Robot Nation

“The self-service checkout lines that are springing up everywhere are the first sign of the trend. | The problem, of course, is that all of these robots will eliminate a huge portion of the jobs currently held by human beings. For example, there are 3.5 million jobs in the fast food industry alone. Many of those will be lost to kiosks. Many more will be lost to robots that can flip burgers and clean bathrooms. Eventually they will all be lost. The only people who will still have jobs in the fast food industry will be the senior management team at corporate headquarters. | The same sort of thing will happen in retail stores, hotels, airports, factories, construction sites, delivery companies and so on. All of these jobs will evaporate at approximately the same time, leaving all of those workers unemployed.” Marshall Brain —Robot Nation (MarshallBrain.com)

For the record, the idea of cheap Robot labor causing a worldwide economic depression, leading to food riots and internation wars (fought with Robot armies) forms part of the backstory of Karel Capek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the 1921 Czech play that introduced the word “robot” to the world.