The fate of the industrial working class (Score 2)

I predict that within 20 years, advances in the fields of robotics and AI will make obsolete all assembly line level jobs. The work can be reduced to simple enough steps that someone is going to realize its just cheaper to mechanize the whole nine yards. The resulting reductions in cost will be so great that no business will be able to remain competitive without upgrading.
When this happens, there's going to be a whole lot of people without jobs, and a whole lot of heavy industry based economies that are going to hit the fan.
What the hell are these largely unskilled people gonna do? How are they going to support themselves? I can forsee two possible end results, neither of them pretty.
First, in wealthier, economically diverse countries, the non-working class will either be retrained by the government to do useful work (which I would imagine would be hard to find), or more likely supported on government welfare. In poorer countries, everything is just gonna go to hell.
The other possibility would be to reduce the population; simply remove the industrial working class by randomly sterilizing a large number of people.

Both of these possibilities scare the crap out of me.