1375 Robot Age

There’s no problem with productivity in American, especially considering the upcoming Robot Age: robots driving cars, robots cleaning houses, robots growing & preparing food, robots doing all the clerking tasks, even robots tending children; it will be just like the science fiction stories. Robots imply less work for the same Quality-of-Life, so presumably a huge chunk of the population could live a physically satisfactory life with less expenditure of effort. This is presumably a good thing… Or is it? The question becomes: what will people do? Most people aren’t creative and even if they were trained to be passable draftsmen, art quickly becomes mundane, and anyway, robots could do it better. Most people don’t take care of their bodies, most people don’t participate in sports nor go on adventures. With the robots doing all the work, most people would simply have no role in life. There’s already an epidemic of mental illness, the Robot Age promises to increase that, but at least everyone will be well-fed and have a place to sleep, at least until they commit suicide.