Robots ate my job

[shnozzola]

From grocery self-checkout to your home accounting software to "Godzillas" working the assembly lines, technology is fundamentally changing the American workforce.

Start of good series on NPR with David Brancaccio

http://www.marketplace.org/robots-ate-my-job

[ParkingPlaces]

When "robots" were first seriously envisioned back in the 60's, people immediately began worrying about how it would affect jobs. But the easy answer was that robots would generate jobs because people would be needed to support the robot industry.

Of course not only robotics but things like automated checkout lines have gone far further than anyone imagined 50 years ago. And there probably aren't too many entry level or unskilled jobs in robot and automation support. Like there used to be in grocery stores or such.

I'll give this a listen. Thanks for the link.

[Frank]

I remember back in the 1970's when the microchip first appeared they made out that by now automation and robots would be doing everything and us humans would sit back and relax with endless hours of leisure time. Didn't quite work out that way. We just ended up working round the clock doing shitty low skill, low pay McJobs in service industries. In terms of work automation and robots haven't done us any good at all.

Capitalism requires that enough people have enough disposable income to afford big ticket items like houses, cars, etc, etc, yet at the same time capitalists simply refuse to pay people high enough wages, assuming you have a job at all, to be able to afford said items. No wonder western capitalism is collapsing. It's just a vicious circle. Lower and lower pay = less and less disposable income = fewer and fewer sales until eventually we will once again have a subsistence economy.