Industrial robot guy here. Robots replace dirty dangerous dull jobs. They’re great at doing the same thing all day long. Every task you add to the list makes them 10x less reliable.

Basically if your job involves you sitting on your ass and doing one thing all day long you are in trouble. I can buy a $25k robot arm that is safe to work around humans and has a 10kg payload. It can sit there and do a simple task. It’s also a complete idiot and will fault out, wait for a human with the slightest disturbance.

You still need human operators to babysit them when things go wrong. The answer here is instead of 4 poorly paid idiots doing a repetitive task all day long, you pay one guy a decent living wage to keep those robots fed and happy. That guy might be able to figure out some basic programming like teaching some new points. Any serious integration or tooling work needs a guy like me who makes a pretty penny.

But I am sure there are punishments in hell less severe than sitting stationary for 8 hours a day and doing a repetitive task. I have zero issues with getting rid of those jobs. Especially when you discover those robots doubled your productivity and all of a sudden you need to hire another warehouse guy, another truck driver and another sales guy. Automation tends to simply shuffle jobs around while making a company grow.

But there is a need for those jobs as when I said you hire idiots I mean it. Smart people quit. You hunt for the most empty sad pathetic CV you can find to find a production worker who won’t quit by noon. Idiots need work too and I don’t know what society is going to do to keep them working. Tax the robots and pay the idiots to sit at home and make Lets Play videos?