And women, of course.

I read the following article earlier today :–>  Robots set to create over 100 million jobs by 2022.

I found it rather interesting.

Interesting....because numbers from two industries that lend themselves to high levels of automation, namely automobiles and aerospace, the latter of which I am intimately familiar, show a decimation in employment. In fact, automation and/or robotics has not only changed those industries, but also wrought changes in the communities that rose up around them.

There no longer is an expectation that jobs in those sectors would lead to the attainment of a middle class life.

The certainty of such upwards mobility, leastways in the aerospace industry. evaporated with the realization that Reagan's "Star Wars" initiative wasn't fiscally sustainable.

The auto industry publicly seemed to have staved off this problem, blaming globalization for the loss of jobs.

However, the real truth was hidden: jobs weren’t being “sent to Mexico”. Or China, even. Robots were taking over!

I read somewhere that auto industry employment in the traditionally middle-class city of Toledo, Ohio has been so decimated that there is a 6-1 ratio of robots to workers. Moreover, jobs, once automated, won’t ever be manual again. As long as mass production is concerned.

You had better believe that human worker angst over there is not only palpable, but is quite visible!

Because what was once a multi-generational path to middle "classhood", has vanished completely.

Meanwhile, those displaced workers are largely illiterate, mostly uneducated folks with great skills that have been surpassed within a few years, in their own generation, by robots.

In order to come within one light year of that 100 million jobs figure mentioned in the article referenced above, our workforce would have to be retrained in new, and forward-thinking ways. However, I don’t see the government, or industry doing this. The current administration is hell-bent on demonizing industry, and industry is in full-on profit-taking mode. Spending money to train laid-off workers is not in the offing for them.

For now, re-training to service robots might be a way, but it is unfortunately, a mere stopgap.

For very soon, robots will repair robots.