[cm2187]

We have seen exactly the same fear with the appearance of machines and automation in the industry after the war. Look at historical news footage and people were concerned that this would lead to massive losses of jobs. And it did, the industry is a lot less labour intensive today, at least in the western world. But jobs were created elsewhere and the economy adapted.

Beside, with outsourcing to China, there aren't that many manufacturing jobs left in the US and Europe for robots to take anyway. I think where robots will have a huge potential is for domestic tasks: cleaning your home, taking parcels while you're away, preparing food, doing the laundry and ironing. A home robot that would do all that would have a huge market. But they are not going to replace an existing workforce, rather free up time for women (who still predominantly bear the burden of these tasks) and enable them to focus on their career.

I think there could be another wave of automation in the service industry, but it wouldn't be robots, just software. Today there are a huge number of manual tasks done in the service industry: processing invoices, preparing financial accounts, payslips, paying a lawyer to rewrite the same contract over and over, etc. Some of that can be automated by outsourcing it to a provider who has the means to automate it, but a huge fraction is just too specific, customized to a business, to justify paying for an IT team to build software for it. The way to automate it is for business people to build their own automation. In a way Microsoft Office has done partially that (an accountant with Excel has the productivity of 50 accountants from the 50s) but I think we can gain another order of magnitude of productivity by enable people to code. For that, basic coding skills should be widely deployed, in a very simple and highly productive language. And I am not convinced this language already exists.