As long as they keep the engineers, tech and production workers here to design and build the automation products and robotics, and not send overseas, I don’t see a problem with that.
If your job consists of standing or sitting in one spot and repeatedly doing the same thing, feel threatened. If your job is changing location constantly, day after day or week after week then you’re secure.
Apples Foxconn factory in China just fired 60,000 people and replaced them with robots.
So the fact that GDP in the US, for example, went up over the 20-year period in the elephant graph doesnt mean that wages went up, or that workers are better off. They did not, and they are not.
This is the hollowing out of the American middle class. This is the shift from labor to capital. And this, I believe, is the source of a significant amount of global discontent: where phenomena like Brexit and Sanders and Trump find fertile ground.
Technology has gotten so cheap that it is now more economically viable to buy robots than it is to pay people $5 a day.
That's not what's happening though. I'm seeing it first hand working in Financial Services. Once the automation is done, the Operations are outsourced overseas.
Even the number of Engineers is being reduced as more and more is being automated. We're at the point where information robots are being used to analyze big data and make investment decisions (the bank I work for is actively working on that) and they're also starting to be used in the legal field to analyze cases, opinions, replacing lawyers and paralegals for example. (Yes, I agree, less lawyers is a GOOD thing.)
My own opinion on this topic is that the technology is getting too far ahead of our own ability to fully consider the implications of what implementing and using it really means.
Will information robots, decision robots, analytical robots and physical robots that do manufacturing and other tasks replace humans? YES.
But what does that mean in terms of other jobs and opportunities that will create, the impacts to daily human life and dare I say the human spirit and Government for example. Will fewer and fewer people be paying higher and higher taxes to support those who are put out of work either temporarily or permanently as this transition to an automated society happens?
The technology is racing ahead of our ability to fully analyze and understand the impacts to us as human beings and God's design for us (which is to WORK.) I think the danger here is crushing the human spirit and all the implications that will have on us as a society and globally.
Just my own .02 worth and I had no idea I'd be so philosophical on my first cup of coffee this morning. Go figure. Try that, robot! :-)