A Daily Mail (meh) article about a new book coming out describing how the low-skill jobs are going to be wiped out by robots within the next few years. This is a concept I’ve babbled about before… what happens when you make millions of people *permanently* unemployable?

If you don’t have a low-skill job, go to where such jobs are: fast food joints, agriculture, factories, big-box stores, etc. You’re generally find three types of employees sleepwalking through their days there:

1) Youngsters working more or less their first jobs

2) Adults who can’t find better jobs due to economic conditions

3) Adults capable of little more

If robots do actually take over the crap jobs, there’ll be a whole lots of high schoolers who’ll find buying their first car something of a challenge, never mind working their way through college or getting a Real Job. And there’ll be a bunch of adults “currently between jobs” who’ll find themselves in a bit of trouble. And… there’ll be a LOT of “Hardcore Pawn Customers” who will find themselves incapable of finding any sort of employment at all.

Of  course robots will also replace a lot of “good jobs” at the same time. I can easily see more than half the jobs in the US being done by bots within a generation. The sort of jobs that’ll be bot-proof – at least for a while – are those requiring smarts, beauty, art and creativity… and these can’t really be instilled via  job retraining programs. Hopefully there’ll be some effective INS robocops to deport a few million illegal aliens who will be pretty much universally replaced by bots… but what to do with, say, a hundred and fifty million unemployable Americans? I got no comforting solutions.