In related news, law enforcement has moved to ban all spin dial, numerical pin, and other locking mechanisms for which they do not have instant skeleton key access.

The question is less about whether or not there are still meaningful tasks to complete once your job is automated. The question is about whether or not you can get paid for it.

Sure, we could busy ourselves with the arts, ushering in a new Renaissance. But who's going to pay for it? What CEO in the modern work will pay these "jobless layabouts" (as they'll be labeled) to lounge around on the government dime and draw pictures all day?

Personally, I'd love to see people freed up from mundane tasks to pursue higher goals. Be it art, science, academia, etc. a lot if good could come from a world like that. But the world we live in currently will not allow such a thing to happen. Not without some radical changes first.

Really? There are people considered "moderate" regarding ISIS/L?

"You know, I'd heard that they were gruesomely beheading people with rusty knives, and burning people alive ... but I kinda figured it was no biggie until now."

Having been to Europe, I can confirm some minor indications of actual life.

Further studies to commence shortly.

You lost it on your second sentence : "absent collusion"

There will always be collusion in limited markets. Perhaps not immediately, but over the course of a few years, it will creep in and become status quo. At that point, getting rid of the collusion takes an act of congress, or in this case, a presidential decree.

Only by opening up the market, can you eliminate collusion, by making it cost prohibitive.

My guess : See the world. Think about how far we've come in the last 40 years.

40 years ago, Pong was first released on home console. And now I'm using a device with orders of magnitude more computational power than all of the pong consoles ever created combined. I just asked this device where I should go for lunch. It gave me a few suggestions and helpfully drew me a map.

40 years ago, Voyager was still in the planning phases. It wouldn't be launched for another two years. And now, it's exited the heliosphere, and taken the most amazing Family Portrait ever captured.

And I can't begin to imagine how much better life is for women, minorities, homosexuals, or really anyone that's not a 'normal' white male, compared to 40 years ago

Given the option of dying at 80, or living to see what another 40 years might hold... well ...

It's transitive.

Cameras cause shorter yellows.
Shorter yellows cause accidents.
Ergo, cameras cause accidents

Of course, this presupposes a greedy and corrupt government that would willfully endanger their own people to earn a buck, which of course sounds completely ... uh ... well it actually sounds completely plausible. So yeah, let's go with that.

Do you think that the phone in your pocket is actually doing the voice recognition and translation?

Put your phone into airplane mode and try.

The actual voice recognition software is "in the cloud," if you'll excuse the jargon. Your phone just saves the snippet of voice as a sound file and sends that file back to the Apple/Google/MS servers to process.

The given reasons are to improve their recognition software. Every time you change a word that went through the process, the server learns a little more. Of course, there may be other reasons to take everything you've ever said into your phone and store it in a centralized database...

True. The cost becomes moot if we simply don't have the ability to fix anything

But we've done it in the past. Japan and Germany are looking quite nice these days, despite one of them getting nuked twice and the other going through a REALLY rough stretch post WWII. Of course, the US didn't single-handedly help those countries back onto their feet, but I don't see why we couldn't leverage some UN assistance in the matter.

I think you hit the nail on the head though, in defining "long term." For most lawmakers these days, "long term" is "the next election date." Anything that happens beyond that may as well not exist We need to be able to plan for 10, 25 or even 50 years out. Mexico is going to be our neighbor for a long long time. It would behoove us to help them out.

I'm not saying that we should bankroll them indefinitely. Just get the ball rolling.

But really, it's all hypothetical anyway. Considering the job we've done helping other countries around the world, I doubt we could actually improve our southern neighbors.

You assume the owners can actually see what's passing through their wires.

How's that working out so far?

If we're going to dump some money into the problem, we should target the root of the problem, not a symptom.

Initial investment. Probably.

Long term maintenance and upkeep: probably not.