Robots?

There's a worrisome report put out today via ING-DiBa (a German finance organization).

Some smart German jobs people sat down and looked at the future, and it's a fairly shocking study that comes out of this.  These guys figure roughly two of three jobs (59-percent) in the German work force could be shifted over to robots.  Between machines and automation.....around eighteen million German jobs would likely go away.

Now, you'd sit and pause over this.....thinking is it possible?

Well.....these guys are looking three to four decades down the road.  They look at the fast-food industry shifting over and having just a couple of guys to manager a McDonalds, and robots flipping the burgers.  They look at driver-less vehicles distributing groceries to your local village shop.  The landscape mowing team?  They would be mostly all robots.

Jobs for robot maintainers?  I'm guessing that it'll become a major job industry within the next decade, and kids will be recruited into this area who have a passion for mechanics and computers.  Maybe a million of the eighteen million will find jobs as the robot maintainers.

But the rest?

This is a study which some political folks might gaze over and ask what exactly our general job future will be about.  You can't have some society existing with twenty-percent of the folks in their prime (18 to 40 years old).....unemployed or just sitting around.

Some folks would bring up that Germany has a birth-rate problem and this robot thing would be positive.  The same folks tell us that open arms for refugees is positive, but then you wonder what the refugees and immigrant folks will be doing.....if the robots are doing most of the manual labor?

Somehow, you would suspect that the Greens and Linke Party will have to take up the discussion over robots having citizenship and voting rights somewhere down the line.  There's probably a Greens statue team working on some kind of dedication to the first robot harmed by the human race and set to be a German martyr.

My humble guess is that some German guys are just grinning over this.....hoping a German female robot is somewhere in this mix.....who can be programmed to accept eccentric and quirky German males over the age of forty, and obedient to a strict German 'master'.

Somewhere in this thing which will unfold....will be this one evening where the 8PM German news guy has a big report over the last Burger King burger-flipper.....some 20-year-old guy from Frankfurt.....who got pushed out the door by a Erik-Series-8000 burger-flipper.  The news guy will ask the burger-flipper what's next and he'll look all gloomy as he responds the unemployment office.  The German news guy will respond....."....yes, the end of an era".