The impact of increasing use of robotics on future employment has gained increasing interest recently.
Here’s a Brookings Institute paper.
Here’s a recent article in a series by the Atlantic.
Absolutely.
My son who was in First for 4 years went on to get a degree in Mechanical engineering. He now works for a manufacture. His main focus for the past few years has been automating production lines. The number of good well paying jobs he has eliminated is substantial. While the displaced workers are a problem, the gains in productivity have kept the plant in the US. In fact the gains were such that a global conglomerate recently bought the company. This is the future.
I am just going to throw this interesting interactive info-graphic in:
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-the-most-common-job-in-every-state
Now, if many secretaries were replaced with Voicemail, Email, and the general ability to type your own stuff… I Imagine there are several trucking industries drooling over self driving trucks… Assuming a semi truck gets about 6 miles per gallon and is driven at 60 mph then it is using 10 gallons per hour or about $40 of fuel. Now if a truck driver makes about $20/hour… then you are paying $60/hr shipping, but with a computer controlled driver, you could erduce the cost to your driving system which might be $20K, but would be good for 2 years would reduce it to $5/hr… If refresh only costs $10K then you would reduce down to $2.5/hr Hmmmm. From a cost perspective, that would require getting truck from 6 mpg to 10-12 mpg to get an equivalent savings… Something tells me the most popular job for many states has an expiration date in the not too distant future.
Robots eliminate jobs, not work, and that is a very good thing.
The economics is pretty straightforward. If you can create more production with fewer resources, everybody wins.