Okay, fair enough. For now it may cheaper to have human workers (which is evidenced by the fact that your line of work still has many human workers), but give technology time, and the automatons will be made cheaper and more affordable, while the cost for human wages goes up.

The Japanese in the 1980s considered fully automating the automotive production industry, but decided to do only a partial system because there would have been massive unemployment.

Automation cause job disruption and just saying you can retrain all the workers into new jobs doesn't always happen. The US unemployment program in the 1990s tried paying workers to retrain to keep unemployment down only to have people find that their "new" jobs weren't there and they had to go back into a different retraining program and hope their would be jobs.

Automation eliminates lots of relatively high paying middle class jobs and forces the workers to go into lower paying service jobs or massive education to try for the higher paying jobs.

Take law firms that are automating discovery where paralegals and new lawyer hires traditionally spent hours reading documents for relevant information. This is now primarily done by computer software looking for keywords or outsourced to cheaper foreign lawyers. Law firms no longer need to hire as many new lawyers to do the grunt work and these are not cheap uneducated workers that can no longer find jobs.

That's a fair argument. When this happens more work will go to China/Mexico/India though. To get to that point would be well over 50 years at least. (no clue, just a guess. Average MX wage deep in the country is $2.00/hr fully loaded. China is half of that.

Also to counter to the machines getting cheaper, there will be more bells and whistles. The expectations for the machines will grow and keep the costs up.

@ag: Well, hopefully it is at least that long. The growth in quality and decrease in prices of machines seems to be closer to exponential growth than constant, hopefully it's simply logarithmic. Still, I should be able to get in and out okay, but the generation after mine or maybe the one after that, they are going to have a difficult future.

2 generations will be with no change really. Just a shift within the nation to the lower costs; more globalization to lower cost countries... the same as it's been the last 2 decades.

Interesting. ag certainly raises some fair points. It seems to me that they are all focused on demand though. I think ag makes a decent case for demand not changing significantly. How about supply though? I think we can all agree that the supply of automated machines will increase. If demand remains the same, that means prices go down. Sure, there will be new machines that are more expensive because they've got more bells and whistles, but the old machines get cheaper. At some point they'll get cheaper than the workers, right? In ag's example, at some point the automated assembly line will cost less than 800K/year, right?

Can both sides agree to that?