Vince - you'd want to be careful about water in Utah above all else. They're already preparing to sieze water supplies for military usage in the inevitable coming shortage:
http://le.utah.gov/~2011/bills/sbillamd/sb0102.htm
Anywhere you can't live independantly will be dangerous, and you can't live independantly if you don't have control over your own water supply.
Old1953 - you're dead on about automation decreasing the number of jobs in the economy and making people obsolete. The system can't possibily produce enough jobs to support everyone, and welfare lasts only as long as the Federal government can pretend to be solvent, which won't be much longer, and starvation, uh, doesn't seem like a good option. But you're missing a critical point. Actually, two.
Point One - even outside of innovative or creative tasks, there are still a few 'simple' tasks that humans are better at than machines. For instance, I dare anyone to try and replace an organic farmer or gardener with a machine! The tasks involved are too complex, nonlinear and contingent for machines to handle, and that will likely be the case for another several decades at least.
Point Two - we have enough productive land in this country for every single person to have enough land to grow enough food to feed themselves and their families. Modern technologies and ancient knowledge are available that could easily permit comfortable, cheap, off-grid, digitally-connected dwellings with sustainable, local food and fuel production resources for anyone who cared to construct them, but most of the land is either under Federal control and used for nothing or under private control and too expensive for citizens to obtain, and many of the technologies and much of the knowledge needed is deliberately surpressed or marginalized.
But there's plenty of land - between a third and a half of the land in most Western states is owned by the Federal Government and essentially not used. There is no reason at all that shouldn't be opened up for sustainable, low-impact homesteads. It's not that the American Frontier filled up or went away - it's still there, we just quit colonizing it and moved to the suburbs instead!
The 'surplus population' doesn't need cities, welfare, or 'service' jobs. We just need freedom and healthy land to live on. That's it.
The changes we'd have to make in our current social arrangements to accomplish this are pretty 'radical', but so what? The current American political discourse is so out of touch with reality that the only things considered politically pragmatic are nonsense evasions that accomplish nothing and contribute to the coming disaster. If we're going to get out of this, we'll have to dramatically alter what constitutes the political 'mainstream.' But I think that's less difficult than many people think, because the system is falling apart intellectually and spiritually as well as physically and financially! A LOT of people are really hungry for real change, and more people are willing to consider options they'd have dismissed before things got this bad. People drastically underestimate the liklihood of a 'Black Swan' Jasmine-style social revolution in the United States. It's a good thing, too, since that's our only hope.
So I guess that's "what we're going to do about it" for me, anyway.
However, even if the revolution gets off the ground things are going to be pretty dark for a long time. If, as seems likely, the great masses of people can't escape the dying, stinking, starving cities in time to avoid the onrushing catastrophe, don't bother investing money with the expectation of getting it back. You'll lose no matter how clever and rich you are. Buy bullets, land, and chickens instead.