Almost every reply that states "people won't need to work, and will have a machine in their home that will make everything they consume", seem to be missing one BIG point:

How will the people get those machines?
The manufacturers will simply give them away for free?
The companies will purposely build something that will render themselves obsolete?

There is a point between now and utopia, where society would need to change as a whole almost overnight in order to save everyone. And when was the last time that happened with any measure of success?

The fat and ugly ones usually give it up first. How else will they get boys to like them?

p.s. I wish the above was sarcasm.

But how are the consumers going to be able to buy anything if they have no jobs?

People will ALWAYS cost more than machines. It simply takes more to maintain a human than a computer. Look at medical bills. Even with insurance, for any major problems, it will still number in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The price of a machine will go down because the cost of manufacturing reduces over its lifetime. If it breaks, just replace it. Humans still need to live, with or without a job.

I call bull on this entire statement. Housekeepers? Landfill workers? Do you have any idea how much those jobs actually pay? I'm a security guard, and I realized long ago that there isn't a single aspect to my job that couldn't be replaced with a moderately expensive security system.

There aren't enough middle class households in the world to employ the number of people who need jobs. And as robotics comes down to the consumer level, those same housekeepers would be fired anyways because a machine cost less than a person to maintain. And as those middle class careers are replaced by sophisticated software that can do the same job more efficiently, more people will join the unemployed line.

Face it, at the current rate of development, automation, and globalization, there will be an increasing amount of unemployed over the next few decades. The only people holding all the wealth are the ones who own the computers and robotics, not the ones who are making them.

THANK YOU! I've been waiting for someone to bring up this point.

*Puts on tinfoil hat*

Society doesn't seem to notice that so much information is being gathered into the hands of a few powerful entities. With paper books, CDs, DVDs, and the like, its easy to duplicate and distribute data directly. To stop the spread, you had to physically hunt down every copy or destroy the original. But there was no feasible way to keep other people from copying and distributing from the duplicate they owned. This is how many ideas, "good" or "bad", are spread outside the influence of people who sought to suppress them.

But with all this information in the "cloud" and concentrated into the servers of the few companies big enough to run them, it becomes almost trivial to make information disappear. To make ideas disappear. The concentration of knowledge, and consequently power, into the hands of profit driven organizations is a bigger threat to freedom than many people realize.

(The following is just an example, don't look too deep into it)

The Catholic Church maintained power for centuries because Bibles were written in Latin, a language only the priests and scholars could read. The lay congregation depended on someone else translating for them in order to hear the word of God. This opened the door to incredible amounts of corruption, until the invention of the printing press. Now the people could read and decide for themselves. This democratization of knowledge has benefited us all, in almost every field.

Now were turning off the presses and handing our books back to people who have the most to gain from the public's ignorance.

I'm keeping my local storage (books. CDs, etc.), if you don't mind.

If you look at many of the most difficult jobs in the world today, they are essentially apprenticeships. Doctors, lawyers, many research sciences, even some teaching careers have a period of on-the-job-training that must be fulfilled before you can take on the job officially. Event the military has a standard period of "you don't know anything I haven't taught you". Historically (thousands of years), most people entered the job they spent the rest of their life at by being an apprentice to a master.

When did that go away? It would make sense to replace the last year or 2 of high school with a form of apprenticeship. These corps expect potential employees to walk off campus with a new product ready to be sold. Seems proper that they have an active hand in the education of the populace.

Its far easier to criticize when those "frequent releases" also include a price increase every go around, along with the need to buy new equipment just to support it, changes in functionality nobody asked for, and restrictions that border on invasion of privacy.

Many Linux distros run on just about any hardware you can load it on. Can the same be said about the last 2 versions of Windows?

Why are people so anti-socialism? What's wrong with a system that attempts to equalize the state of the people?

Not joking, I'm actually very curious to find out the reasons.

True. But I do hold the credit companies and almost every business partially responsible. They introduce several incentives to use your credit cards, almost punishing you for using cash.

One year I worked at Universal Studios. If you bought a ticket with cash, you just got that one ticket for a day. But if you paid with a Mastercard, for the same price you got a yearly pass with no blackout dates and a free poster. Visa customers sometimes got discounts for paying with a Visa card. The current marketplace and the businesses that manipulate it must bear some of the responsibility.

Its easy to say people dig their own hole. But isn't the person who gave you the shovel and showed you where to dig at least a little obligated to help pull you back out?

Some would argue that "profit" is a wholly human, intellectual creation and a perversion of our survival instinct. Most creatures of this world only do what is necessary to survive. Even those with and ordered society among themselves don't seek to purposely destroy for destruction's sake. Humans are the only ones who do that, who kill outside of the needs of survival.

"Humans make their living FROM the environment, not FOR it."

How about making our living WITH it?

Central Air Conditioning. You just defeated your own argument with that one line. "Nature" is NOT a centralized, autonomous entity. There is no "master control" maintaining the balance on this planet. Everything on this planet exist through a self-correcting balance of competition and cooperation. Its brutal, but not merciless. Anything that steps too out of line is put down by resistance from all other participants within its environment. Or, it wipes out everything around it, and starves to death because it has removed the infrastructure that created the ideal conditions in the first place. Guess which side of that coin humans are leaning towards?

Maybe that's the problem. Governments and terrorist are effective because of one thing: fear. Fear keeps (most) people from breaking the law and fear keeps the same people from standing up to those who disregard it. So fear of harming someone else or of being harmed hands too much power over to these bastards. Maybe if people were less afraid, more outraged, and more willing to make personal sacrifices for the greater good, we wouldn't have to worry about this in the first place.

What about the possibility he may have been found before now if the news had reported it and Wikipedia hadn't "edited" the ordeal from his profile?