When the robots take your job robots and material goods will become cheap too. Return to the land. Produce your own food and many other things. Enjoy life. Fret less. Be.

Your lack of imagination and drive is your problem. Look for land where it is cheaper. That's what I did. Worked. The money you spend on rent each month could instead be building you an asset. With renting you have nothing.

Sorry you live in the wrong place. Pick a better location with less services and lower costs. That's what I did. Works.

No force involved and people are already returning to the land in droves. It's been happening for several decades now.

It is time to eliminate the patent system. The only reward should be delivering the product to customers and making the sales.

No, actually most of what is in my house was created by me and has never been to a city and mostly those things were created from materials right here on our own land. I have few possessions.

It's a very different world than you are used to, clearly.

"Trying to find new jobs for billions of people is a good idea but obviously very hard because whatever the new jobs are, they will probably be so fundamentally different from anything that exists today that meaningful planning is almost impossible."

Return to the land. Farm. Raise up your own food and some extra. Harvest your own local fuel. Build your own house. All of these things are doable and it brings your cost of living to nearly nil. No need for 'jobs'. Be.

"Where there is human, there is light"

Not really. You won't find any light from us. I am careful to not waste light. What goes up to the sky is a waste. It's not being useful. We are also minimally noisy and not polluting.

Just because there are humans does not mean there will be light, noise or pollution.

The problem is choices. Urban areas have too many people choosing not to conserve and letting their noise, light and pollutants out into the environment. One might argue the problem is simply too many people in those places such that they don't care. They have other priorities.

Where we are is pretty deep blue on the map but I bet it is even bluer in reality as we are in a valley surrounded by mountains that lift the sound up over us providing an extra buffer. Loving it in the deep blue.

Interesting to note the map also looks like the city lights maps.

I've got this covered. We'll have population increases over the next century up to the point of a sustainable level at 50 Billion. This will allow one quarter of the earth's land area to be set aside as natural parks areas, move people out of the urban areas and back to the land, get almost everyone involved at least to some degree with producing at least 10% of their own food, improve health and education all while lowering consumption by 90%.

"It costs a lot of money to keep everything compatible."

What a short sited response you have. Consider:

1) there are hundreds of millions of older iOS devices and Macs.

2) older iOS offer an inexpensive way for new users to come into the fold and become customers.

3) Apple makes the vast majority of their money on software and content.

Ergo, by offering legacy support they greatly increase their market share and their income.

The same argument could have been made for PCs except they don't last.

Play the long game. It's for winners.

We desperately need legacy support.

1) All existing and past applications should be able to run on current platforms. This can be done economically and gracefully with enveloping. That would even allow modern OSs to run software from all previous OSs even those not in their lineages or hardware histories. There is no good excuse for Apple, Microsoft and others making the OS's not compatible with legacy software. Access to legacy software is key to our being able to access our data into the future.

2) OS makers should be building their OSs so that they run on older hardware. This can be done gracefully and economically with targeted compiling and fall back on features that older hardware is not able to support.

Companies are driving our data to extinction. Legacy support should be required. If it was required they would figure out how to do it gracefully because that means economically.

I prefer having a dumb home that passively does what it should do. That is what I designed and built. It is low cost, low maintenance, low taxes and passive. It just works. It keeps us sheltered from rain, warm in the winter and cool in the summer with a minimum of effort, cost and upkeep.

Smart Homes are a Dumb Idea that gadget makers have been trying to sell for a long time. The problem is do you really want to be upgrading and replacing your home's parts every five years or more frequently?

What will be worse is subscription homes. It's called renting.

No dice.

"growth in Google's primary business, search advertising, has flattened out at about 20 percent a year for the last few years."

Gee... Most businesses would be overjoyed to have an annual growth of 20% in their main business. Google is doing extraordinarily well. There is always some pundit who writes gloom and doom on the off chance they might be right and then can look back and say, "See! I said it!" totally ignoring all their own fails at prediction. Standard quackery with a broad baseline like fortune telling through the ages.

I designed one that was activated by a tank filling with fluid to a certain height. It then texted the delivery guy to come take the fluid. I can't give you my solution, it was very low level and simple based on local tech, and it wasn't a neat portable thing for your toddler to carry although it could be a panic button in the middle of the house. However, any competent hacker, er, I mean local technician, should be able to rig something together like this for you. A two year old can learn a lot and be quite responsive.