Comment Re:240,000 jobs for robots? (Score 1) 171
That doesn't work. Ten people can maintain the machines that do the work once done by 100.
A couple of points here. First, it takes 10 people to maintain today's machines that do the work of 100 people. These machines, as I've posted elsewhere, are highly simplistic as far as robots go. Limited sensing and perception, limited cognition, very limited degrees of freedom, no mobility, specialized actuators, etc. Fixing simple machines is simple. A robot of tomorrow will be much more complex, requiring more people with more specialized knowledge to service them. Much like you have mechanics who specialize in transmissions, or even more aptly doctors who specialize in hearts, you will have robot "technicians" who specialize in perception, locomotion, "brains", electronics, drive systems, etc. Think about how many doctors a human needs, due to their sheer complexity. This is more along the lines of how a robot repair industry would develop.
Now if you could train everyone to be robot maintenance technicians that would be fine (ecological implications notwithstanding), but that's not possible
But not everyone needs to be a robot repair technician, just as not everyone in the healthcare industry is a doctor or surgeon. You've forgotten that a robot technician also works for a company. A robot technician would also be supported by non automatable non-technical jobs (management, sales, marketing, HR, legal... anything with a human-facing or creative component). I could even imagine different tiers of knowledge, where some technicians perform routine maintenance (like a nurse), some technicians simply diagnose (like a doctor), and some technicians repair (like a surgeon). Maybe someone replaced on the assembly line could re-train to a human-facing job that doesn't have to be highly technical. Will there be enough such jobs? I don't know, I can only guess. But I can see the job creation/destroyed ratio is much better than 10/100.
tl;dr - repairing robots is/will be a new *industry* not a new *job*.