Do robots destroy jobs for people?
This is not a simple question to answer. Sometimes robots displace human workers, but the robot often is doing a job that is unpleasant or dangerous for a human to perform. Low skill, repetitive jobs tend to disappear, but the robot creates high skill jobs in robotics, maintenance and service, programming, data analysis and other fields. It is hard on the workers displaced, for they must be retrained to serve in other capacities. Such retraining is often, but not always, successful. Even if successful, it creates economic and social stress for the people affected. And it is not a new situation. Mechanization has been displacing human labor ever since clocks began replacing bell ringers. On the bright side, we no longer need hordes of human slaves to provide labor for our economy.
