This was not apparent in the mid 1980s when the robot panic was definitely in full swing. You're looking back with almost 40 years of hindsight. The view in the

This was not apparent in the mid 1980s when the robot panic was definitely in full swing. You're looking back with almost 40 years of hindsight. The view in the 80s was that the entire assembly line was going away to be replaced with nothing but robots. We were taught to expect that our jobs would be to maintain and service the robots. Heck in the 90s I remember going to a museum somewhere where McDonald's was demonstrating a fully robotic kitchen for its restaurants. This was a real widespread fear at the time. Thirty to 40 years later, maybe we can look back and recognize that it didn't quite turn out that way, but at the same time we can't know what's going to transpire by 2050 based on today's fears of AI outsourcing "information work" either.