System "collapse" aka LIFEKILL. Automation is coming fast and your masters won't need you most of you soon. Expect it in your lifetime.

I hope everyone's stocking up on freeze dried food etc. I bet that's a good business to get into right now.

Like any new technology, adoption won't happen immediately. Self-driving cars require investment in hardware, so adoption will be slower than most AI-related applications. There will be a transition phase where there are still a lot of older people-driven vehicles on the road. It's just the new purchases that will be heavily weighted towards the self driving cars. It will take 10-20 years to transition, which is plenty of time for people to be pushed towards careers that aren't based on performing a simple task like driving. Personally I'm excited that we'll have all that labor freed up to do other things. Productivity of mankind will increase, and people won't have to waste hours every day paying attention to the road, giving people more free time to whine on the internet about how unfair technology is to the poor.

Really? You don't think a few people would still drive even if there was some amazing nationwide rail system? Are you going to take the rail down to the grocery story, or to go pick up Chipotle? What about truck drivers? The idea that a nationwide rail system is in any way comparable to self-driving car technology is laughable at best. Do you think before typing?

That outsourcing though. You'll have 350 million people in a country with very little to do. Win/win for big businesses...who cares if people are starving as long as its not hurting the bottom line.

They'll be forced to join the military.

You've clearly never lived in a large city that had good commuter rail. You don't "drive" to any of those places.

Let's play along with this idea that every single job will be made unnecessary due to technology (won't happen until strong AI, which is further off than most seem to think). We'd still be producing the same (or almost certainly much more) goods as before. Are the rich going to suddenly start consuming 10x as much food so as to cause everyone else to starve? No, we would have revolted long before reaching that point. Even the rich realize that they can't enjoy their wealth if the majority of people are desperate due to hunger. It's why every single wealthy nation on earth has a pretty damn big safety net. I swear you people saw movies like Elysium and said "yeah, that seems like a pretty likely scenario", while completely ignoring the long arc of civilization's growth and particularly the advances made in the past hundred years.

Think about this. In 1790, farmers made up 90% of the labor force. Today, they account for less than 1%. Are we wallowing in poverty with 89% of people starving? No? Do you think perhaps your view of what will happen when technology continues to replace human labor is not based on any rational understanding of how the world actually works?

I've been to US cities like New York and traveled Europe. Even in very dense cities like Amsterdam with extensive public transport and a 10:1 bicycle to human ratio, there were still many cars on the roads. I'm starting to think you have a very very narrow world view.

Also wrapped up in your argument is the assumption that public transport would work the same in a very sparsely populated area as it does in a major metropolitan area. Perhaps you know where we'll find the money to afford to pay for a commuter rail system for Dodge City, Kansas, in addition to the other hundreds of thousands of cities across the country? Passenger rail will never come close to removing the need for motor vehicles. Not to mention trucking (how are you solving the problem of getting a truck load of produce to the grocery story with rail lines?)