I should have described the difficulty of transition.
When a few companies have changed to fully automated production it is hard to see how they can be made to use a shorter work week, earlier retirement, higher taxes etc.To impose those things just on companies changing to full automation would lower the incentive to do so and dramatically slow the transition.Yet to impose those things on companies that have not yet made the change would probably kill them.I think the result is a transition that will be much slower to take advantage of new technologies than one would otherwise like.
It is already cheaper to make many things here with high automation, than to buy them from abroad, from countries with low labor costs.Then what happens to those third world countries?Meanwhile we have sustained, then growing, high unemployment that we can't afford.
If Rossi's Hot Cat actually works as well as he claims, there is a chance it could be the black swan event that would allow/pay for the transition.The slow, painful transition is more likely.
