Robotic Nation

In 2055 the nation hit a big milestone -- over half of the American workforce was unemployed, and the number was still rising. Nearly every "normal" job that had been filled by a human being in 2001 was filled by a robot instead. At restaurants, robots did all the cooking, cleaning and order taking. At construction sites, robots did everything -- Robots poured the concrete, laid brick, built the home's frame, put in the windows and doors, sided the house, roofed it, plumbed it, wired it, hung the drywall, painted it, etc. At the airport, robots flew the planes, sold the tickets, moved the luggage, handled security, kept the building clean and managed air traffic control. At the hospital robots cared for the patients, cooked and delivered the food, cleaned everything and handled many of the administrative tasks. At the mall, stores were stocked, cleaned and clerked by robots. At the amusement park, hundreds of robots ran the rides, cleaned the park and sold the concessions. On the roads, robots drove all the cars and trucks. Companies like Fedex, UPS and the post office had huge numbers of robots instead of people sorting packages, driving trucks and making deliveries

Personally I think this is possible. But I dont think it will be that bad. It could lead to an economy as seen in star trek.
In a way, open source is a start towards that. Could you say fifteen years ago, that thousands of developers around the world get together, through the internet, and create software, that would be given away for free. Could you say that this software would power hundreds of enterprise servers, that run critical business infrastructure? Thousands and Thousands of man hours have been spent on open source software. It is continously getting better at a steady rate, despite the economic climate. Whats to stop it? Other than stupid laws. And those laws only affect people in the states. Now there are programmers all over the world contributing to the open source cause.