How much longer do you think technological automation will make the need for people to labor for capital/money obsolete and inefficient?

It could be argued that it already is, but cultural inertia is preventing meaningful change.

Personally, I don't think any huge shift is likely to occur in the next 5 years. The only "big" thing we have on the immediate horizon is VR, and that's more likely to placate the masses than anything. Driverless vehicles have the potential to make a big splash, but most estimates suggest commercial implementation in 2019-2020 or so.

But simply having driverless vehicles on the road, even if it's google's robot-uber model, it's still going to take some time for it to spread and be common. Day one will probably be a few hundred vehicles that operate only in a single city. Then a few hundred in a couple cities, then a few thousand...it's going to take time to spread and make a huge impact.

So, nothing terribly major within 5 years. In the 5-10 year range, I think that's when we're going to start seeing that things are definitely happening. Driverless vehicles will be replacing truckers, ordering machines that already exist now will have begun to eliminate jobs rather than companies still insisting that they only exist to "help" workers, call center AI's like Amelia will probably start coming in to play...human labot won't be obsolete by any stretch, but the transition will have begun and it will be increasingly obvious to more people that it's really going to happen.

After 10 years is difficult to predict. We might have functional AI and humanoid robots meaningfully replacing workers by that time. Some EU countries might have successfully implemented a basic income. There might be massive social rejection of automation and boycott of companies that use it. The luddites might win culturally. Or they might not. Again, it's difficult to predict. Yes, the technology is going to grow, but there are a lot of factors that could push in either direction.

I think probably not much is going to happen in the next five years. After that, it really depends. Look at bank ATMs. We've had them forever. They haven't massively changed society. Look at automated checkout at grocery stores. Again, no massive societal change. I think in hte 5-10 year range we've going to have commercial implemenation of some potentially massive game-chaning technology...but whether it actually does have the impact that it could, really depends on how people react. We already have technology to make bank tellers and grocery store clerks and cashiers and restaurants servers in general obsolete. But we still have a lot of people working these jobs. Just...because.

I think that the next generation of technology is going to actually change things. But whether it will happen in the 5-10 year range or the 10-20 year range is difficult to guess. And even once it starts happening, it might still take some to really make a difference.

How long before the average person who doesn't browse /r/futrology to agree that expecting people to work jobs is ridiculous? I would guess that's probably not going to happen within the next 10 years. I mean, it could. There are scenarios where I can see it happening. I just think those scenarios are unlikely.