What?! What buildings? In the U.S., a typical 30-year-old house is ready for a major renovation, including serious energy-related overhaul. A lot of buildings older than say 50 years may need to be torn down and replaced as it'll be cheaper than fixing them up. Never mind that the population grows, so no, we still need new buildings all the time. Of course the population growth might stop or even reverse into a decline, but you'll still need new buildings. I think the real issue is that the middle class has been virtually relocated to China.

Meh, they're probably just trying to lull us into a false sense of security before deploying the dragnet.

Remember, private prisons often sell themselves on promises of 90-95% fill rates!

Another non-response. Got it.

Won't bother you again.

Well, there's still a subculture of people who do subsist on hunting and gathering. They even end up on TV shows, occasionally :)

What service? Knowing where to go and actuating the doors? I'd presume a self-driving limo will do all that, no problem.

Hence nobody watches bot wars, right?

While I'm not sure if correlation implies causation, it's certainly true that executive salaries are absurd. There is no job out there that's worth millions of dollars a year.

A lot of the data entry jobs are bullshit anyway. Most of the time it's due to workflows that are 20 years behind the times. Nobody really needs to fill out paper forms anymore in this day and age.

You know what else happened between 1970 and now? Increase of the labor force available to the developed world by around a factor of six to ten. When supply of something increases so dramatically, you should expect that the price paid for it does as well. This explains most of Krugman's observations. Robots aren't displacing human jobs - cheaper humans are displacing human jobs.

Now, I've read endless claims that due to technology, less people are working now than before. But when we look at what's going on, we see that such labor issues only exist in the developed world. And that a lot of that is because it's because it's so much harder to employ people and start new businesses than it used to be back in 1970. Rather than try to make their labor more competitive in the world, the developed world has turned around and made the problem worse while complaining about it and using that very problem as justification. For example, there are many direct effects that make hiring people more expensive, such as, minimum wage, shorter work week, and employer payments for various mandatory benefits.

And I see people continue to double down on this madness, for example, advocating shortening the work week even further. But that just means that people start to work more than one job to get by even to the point of getting paid "under the table" when the government regulation and taxation grows too much.

It's not just that these things aren't needed, but that their effect is opposite that which is intended.

Well, they can, but it'd need to be a very specialized kind of a driver. Maybe an astronaut :)

While this is certainly a flame bait, there is, sadly, some truth to that. I was quite surprised to find out that most guys in a construction crew that we hired were illiterate.

Frankly said I'll take that over drunk drivers. A failing self-driving car will, presumably, do as much as possible, given the nature of the failure, to protect everyone involved.

I'd say that most drivers are not employed as drivers and are wasting a lot of time driving their cars :)

For me personally it'd be a bit different. In the time I spend in the car I could be working on my own business, perhaps providing a couple of jobs to other people. Instead, I'm wasting time driving. An hour a day, every day, is a lot of time.

I had always heard that the residents of Iceland named it, in order to trick Viking raiding parties.

No citation, pure heresay.

I, too, would prefer the third option, but in all likelihood reality will reflect the first, go very, very wrong, which will cause the mindless reactionaries to move towards the second, like the frightened sheep they are.

Look - I want to live in Star Trek's universe as much as the next Slashdotter, but my experience with human nature tells me it ain't likely to happen in any of our lifetimes, if ever.