Future Is Here, Robots Are Here. What About Us, Humans?

Self-driving cars are already a reality. More of them will appear in the streets within a couple of years, and as they are going to become widely used, more drivers will become jobless. exactly the same way as Skype and other VoIP services together with mobile internet almost killed international phone calls industry, self-driving cars will transform the transportation industry. Lots of people will lose their jobs.



The same will happen in other industries: robots will replace people. Hence the question - what are those people going to do in order to earn money? What new professions can appear? What can humans do better than robots? Or what kind of unique jobs can humans do which cannot be done by robots?

Probably we can think about "alternative" ways, e.g. grow vegetables to have something to eat. Probably we need to master something "practical" to be able to provide basic services to our neighbours and thus have a kind of communal / tribal life: I can build houses, you can repair mechanisms, he is plumber, she can milk cows, etc. But all these things are about saving resources, not generating them. It's possible to save money, when you have a regular job with a sufficient pay, but you cannot save when you have no income.

I believe there will be a great demand for sharing services (like AirBnb) with an option to pay each other without money. E.g. I provide service A and and say it's worth of X credits. You provide service B and say it's worth of Y credits. When I need to use your services, I give you a right to use my services worth a certain amount of credits. But neither you nor me send those credits to each other. The credits will not have any monetary connection, they will not be converted into "real money", they will not be taxable. Of course, governments shall not be happy, but when governments are no longer able to provide enough jobs, citizens will be getting out of their control and such alternative payment mechanisms will appear.

The life will change as drastically as it changed when factories with conveyors appeared and replaced manual labour in many areas. We will figure out ways to help each other with what we can do with our own hands.

But the main question is the same: what can we do better than robots.