This article perfectly put into words things I've been ruminating about for quite awhile now. The system as it is cannot live once the price of paying a human becomes more than the price of maintaining a robot. Of course, for a long time where will be industrial jobs where humans will simply outclass robots for their versatility, like construction or gardening. But by and large it is easy to imagine a world, in just maybe a decade, where factory workers are obsolete. It is inevitable that the capitlistic system will eat itself this way, and the way I see it there are two possible outcomes:

1) We cling to the old ways and fall into a very very deep depression, once everyone loses their factory jobs to automation. I really don't want to see this happen, and it seems like it just might happen, at least in the US. It should be obvious to anyone that if wecontinue to focus on the "having a job is everything" mentality, the old system will continue to crumble until we're forced into a socialist revolution of sorts. I don't want to imagine the outcome of that.

2) We embrace the need for increased openness and education. Europe is doing this very well, much better than the US at least. This way we'll have an educated populace capable of coping with this new world and really using it to our benefit, and the working class will all but cease to exist(I expect the unions for the exceptions to be extremely powerful once the transition is complete... almost like guilds). The transition in this case will be mich smoother, in my opinion.

I can't guess how developing economies like India and China will fare from this, since their economies are lagging so far behind the West. I suspect there will be severe political and cultural upheavals no matter what happens.

Warning: the above was written at 1 AM while on pain meds.