Human Workers Get Increasingly Obsolete

Robots are coming to replace humans at work. In a store, a shopping assistant robot helps to organize inventories. Cheap robotic farmers patiently seed, tend and harvest fields one plant at a time without the need for damaging pesticide. In Tokyo, elementary school students were delighted to find out their teacher had been substituted by a robot.

“In a recent New York Times/CBS News/Kaiser Family Foundation poll of Americans between the ages of 25 and 54 who were not working, 37 percent of those who said they wanted a job said technology was a reason they did not have one.”

Even if there are certain human skills machines will probably never replicate, like common sense and creativity, “new technologies have also long complemented people’s skills and enabled them to be more productive — as the Internet and word processing have for office workers or robotic surgery has for surgeons”.

Technology is advancing to such a degree that it is now encroaching upon occupational skills that used to belong to humans alone, are robots a real threat to the world’s unemployed?

Read more at The New York Times