Technology displacing workers

[Person Man]

I'm less than optimistic about the chances that the owners and the "capable" will agree to support those for whom capitalism no longer has any clear purpose. It's hardly as if they have any real political power.

For the time being, we have plenty of low-level service work to go around. Technology won't be replacing hospice workers for at least several decades, for instance, and as long as this kind of labor remains dirt cheap it's unlikely that the McDonalds and Wal-Marts of the world will bother to mechanize it.

Define "decades". If you really mean "hospice" as a place you go to die, it is already a major priority to automize those workers as well. Especially in countries that have a lot of olds.

You could start seeing automated ordering counters at fast food places anytime now. Though the actual cooking probably won't start being automated until about 2025 or 2030.
My take on it is that there is a potential boom for technology positions as service positions go away. Then again, along with a higher minimium wage, this should encourage people to get into some sort of technological trade.

Perhaps as robots and computers productions can create new domestic jobs if there isn't the infrastructure in poor countries.  

[Person Man]

Assuming appropriate market mechanisms are allowed to work "properly," technology just changes the nature of jobs, and the relative pay scales between different kinds of jobs. So it is probably somewhat accurate to attribute some of the growing wealth inequality on technological innovation (heck back when most of the human species made about the same - just enough to keep barely alive and reproduce), but not the lack of jobs.

Regarding the part I've underlined - what do you think the vast majority of humanity, under capitalism's heel, makes now?  Nothing has changed, Torie. 

Well yeah, the global South's progress has been astonishing but one must wonder if it has made live more difficult back up North. Though I will buy the argument that growth has simply shifted and that an equilbrium could be possible in a few decades, say 2050-2070ish, without causing much more pain in the good 'ol USA. 

Everything has changed opebo, and much has changed in my own lifetime. Been to Mexico lately? It is nothing like it was when I was a kid. Heck, in my gardener's little town of maybe 10,000 when he was a kid, only one family had a car and money, and to get there, you needed to drive 3 hours on dirt roads. Now about a third of the population own cars, and the place is bustling. There is a substantial middle class. Tecate on the border is the same way. When I was a kid, Tijuana had no paved roads. Now it does of course, and also has a very substantial middle class, and most of the horrible hovels and tin shacks put up by squatters with no utilities are gone. They are all gone in Tecate, which used to have about 5 miles of them strung along the road to Ensenada. Granted, a few places are still not too far away from our species' beginning. But most places are these days are. The increasing wealth of the developing world, and the standard of living of the average Joe, is simply stunning to me - and gratifying. Most of it has happened my lifetime.

And then there is Thailand, which presumably you know about, with a rapidly increasing standard of living - very rapid. 

Facts just don't get in the way of your ideology do they?