The problem has never been or ever will be the robots. The problem has always been and will be the growth of the welfare state and the concentration of money and power in fewer and fewer hands.
I, for one, welcome our new maintenance dependent overlords ;)
I’m all for robots as long as they don’t have a logic system like Democrats, and I would also make an extra entry into the law of robotics:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
4. A democrat is not a human being.
Tax the labor of the robot!
Have Robot pay into social security.
I think the first prediction of this goes back to the Luddites of the 18th Century. But “Deux ex machina” goes back as far as the ancient Egyptians, who invented some gimmicks that would still impress today, if you didn’t know what was going on.
In modern times, lots of people were convinced that fast food hamburgers, for example, would soon be completely mechanized, with fast food workers just keeping the place clean and insuring the machines worked and were sanitary. And yes, the machines were created to do this, but didn’t work out, costing more in the short term and long run than do minimum wage workers.
And the novelty of fully machine made hamburgers wore off very quickly.
Yes, new jobs will be created when the robots take the old ones.
The problems is that most of those jobs will call for above average intelligence. And by definition 50% of the population is of below average intelligence.
We’re already seeing a big split. High-skill jobs are in great demand with high wages. Low-skill workers are a glut on the market with low wages.
This trend will continue and intensify.
IMO increasingly there will be less and less demand, in an economic sense, for jobs people on the lower end of the intelligence scale are capable of doing or of being trained to do.