You certainly could get to a point where it's just too much of a bother to even keep track of a low-achieving human employee vs. having a robot do it. Those people could essentially become unemployable. Some people could be encouraged to try harder to achieve, but in many cases you can't get blood out of a turnip. Every year the percentage of people who fail to make the grade could increase as robots gain capabilities.

I'm sure your fine with that because they're receiving what they're worth. But if it's not handled correctly, these hoards of "useless" people could end up stepping out of your little free market box, turning into angry mobs and burning everything down.

If the demand for productive labor can be filled by more robots, the value of human labor can still stay at zero.

What "actual issue"? I just soundly disproved everything you stated.

There must be some kind of vague concept in your head that you can't seem to actually express, but you're just sure that I "don't get it".

The whole point of this topic is that as the supply of labor (provided by workers and/or robots) goes up, the value goes down. Eventually, many people's market value may end up to be essentially zero vs. robots, regardless of what kind of country they live in. You would then probably advocate that we encourage them to work for free; problem solved!

The approaches of the past may not apply it all in the potentially a drastically different future dominated by self-directed automation.

The problem is that median wages have been stagnating for decades.

Your solution to the problem is to lower them further.

I know that they're completely different. Copyright fanbois are the ones who don't realize that copyrights are a ham-fisted attempt to make an infinitely replicable idea seem more like a physical object via creating artificial scarcity through government fiat.

And the differences don't apply to my point: You do some work. You get paid for it. Then you should move on and do more work. Your grandchildren should not be able to charge rents a century down the road based on artificially created scarcity without having to do work themselves. That makes no economic sense.

Indeed those documents were very valuable. Somehow they even got created without the benefit of copyright protection or ownership rights by their authors. How could that be? Maybe it's because copyright is highly overrated in the first place.

Actually, if made it past childhood, life expectancy back then wasn't dramatically less than it is now. It certainly wasn't 5X less, like the copyright terms were.

I can also never figure out why anybody gives a damn about the lifetime of the author. The crew that mudjacked my driveway 20 years ago are probably still alive. None of them are showing up here demanding tips when people park on my driveway.

That's exactly true, and in fact that's the reason that the US Constitution plainly states that copyrights are to be granted only for limited times. The founders of this country clearly wanted the public to profit from the works of others, after as little as 14 years.

Well, you would be very wrong. Fraud costs both the retailers and the banks money. The real problem is that issuing new chip cards would cost the banks more than the fraud. Not only are the cards about a dollar more expensive each, and they still have to be re-issued about every three years, but the systems that inject encrypted keys into them, and store the keys on their databases, are very expensive. Banks are notoriously cheap when it comes to spending money that won't make them money.

The other reason EMV hasn't rolled out across the U.S. is that millions of retailers have about 12 million old credit card terminals spread across the country, and most are owned by cheap store owners who don't like being told they have to spend money to replace them. Most retailers have been dragging their feet, not wanting to make an expensive change. But the new members of the breach-of-the-month club are mad about the insecure systems they've been forced to use, and are now championing the rapid switch to EMV instead of fighting it. The smaller retailers are also impacted now, and are no longer resisting.

The irony is that EMV readers for the small retailers are far, far cheaper than the old terminals, and the rates for using new companies like Square, Intuit, and PayPal are much lower than the typical old bank rates for the old credit card readers.

That's how Chip and PIN works. Your account number is still fixed, but your authorization to spend from it (your PIN) is encrypted by the chip, and is valid only for a single transaction. There are still kinks with non-electronic transactions, but those can be solved.

Look for it to be all over the US by October of next year.

9th & 10th Amendments. Unless it's a power granted to the Federal Government, or reserved by a State, it's a right retained by the people.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has ruled that even the most tenuous, indirect link to interstate commerce creates Federal jurisdiction, which means only those rights specifically enumerated are actually protected in their eyes.

If they're able to manufacture more robots, then it's life... but not as we know it.

Why stop there?

They should also add a spell checker and auto-correct to the file system driver just to make sure people haven't made any mistakes.

All the complexity you need to add is:

if (ch <= '\x1f') {
        goto FAIL;
}

How hard is that?