The goal isn't to mine and sit on your ass for the rest of your life while the machines do more mining to make you money to live on.
The idea is to mine, then make money, then use that money to put real life applications into place. Invention is the only one that I have mentioned, but there are plenty of other ways to start your own company, or publish your own book/magazine, start your own website, make your own movie, run a political campaign, start a charity.
Make the world a better place by mining.
EX:
If you have earned a lot of money mining, buy a "Brother" T-Shirt printing machine. It may cost $5,000-$15,000. But you now have a machine that can print like 6-12 shirts an hour, and it will look like a real shirt, not ironed on shit.
Guess what, now you own a REAL t-shirt making company. And the machines do most of the work, and you can continue mining, maybe even hire people to do the work for you, or make an invention to do it. And you can do the same with magazines, and newspapers. It's just printers, but you do have to get a really good one.
So then those people you hire will be slaves...
So you are saying that one should use mining as means to get capital to start bussiness. And that isn't really anything new. You still need the capital...