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Manna by Marshall Brain.

More of a transhumanist treatise than a novel, it makes a sharp point about where automation might inevitably lead.

As geeks, you should aready know this story.

Oblig: http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

Manna - management by algorithm - the final precursor step to total automation.

..or total subjugation by our man made god... once a system is in place where we've given up our free will to a machine and generations are born into and accepting that system, it will be almost impossible to escape it.

Oblig: http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

Manna - management by algorithm - the final precursor step to total automation.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

Manna's job was to manage the store, and it did this in a most interesting way. Think about a normal fast food restaurant. A group of employees worked at the store, typically 50 people in a normal restaurant, and they rotated in and out on a weekly schedule. The people did everything from making the burgers to taking the orders to cleaning the tables and taking out the trash. All of these employees reported to the store manager and a couple of assistant managers. The managers hired the employees, scheduled them and told them what to do each day. This was a completely normal arrangement. In the early twenty-first century, there were millions of businesses that operated in this way.

But the fast food industry had a problem, and Burger-G was no different. The problem was the quality of the fast food experience. Some restaurants were run perfectly. They had courteous and thoughtful crew members, clean restrooms, great customer service and high accuracy on the orders. Other restaurants were chaotic and uncomfortable to customers. Since one bad experience could turn a customer off to an entire chain of restaurants, these poorly-managed stores were the Achilles heel of any chain.

To solve the problem, Burger-G contracted with a software consultant and commissioned a piece of software. The goal of the software was to replace the managers and tell the employees what to do in a more controllable way. Manna version 1.0 was born. ...

The first part is a rather depression dystopia. The second part is pure utopia.

Read the short story "Manna" (free book). In the story, most countries evolve into a somewhat dystopian jobless society. People get a minimum income, most of that being provided in kind: government housing with free TV and a cafeteria serving palatable food. But no hopes of ever doing better, no opportunities for other activities of leisure, and after a while you can imagine those benefits will get cut: less meal choices, singles will now have to share their room. And you are not allowed to leave the compound anymore either.

It all comes down to the question Marx posed: who owns the means of production? Who owns the robots? That may well gravitate to private owners, while governments increasingly struggle to balance their budget and provide for a growing number of unemployed, while income from natural resources is running out fast. And then what? You'd kind of hope the megacorps will go under with us since they'd have no one left to sell to. But even if we end up owning the robots collectively, you're still likely to end up with a centrally planned, communist society, nominally designed for efficiency rather than comfort, like the world in "This Perfect Day"

http://marshallbrain.com/manna... Might as well add this to the viewing list also. It at least hints at a new economic model....

You mean like this
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

And how long until people call for efficiency with set serving sizes?

Just going to leave this here.

Obligatory: http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

Yep, the good old days for income equality peaked 30-60 years ago.
What we are seeing now is a slow and deliberately controlled downward spiral.

Wealth transfers in the past 20-30 years are enormous, and are one way, to a very small percentage of people(you know who I'm talking about)

Do yourself a favor and read some of the stuff Marshall Brain has written about this subject, its pretty interesting.

Depending on how you want to think about it, it was funny or inevitable or symbolic that the robotic takeover did not start at MIT, NASA, Microsoft or Ford. It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17. It seemed like such a simple thing at the time, but May 17 marked a pivotal moment in human history.

Burger-G was a fast food chain that had come out of nowhere starting with its first restaurant in Cary. The Burger-G chain had an attitude and a style that said "hip" and "fun" to a wide swath of the American middle class. The chain was able to grow with surprising speed based on its popularity and the public persona of the young founder, Joe Garcia. Over time, Burger-G grew to 1,000 outlets in the U.S. and showed no signs of slowing down. If the trend continued, Burger-G would soon be one of the "Top 5" fast food restaurants in the U.S.

The "robot" installed at this first Burger-G restaurant looked nothing like the robots of popular culture. It was not hominid like C-3PO or futuristic like R2-D2 or industrial like an assembly line robot. Instead it was simply a PC sitting in the back corner of the restaurant running a piece of software. The software was called "Manna", version 1.0*.

Manna's job was to manage the store, and it did this in a most interesting way. Think about a normal fast food restaurant. A group of employees worked at the store, typically 50 people in a normal restaurant, and they rotated in and out on a weekly schedule. The people did everything from making the burgers to taking the orders to cleaning the tables and taking out the trash. All of these employees reported to the store manager and a couple of assistant managers. The managers hired the employees, scheduled them and told them what to do each day. This was a completely normal arrangement. In the early twenty-first century, there were millions of businesses that operated in this way.

You don't need to tax people, only production and exchange. Anyway you're right, we're nowhere near the level of automation needed to give everyone a basic income. These plans are all very premature.

If you wait until the end of the automation revolution, it will be too late. Right now, we have a large wealth disparity problem in western society - a large portion of society's wealth is going to a small portion of the population. It's a side-effect of capitalism - you have to have money to make money, and if you have a lot of money it can make an even greater amount of money. We have tolerated it up to this point because capitalism works for the most part and is better than the alternatives. However, with automation the capitalist/labor balance is broken and the capitalist no longer needs labor. This will greatly accelerate the wealth disparity already present in the system and pretty soon the 1% will have ALL the money instead of just most of it. Along with that money comes political power, the rich certainly aren't going to support UBI legislation once they no longer need workers. The best you can hope for is the Terrafoam projects from Manna, if you aren't just summarily executed when you are no longer useful.

All previous waves of technological change increased employment. So why do you believe "This time is different"?

The Second Intelligent Species spells it out, or Manna if you prefer it couched as fiction.

All previous waves of technological change increased employment. So why do you believe "This time is different"?

The Second Intelligent Species spells it out, or Manna if you prefer it couched as fiction.

If a "basic income" program is implemented in .us, I rather suspect it will resemble the "welfare islands" concept of Jerry Pournelle or the "Terrafoam" concept of Marshall Brain. . . Massive barracks and industrial-style population management of the residents.

It would be survivable, but not pleasant. . .

Your sarcastic tone was unnecessary to get your point across. In the long run it's impossible to argue with the benefits of industrial efficiency, and robots are a clear winner over humans for efficiency.

The problem is that society (an umbrella term encompassing individuals and their attitudes; government lawmakers and executives; and corporations' leadership) collectively has few ideas (and even fewer plans to actually implement those ideas) about what to do to take care of the laborers whose jobs are being taken away by this efficiency. We continue to see global population growth; there are more people than ever, but fewer jobs are needed as automation increases.

The whole "let them eat cake" philosophy won't work. You're talking about a 21st century revolution in the way business is conducted. You can't expect the current societal structures and economic theories to continue to work when you're making such a drastic change. The change is ultimately for the better, but only if we change our society to look after the people who will be out of work.

Let's hope that industrial efficiency and automation helps us reach the high ground, instead of delving into a horrid dystopia.

Still relevant: http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

Well, I've worked in the IT field and currently am in contracting work. I can say it will be many many years before my job as a carpenter, sheet metal worker, tile worker, and plumber will be replaced. It's simply not possible for a machine to do what I do. I may also add that I still do IT work on the side as a systems security consultant. Unfortunately robots can replace many mundane jobs. If you are skilled, you have no worries for many years.

Your sarcastic tone was unnecessary to get your point across. In the long run it's impossible to argue with the benefits of industrial efficiency, and robots are a clear winner over humans for efficiency.

The problem is that society (an umbrella term encompassing individuals and their attitudes; government lawmakers and executives; and corporations' leadership) collectively has few ideas (and even fewer plans to actually implement those ideas) about what to do to take care of the laborers whose jobs are being taken away by this efficiency. We continue to see global population growth; there are more people than ever, but fewer jobs are needed as automation increases.

The whole "let them eat cake" philosophy won't work. You're talking about a 21st century revolution in the way business is conducted. You can't expect the current societal structures and economic theories to continue to work when you're making such a drastic change. The change is ultimately for the better, but only if we change our society to look after the people who will be out of work.

Let's hope that industrial efficiency and automation helps us reach the high ground, instead of delving into a horrid dystopia.

Still relevant: http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

I can't leave this discussion without a mention of Manna by Marshal Brain http://marshallbrain.com/manna... It's two extreme scenarios for what might happen if we are able to replace the entire workforce.

Gaaaah - looks like Greg Egan's stuff done badly but I may have hit a few rough spots.
What's with the flag icon? Is he pushing libertarian politics or something?


The assumption of there being no resource limits appears to put it firmly in the Fantasy end of SF&F, but then again so is anything about a manned US space program at the moment :(

For all of their faults (and there are many to be sure,) most large (and even mid size) corporations would fall apart without CxOs or some equivalent to keep everything moving in the same direction.

If you haven't read Marshall Brain's short story Manna, or similar things, it may be worth investing some time. Some people put forward the idea that these manager/director jobs can be done one day by PCs, mostly using existing technologies. It's an interesting idea with far reaching consequences for our societies of today if it were ever to happen.

I can't leave this discussion without a mention of Manna by Marshal Brain http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
It's two extreme scenarios for what might happen if we are able to replace the entire workforce.

I won't argue the merits of the prose or storytelling, but I always recall this post from 2003: http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

What happens is that we'll replicate the Terrafoam scenario from Manna:

http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

This exact choice is contemplated and explored in a short story I really enjoy: Manna by Marshall Brain. You can read it on his website: http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

Maybe he plans to become Burger-G?

Also, Pudzer's being more than a little dishonest. If $3 an hour is the difference between human or robot service now and he's willing to swich and the cost of automation is decreasing, then one of two things must be true either he's lying about these facts, or "Suzie" is going to end up without of a job regardless of whether we raise the minimum wage. So increasing the minimum wage will have pretty much no effect (the research indicates that raising the minimum wage tends to have a mildly positive effect on employment), or not increasing the minimum wage would, at best, keep Suzie working in a terrible job for a couple of additional years until she's replace by a slightly cheaper robot.

Frankly, I would place my bet on Pudzer being entirely full of shit. This isn't about jobs at all, it's about Pudzer's company not having to pay it's employees more money. It seems to me, that this putz would say anything at all to try and make it so they don't have to pay them a single penny more and he can collect a multi-million dollar bonus for keeping costs down.

I work in automation. It isn't so much that minimum wage matters... sure if you have really, really low minimum wage and people willing to work for it then you might just throw labor at a problem, but typically we automate for a variety of reasons: improved accuracy/quality, better throughput (a robot loading a machine can often keep up better than a human, which means I get more throughput out of my expensive machine), more consistent process. We *want* to automate everything, and when we look at what we *can* automate, it's always the boring repetitive jobs anyway. So it doesn't matter that much whether someone's making $6 or $8 or $10 an hour, if we can automate it we will. Certainly we are growing more concerned with the fact that a growing percentage of the population isn't going to be able to find the easy put-nut-A-on-bolt-B type of work anymore, and there's definitely a portion of those people who may not be able to be retrained to do something that a robot can't do. That's a societal problem, not an engineering problem. First is understanding that this isn't the same thing we saw in the industrial revolution. If I gave a laborer a steam shovel I made them a lot more productive. If I just say "stand aside while this robot does the job" that's different. And no, you're not going to take someone who works on an assembly line and retrain them to be a robot programmer. That's absurd. They won't get a job assembling robots either, as Fanuc apparently has a "lights out" manufacturing facility for their robots - it's a completely automated line. Minimum wage is doing a good thing: encouraging factories to automate by making the payback look better. Automated factories are better. Automated restaurants are probably better too. The fact that we have a very low skilled portion of the populace is a separate issue that needs addressing... maybe a guaranteed minimum income, I don't know. But coming up with make-work jobs for them is no better than putting them in prison and having them dig holes and fill them in. Also relevant to this discussion - has everyone seen the short story, "Manna"?

The damn link: http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

Why can't we have both?

Taxing the rent-seekers that would literally* drown in the coming profits will be necessary. Necessary to KEEP giving them hilarious, robogrown profits, but whatever, UBI means the rest won't starve. Probably.

With that said, there's a few supplements that should've been a citizen's dividend in the first place. The Manna guy names a few, though some are just rebranding existing taxes as citizen's due: http://marshallbrain.com/robot...

* https://xkcd.com/1260/

Marshall Brain was writing about this in the '90s. Nothing new here.

Oblig Manna link.

Check out this excellent short story, it contemplates 2 possible paths in the scenario you describe: http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

Ranton put it fairly concisely in a different reply to GP.

People as a whole won't become dumber and lazier. Also the same thing as why I'm in agreement with the basic minimum income proposition: people as a whole won't become more intelligent or creative. Actually, both sides of that coin are both strong arguments for basic minimum income.

I haven't spotted it, so I'll throw out the oblig Manna link. I like the way the story ended. The protagonist basically went back to an agrarian lifestyle. The important point I feel is that the protagonist was able to; he was free to make that choice because of the benefits of living in a post-scarcity society where the basic minimum income has completely exceeded the amount of income a person could possibly use in a week.

The protagonist didn't need to join a farming community to survive, but he did anyway because it made him feel useful. Feeling useful is important to most people, and in basic minimum income trials, most people either keep working their day job or quit to invent, form new businesses, and innovate. The rest do things for the local community, e.g. skilled trades*/community organizers/outreach/etc. There are a few deadbeats, but not nearly as many as one might fear.

* Every time I drive by a boarded up house, it always makes me depressed. I don't even live in that big of a city. There are homeless people right here downtown who could live in that house if I had the free time to learn some basics and fix the place up. Instead I'm stuck behind a computer, posting to /. because keeping this seat warm is of more value to our society than letting me take some building classes at the local college, getting me some supplies, and turning me loose on every last boarded up house in town.

Fsck beta: what is wrong with /. today? I was going to use my account to post this, but every time I press preview I get logged out. The other times I posted, I was able to press back and preview would keep me logged in on the 2nd try. Hitting submit now and I guess we'll see whether my username makes it through or not.

Or Manna: http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

Likely somewhere inbetween.

But then who will have any money to buy things made by robots?

ObManna

The concept sounds similar to the terrafoam welfare dorms from Marshall Brain's Manna:

http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

At least this building would have individual bathrooms, and the building's small enough that there are windows for everyone...

http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

I shall just leave these here, eh?

It all depends on what you do with the data. The mere act of passively collecting the data is relatively benign, assuming that no action is ever taken with it and that it's securely stored away so that it can't be exfiltrated or abused. There ARE privacy concerns with this, of course, but most corporate networks explicitly state that users should have no expectation of privacy.

If your boss receives an email for every 5 minutes you spend on Slashdot or Reddit or Anandtech, and marches down to your cube and sternly tells you to get back on task, that solution will only improve productivity in the very near term. The worker will fear for their job, so they'll do their work more and go off-task less. But that will stop being effective as soon as the worker can leave to find another job, or come up with an alternative way to go off-task while avoiding detection, or half-heartedly do their work in a way that appears to show progress but isn't really (e.g. gaming the metrics). The end-game of "cracking the whip" is almost never a worker who willingly spends less time doing whatever they really would rather be doing besides working and suddenly enjoys their work more.

If, however, you collect all the data in aggregate and then discuss it during their annual performance review, and have it play a factor in their compensation, that could definitely be a strong motivator for people not to be off-task: if they associate slacking off with getting lower raises / bonuses / etc. and steady work output with higher compensation, most people will probably try to slack off *less*, at least. It also has the side effect of saving the company some money by being able to justify not giving a raise to someone who spends most of their time slacking off.

Either way, though, there is always going to be a way to game the system. If they track you at the network level, just use a proxy or VPN to an address that looks like it's on-task, or is too vague to get a sense of what exactly it is (e.g., since many sites use EC2 or S3 to serve content for all sorts of purposes, there's not a lot you can say about whether traffic to an EC2 box is business-related - maybe they're doing actual research for their white collar job?). If they're keylogging, set up a VM and plug in a USB keyboard straight into the VM. If you have decent cellular data at your desk, you could do your thing on a smartphone, assuming you can tolerate the display and input device limitations. Or of course you can just take frequent breaks into a hallway or empty conference room and use your own laptop/tablet/smartphone.

The only way to truly keep white-collar workers on task for 8 solid hours per day is to assign one supervisor per worker bee, but the overhead of that proposition is so high that no one will do it, because the costs will far outweigh the benefits.

Or there's Manna, http://marshallbrain.com/manna... which could be a possible future if AI or a close-enough approximation thereof turns out to be feasible.

"Depending on how you want to think about it, it was funny or inevitable or symbolic that the robotic takeover did not start at MIT, NASA, Microsoft or Ford. It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17. It seemed like such a simple thing at the time, but May 17 marked a pivotal moment in human history."

So begins the short story Manna, by Marshall Brain (full text on the web). It's the creepiest dystopian story I've read in a long while... made even creepier by the breezy and cheerful way its central character (who reminds me of Philip J. Fry from Futurama for some reason) tells how the robotic revolution will really go down. Take a few minutes to check it our. Your eyeballs will pop out on springs.

As I write this I'm thinking, should I even mention this story? Someone may think it's a great idea. I'm also thinking, perhaps if enough people read the story they'll have time to think about it and perhaps find a way to stop it from playing out to the end that is described. Some appropriate response that falls short of going full frontal Luddite.

Never mind those cute robots unable to walk up stairs, though some day they will. Forget that silly stuff about Skynet, it doesn't want to hurt you, though some day it will. But the first robots may actually be... people. Starting tomorrow.

Also by the author,
Robotic Nation
The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches

"Depending on how you want to think about it, it was funny or inevitable or symbolic that the robotic takeover did not start at MIT, NASA, Microsoft or Ford. It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17. It seemed like such a simple thing at the time, but May 17 marked a pivotal moment in human history."

So begins the short story Manna, by Marshall Brain (full text on the web). It's the creepiest dystopian story I've read in a long while... made even creepier by the breezy and cheerful way its central character (who reminds me of Philip J. Fry from Futurama for some reason) tells how the robotic revolution will really go down. Take a few minutes to check it our. Your eyeballs will pop out on springs.

As I write this I'm thinking, should I even mention this story? Someone may think it's a great idea. I'm also thinking, perhaps if enough people read the story they'll have time to think about it and perhaps find a way to stop it from playing out to the end that is described. Some appropriate response that falls short of going full frontal Luddite.

Never mind those cute robots unable to walk up stairs, though some day they will. Forget that silly stuff about Skynet, it doesn't want to hurt you, though some day it will. But the first robots may actually be... people. Starting tomorrow.

Also by the author,
Robotic Nation
The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches

"Depending on how you want to think about it, it was funny or inevitable or symbolic that the robotic takeover did not start at MIT, NASA, Microsoft or Ford. It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17. It seemed like such a simple thing at the time, but May 17 marked a pivotal moment in human history."

So begins the short story Manna, by Marshall Brain (full text on the web). It's the creepiest dystopian story I've read in a long while... made even creepier by the breezy and cheerful way its central character (who reminds me of Philip J. Fry from Futurama for some reason) tells how the robotic revolution will really go down. Take a few minutes to check it our. Your eyeballs will pop out on springs.

As I write this I'm thinking, should I even mention this story? Someone may think it's a great idea. I'm also thinking, perhaps if enough people read the story they'll have time to think about it and perhaps find a way to stop it from playing out to the end that is described. Some appropriate response that falls short of going full frontal Luddite.

Never mind those cute robots unable to walk up stairs, though some day they will. Forget that silly stuff about Skynet, it doesn't want to hurt you, though some day it will. But the first robots may actually be... people. Starting tomorrow.

Also by the author,
Robotic Nation
The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches

Why don't you say what this new situation is that will destroy society before we can do anything.

Here's one. When you can see it coming and you do nothing, that is the mark of incompetence.

Fearing Skynet is for ignoramus; the real threat is Manna...

I don't completely agree. I just finished "The Lights in The Tunnel", and previously read "Manna." http://www.thelightsinthetunne... http://marshallbrain.com/manna... The problem is how do we maintain consumption of goods and services in a society where working is optional? I would love to be in the ideal society, where I'm given an "allowance", and allowed to create the things that I want to create that bring additional income. I'm Libertarian at heart, but I don't see how capitalism is going to solve this problem. We are already seeing erosion of unskilled jobs, so wealth concentration will push us towards looking a lot more like a third world country in terms of a poverty analysis. I'm too optimistic in my hope that idle people would do good with their spare time. As I get older, I find myself wanting to branch out into more engineering projects, but I'm sure I'm in a very small minority. Without any structure, I bet a huge portion of our population checks out, going to a perpetual drug induced stupor.

It won't happen next year, or even 5 years from now... but at some point... all those drivers, from taxis to trucks, will become unemployable through no fault of their own. They simply will not be able to compete with the cost of a robot.

Oh, I agree with you and that sentiment completely.

To be specific, take a look at Manna, by Marshall Brain. It's an easy read, and it shows in frighteningly clear steps the two different ways the economy can go.

I'm all for automation, and I've worked on automation projects before. By and large, automation takes away those jobs that humans don't really want to do. Boring, repetitive, dehumanizing things like crop harvesting or long-haul driving.

While I recognize that automated production is the way of the future, I'm not quite sure how to get there. If there were some clear path, I'd be advocating it.

The best I can come up with at the moment is to point out how we're going to be in tough straits when 3 million people find themselves without a job in the next 5 years (and 2 1/2 million after that when short-haul driving is mostly automated, automated drone delivery of packages and mail and such.)

Pointing out the problems might nudge us into rethinking how economics works. That's all I can think of at the moment.

Do you have any ideas on how we can be part of that transition?

I really think we're at a tipping point. Pretty sure everybody here has read Manna by now, but I think about that more and more these days.

We're getting so close with so many things. Solar is cheap, and the Tesla batteries are a game changer. And I wouldn't be shocked if Lockheed Martin's fusion reactor pays off. Yeah, yeah, "20 years away for the last 50 years" but this wasn't some crackpot in his basement talking. It was an MIT Ph.D. plasma physicist heading up a research project at the goddamn Lockheed Martin Skunkworks. "Free energy" or at least "enough energy if used efficiently" is almost doable.

There's 3d printers that make buildings now. People are 3d printing homes. Right now either as art projects, or experiments, but let that mature for 10 years. I know 3d printers have drawbacks and are not magic, but they're getting better all the time. Remember that one a few months back that printed an amazing looking Eiffel Tower in...3 minutes was it?

Farming is already largely automated. There was that robot on /. recently that picks strawberries. There's vertical farms in Japan that produce 10,000 heads of lettuce a day using 99% less water than traditional farming methods. Lab-grown meat apparently tastes like meat. I know it's "a clump of cells" right now, so you're not going to be growing a steak, but it's good enough for hamburger, and getting cheaper all the time. Processed insects. I saw a "doomsday prepper" show where a guy had a self-contained talapia tank/vegetable farm. The waste from the fish fed the plants and the fish ate off the plants. Too bad he died in the 2012 Mayan Apocalypse (I'm just assuming that happened. He was so sure...).

There have been "lights out" factories in China for over a decade now. Robots do all the work. There are no humans, so there are no lights on in the building, because the robots don't need to see.

We've discussed self-driving cars to death.

Information, education, entertainment are all "free" already.

"Internet of Things" technology for smart metering and waste minimization.

In 10 years somebody's going to give it a go. A research project maybe. Kind of like Biosphere 2, except not self-contained. Somebody's going to make an experimental town where robots do all the work. Construction methods and lifestyle will be different. The homes and buildings won't look like a home does today. It'll be whatever paradigm works best for automated construction and servicing/self-cleaning. Food selection will be more limited, sure. But the goal would be a town that can support 500 people with food, clothing, shelter, simple household products and internet for a year, with no human doing work to provide those things, except perhaps simple robot maintenance. And you don't need some political revolution to make it happen. I don't see why that can't exist in America. I'd give it a go. A different/reduced lifestyle, but zero pressure to work or die? It's not like I'd stop working. I'd just spent my time coding and building more robots (I'm an electrical engineer and worked at a robotics lab in college).

I wonder how it'll go...

Or the inverse, where the manager is a computer and the workers are all just "robot arms" for it.. already happening in fulfilment warehouses.

I'm also sure there will be more focus on such robots. However, it's not the minimum wage McDonals employees that will be the first to go. It will be the managers.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

Actually, people in horeca/entertainment etc. will probably get to keep their jobs for quite some time. In your typical restaurant, the people serving you are a very important factor. Without a waiter and a real cook you'd probably not even visit a restaurant.

Short chaptered story, required reading for geek singularity econ.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
I dont agree 100% with Marshal Brain's solution but the problem is extraordinarily well stated and taken to afrighteningly realistic and logical end state to our current economic system when automation is fully introduced and 'work' becomes devalued. What do you do with those disgusting unemployed wage slaves when there is no employment anymore?