Who do you trust the most now to protect American workers jobs against the profit driven robot revolution?

The only way to do that is at least make the robots here and companies can only buy here. Also for every robot that replaces a worker, they must pay 2 times into social security as if it were 2 employees, to keep social security going and 1 payment for unemployment. If they are going to displace people for the sake of profits, they should give with both hands to help those they displace.
Meanwhile robot manufacturing companies must only employ humans. And companies all around can only displace ¼th of their employees.
Of course people can also refuse to buy from these companies that displace people.

Nothing will stop it. If work can be automated it probably should be. We just need to find an equitable way to structure society after the fact. What we do is put an emphasis on education, research, the arts and other things that don’t equate to drudge work that will be automated.

I welcome robot workers.

I don’t see anyone mourning the face that they don’t have to card their own cotton to spin their own thread to ply their own yarn to weave their own fabric to sew their own underpants.

Automation is a good thing.

Nothing will stop it regardless of politics or any other reason if a company can afford it they will have it, I am just glad I have less than a dozen years before I can retire then I can watch it go to hell from the sidelines.
More to your question a robot will go 24 hours a day, doesn’t require breaks, days off or health benefits, I just wonder who will be left to buy the goods and services when all the people are left jobless and looking in?

They’ll be flying planes soon…

Transformers, robots in da skies

Please don’t allow that terrible pun to detract from the initial point, be a shame that ;-}

@Seek Will the robots form a union? URW perhaps?

I doubt it, but the engineers and operators might.

@Seek I did read somewhere that they say the workers displaced by robots will simply shift over to maintenance, building and engineering of the robots, parts supply etc. Should be lots of new jobs but I doubt it will be an equitable swap by the numbers.

We have many more people than we did before the industrial revolution, and far fewer starving, unemployed people than we did when all cloth had to be hand-woven.

It’s going to be OK.

@SQUEEKY2 Is 100% right. There’s no going back. The only option is to recognize the technology is coming and figure out what jobs will be needed in the future. How many jobs did the cotton gin kill? How many jobs did the ludites create by smashing textile machines?

Another thing to keep in mind is that robots can be exceptionally difficult to change. So if you have human workers and you want the process to be altered in some minor way, you can just tell everyone to do it a different way. The robots need mechanical engineers to reprogram the process, test it, verify it’s working, do a limited rollout of the changes, correct any problems and then release the update to all of the machines. They also need high paying positions to keep them maintained and serviced.

For some industries. they’ll work very well, but in others, people are still cheaper.

Robots should do jobs that can be done by robots. It’s time to support education opportunities, because soon the only jobs that a person will need to do will be jobs that involve thinking. It’s happening, you can’t resist automation, it is a natural byproduct of a free market where cheaper options win.

The jobs wont disappear but only change. The Industrial revolution didn’t destroy jobs, it merely made more products available, cheaper, better, and safer. Almost everything in our daily lives has been affected by automation and there is no end in sight. Jobs merely move to research and development, engineering, technicians and programmers. Computers didn’t replace people they merely gave us more information to work with. It’s difficult to predict where this is all going but as long as we have needs, someone will come up with a way to fill them. and that requires work.

Well the customer service industry should remain safe for now. I remember when customer service went over to computers and it caught on but everyone looked for ways to talk to a human operator because listening to 100 menus to narrow down your problem was a freaken nightmare. Eventually most companies went back to having actual people answer the phone. I remember Several Phone companies that did surveys and asked what was the number one reason for people leaving and they said they said the long wait to talk to a human after a long list of menu options that didn’t resolve the problem. The level of anger for robots would be outstanding. If Washington thought that citizens lost their mind over Mexicans, wait till they are replaced by robots. Frankenstein Monster comes to mind. I see pitch forks and fires possibly in these companies future

I trust history, because she says this has already happened when the first machines started replacing manufacture. People protested and thought no one would hire them, machines stayed and humans got used to it eventually and found other jobs. Or something like that.

We will be as good as ever, that’s what I’m saying.

Probably we’ll be much better off

@Sneki95 Back then we looked forward to simplifying life.

My point, is the Internet is almost a new entity (for lack of a better word) in itself. It has brought new ways to rebel and find large groups of like minded people. Before you had to do things simply by word of mouth. It is way easier to rouse up a large group than some small home town of 50 people. Now you can target 100’s at a time. Get enough fear behind it and it could easily become a movement.

Fear has always been histories greatest motivator/manipulator of rebellions. What people fear most is going hungry and or going broke.