The cost benefit will be short-lived. Widespread adoption will force many more out of the job market and force more massive increases in social spending, leading to taxation that will take the cost benefit of robotics and then some. It’s not going to be pretty, I don’t see how this can occur without major disruption and dislocation. I’m beginning to understand the Luddites, the bad outweighs the good.
“We need consumers out there who will buy what is created by the economy,” he said......
Can someone explain, who will have money to buy anything?
I’ve always heard that ‘money’ is what makes the world go round.
Those who remember our emergence from the Carter malaise will remember the way the PC was the “big new thing” as the economy ramped up in late 1981 and into ‘82 and ‘83.
As we emerge from the Obama “great recession,” the “big new thing” will be robots. Everywhere. And more and more of them.
If governments would quit trying to control the economy and quit trying to social engineer the people, things will work themselves out.
I suspect almost all the problems we face today are the result of the government trying to micro manage people.
Life is not fair, and the government can not change that.
Robots don't assault the customers...yet.
Will they pay the robots $15/hour?
The unemployed live better than kings did a couple of hundred years ago. As technology advances so do people’s lives. I realize Bill Gates has a lot more toys than me but I do not envy him. Agitators are always around to get people worked up about what they don’t have.
Robots won’t demand $15 an hour.
A decline in traditional jobs could lead to shrinking markets for small businesses, said Ford. “We need consumers out there who will buy what is created by the economy,” he said
A lot of people still have romantic visions of Laverne & Shirley working in the bottling plant and stamping caps on beer bottles. It might look like a good job on TV but it was a dreary way to make a living. Well we have machines that do that now and the Laverne & Shirley's of today are more likely to be creating web content or advising companies on how best to maintain their data in the cloud.
