I think it's likely that automation will be a huge creator of jobs. And I'm not talking about creation of high skill jobs at the expense of destruction of low s

I think it's likely that automation will be a huge creator of jobs. And I'm not talking about creation of high skill jobs at the expense of destruction of low skill jobs. I'm talking about a net creation of both low and high skill jobs. Allow me to explain. Here's a youtube movie of some robots in a Mercedes factory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VreG1iC65Lc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VreG1iC65Lc There are thousands of movies like that. Lots of robots doing a lot of work, and apparently displacing lots of jobs. But there are some jobs in the background. Someone has programmed those robots. But aren't those programmers (super-)highly skilled? I don't know for sure, but it feels to me a robot is programed like an Excel macro: you record the moves, and then edit what you recorded. For an Excel macro, both parts are done (generally) by the same person, but for industrial robots, they are probably done by different people. The person who is being recorded needs only know how to manipulate a mechanical arm with a controller, that is probably not very different from a PS4 controller. The person who edits the macros, creates procedures, then combines them, optimizes them, creates tests, etc, etc, that person is a highly skilled individual. The other one not so much. The difference here is the capacity for abstraction. Now, one could say that both these jobs happen only once, and then the robot performs the jobs thousands of times, so you have 2 new jobs (one high skill, one low skill) displacing thousands others. Alas, the programming, maintenance, re-programming, upgrading, not to mention construction of the robots still needs a small army of people. But overall, I agree that it's possible that introducing these robots resulted in a net job destruction for Mercedes and its suppliers (but not entirely sure; Mercedes was most likely more concerned with the quality of their cars rather than their cost of production). However, not every manufacturer is similar to Mercedes. A lot of manufacturers produce things in smaller batches for example. And now you start to look at the trade-off of putting the automation in place: https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/ If a batch is small enough, the initial investment in automation is not recouped. If the batch is huge, the automation is a no-brainer. But there's a huge middle ground where only some partial automation makes sense. And part of that automation that makes sense is to do things using some mechanical arms moved by some PS4-type controller. I think in the near future, a lot of the "mechanical" type of work (welding, cutting, soldering, hammering) will become remote-controlled. It might look like high-skilled now, but the job of a machinist was considered high-skilled 50 years ago, and essentially they are the same. Now, the farther you are from the moving or hot or electricity-conducting parts, the farther you are from danger, and the more people can try something as a hobby. More importantly, the barrier of entry for a given (low-skilled) trade goes down, so people will be able to retrain themselves more quickly. And these people will be able to create more quickly. Just like blogging has created millions of (unofficial, but money making) jobs, the advent of remote-controlled machines will create millions of new (low-skilled) jobs. And these remote-controlled machine will show up exactly because of the need for automation.