything the rate of change is accelerating. But I don't see any form of support structure to help new careerists -- much less old careerists -- identify possibilities and get the resources to keep themselves marketable for literally decades. Nobody has even mentioned the cognitive side of work where developments like IBM's Watson suggest rapid development and displacement of jobs too. IBM wants to sell Watson to big law firms and health provider services to do large volumes of information searching and aggregation -- things currently being done by people with jobs.
There's nearly 7 billion people on the planet. We've already automated or outsourced to cheap hands a lot of work that used to make a living for people in this country. I can hardly imagine what's it's going to be like when the world has 9 billion folks who need employment to be part of respectable humanity and we have machines that can do everything they're capable of doing that don't draw any wages at all.
