Robots Rule at Swiss Factories as Strong Franc and Wages Bite

Re:Robots Rule at Swiss Factories as Strong Franc and Wages ... by valuearb on Friday February 17, 2017 @11:29AM (#13669428)

Old jobs are always replaced by new (and usually better ones). The history of the last 200 years has been the massive slaughter of old jobs and replacement by much higher paying and safer new jobs. In US history in from the 1800s we transitioned from 95% brutally hard and dangerous farm labor to less than 5% of the population mechanically farming. Original manufacturing was all by hand, now it's constantly machine aided.

Another trend is we simply don't work as much. The age of the robots may be that we start working 24 hours a week for more money (and still bitching about going back to work on mondays)

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Re:Robots Rule at Swiss Factories as Strong Franc and Wages ... by coldtea on Friday February 17, 2017 @01:52PM (#13670685)

>Old jobs are always replaced by new (and usually better ones).

No, that's just what happened a few times in the past. Not some natural law. The previous times farming jobs got replaced by factory jobs (which were enough because of a huge increase in the manufactoring sector) and when those dwindled by robots and more efficient factories, they got replaced by the services industry. This time automation and software/AI depletes factory and service jobs, and we don't have much room for any other kind of jobs.

Any job we'll come up with will either be able to be done by robots, or be replaced by advanced AI. The exceptions where human touch will be still (always?) needed (artistic work, prostitution, etc) are not enough to make a living even today, much less in an oversaturated future market.

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