What happens to society when robots replace workers?

Harvard Business Review.com ^ | December 10, 2014 | William Davidow & Michael S. Malone

[Doomonyou]

What happens when robots repair the robots?

You gets tons of robot repairmen for robot repair robots. or something.

[MoochPooch]

Which brings to mind the bigger societal problem of when robots replace women...

In the film DINNER AT EIGHT, a ditzy trophy wife (Jean Harlow) tries to impress a society matron with a book she read. "It says that some day robots will replace humans."

Answered the society matron: "My dear, that is something you won't have to worry about for a very long time."

[bert]

Yes we do......

Yesterday I visited a small manufacturer of extremely complex machinery. They export world wide their very special industrial machinery products

There was big change since my last visit. They had moved in a very large CNC machine that was awsome in the complexity of the control panel. They have several smaller CNC machines but they don’t have such an awesome appearance. In the other half of the shop there are the old gray machine shop mills and lathes still putting out the stuff.

But the future is clearly in the computer controlled side. Are they robots. I think so. Once the button is pushed, the machine beavers away until the part is complete.

[Grzegorz 246]

“By contrast, progress today comes rapidly. Consider the numbers for information storage density in computer memory. Between 1960 and 2003, those densities increased by a factor of five million, at times progressing at a rate of 60% per year. At the same time, true to Moore’s Law, semiconductor technology has been progressing at a 40% rate for more than 50 years. These rates of progress are embedded in the creation of intelligent machines, from robots to automobiles to drones, that will soon dominate the global economy – and in the process drive down the value of human labor with astonishing speed.”

Nonsense. Progress doesn't come rapidly, it has just moved to IT/telecom/medicine/biotechnology from coal/steel/heavy industry/cars/airplanes, we're flying pretty much the same airplanes as several decades ago.

Intelligent machines ? They are friggin calculators that won't do anything more than they are programmed to do and they are programmed by... people, who make good money and spend them - in retail, tourism, fitness clubs etc. - creating more jobs there. Once some jobs are automated, others are created elsewhere, It's nothing new, several thousand years ago +90% of people worked in farming...