ttbn,
If you don't bother to read the article, you shouldn't comment on it. Bragging about your own arrogance is tiresome, and so is insulting its writer even if you disagree with him as much as I do.
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Armchair and Shockadelic (and Everald)
There's no shortage of things that would make life better if they were done, even if there's no absolute need to do them. The government has the power to create as many new jobs as there are workers available. But to do so they must abandon the balanced budget meme. Automation is highly deflationary, and to balance that we need a large increase in the money supply, which the private sector isn't always able to create.

If what the author describes is correct, then the question of welfare or no-welfare dwarfs in relation to the real problem:

STOP THE ROBOTS!

Yuyutsu,
Spot-on !
And, while we're at it why not do away with the hordes of economy stifling bureaudroids.

There's an awful lot of "wills" in that article - "robots will be our prime source of productivity"; "we will lose control of them"; "robots will produce more robots without human input"; "millions of Australians will be unemployed" etc etc. Thirty-three 'wills' in total.

The author is very very certain of the future. But the only thing inevitable about the future is that inevitably, it inevitably won't happen as we think.

Replace all the 'wills' with 'maybe', 'perhaps' and 'might' and we get a much better idea of just how urgent these changes will be.

Just one example. Robots "will replace all Taxi and Uber drivers". That was the claim as recently as a year ago. But those working on automated cars are becoming far less certain that it'll happen any time soon. Whereas it was thought of as being 5-10 yrs away, its now talked of as being 20-30 years away.

there's no question that the next 50 years will see dramatic changes in society. Think of the difference in the world between 1967 and 2017 and double or triple it. But that doesn't mean we have to panic right now and start making wholesale changes based on what we think might happen.

I'm old enough to remember the failed claims of the past 50 years and to understand how disastrous things would have been had we acted on those claims. We just need to be alert to the potential changes and ready to implement new policies when they become necessary. The future will arrive in its own time. We don't need to hurry it and we certainly don't need to implement societal upheaval based on assertion about the future that are almost certainly wrong.

mhaze,
Just one more will if you please. They never will see logic because they don't have the will & so they will just continue willy nilly.
Remember if there's a will there will be a bush !

Hey Aiden,
"The government has the power to create as many new jobs as there are workers available. But to do so they must abandon the balanced budget meme."

No, they don't have to abandon balancing budgets.
What they actually need to do is START doing the jobs they're paid for properly and come up with policies that work.
We'd be better off with a dictator, so long as they were a good one, had ethics, we're dedicated to creating policies that were fair and benefitted all our citizens, then this 'democracy' of idiots on opposing sides constantly squabbling and achieving nothing except steering the country down the toilet.
And they spend all their time arguing over minority issues to earn voters (and stirring us all up against each other in the process) rather than sitting down and working out policies that benefit all.

The nature of opposing sides means all we get is lip service whilst they achieve nothing, except pile on debt.