The Jobless Robotics Revolution in the U.S.

60 minutes had a segment tonight on the Jobless Robotics Revolution in the U.S. When the U.S. went into it's last recession something fundamentally changed. What had changed even before the 2008 downturn was that companies realized that they couldn't even afford to pay $7 an hour for worker to make anything to sell around the world competitively. So, when the 2008 downturn occurred many companies laid off employees hired robots (which are cheaper by the hour than humans) to replace the humans in regard to menial jobs. One man was saying how a robot costing around 20,000 dollars I believe it was could work 3 years for a cost of about $3.50 an hour. Before 2008 this would have been difficult to be allowed to do because unions were too strong still. But 2008 weakened almost all unions to the point where doing this in non-unionized companies could work. So, often companies rather than hires hundreds of people now hire 10 or 20 people to be managers and robot repairers and buy a series of trainable robots and go to work manufacturing stuff.

So, in most industrial revolutions there are more jobs. This is the first industrial revolution where there are actually many less jobs. So, people without specific training like Teachers, Lawyers, Nurses and Doctors might not be able to get work soon. So, factory workers, Truck Drivers, Taxi Drivers all likely will be out of work permanently in the U.S. within about 15 years time.

So, what are all these unemployed people going to do? They will either retire or retrain or not have jobs (one of the three)

In 1966 when I was 18 I foresaw this. My solution was for each person to have a replacement robot that would work in place of them. I think maybe the government might need to institute something like this so people could buy a robot and then rent it to a company and any profit they could keep.

Unfortunately, it hasn't gone that direction because of unions in the U.S. So now, there simply won't be jobs for most people unless the government or universities get very creative in the meantime here in the U.S.