| 1. Cash Registers - Automation 2. Construction - There is a glut of unskilled construction labor right now, though, coming off the housing boom. Could conceivably be automated, but it's probably a lot farther off. 3. Healthcare - Hard to automate, but the things you mention seem less so than construction. 4. Teaching - Scalable teaching methods - the few best professors can teach a vast number of students relative to what used to be possible. Khan Academy and Stanford's upcoming online classes seem like early stabs at what I think will eventually become the norm. 5. Maintenance work - you're probably right, this is very case-by-case, and requires a lot of training to be able to deal with all contingencies. Overall, I don't think the future of American blue collar labor's supply vs. demand is very bright at all, unless there's a big uptick in demand for hard-to-automate fields. EDIT: And when I say automation, I usually mean single-purpose robots or devices that handle the busywork parts of things, like self-checkout machines. cperciva covers this pretty well in his healthcare section. General AI is obviously very hard, and good construction bots would probably need something like that if they were to be able to deal with problems and exceptions on their own. |