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Re: What happened to our jobs over the past four decades...

Cheap foreign labor is yesterday’s problem.

Over the next four decades, AI and robotics are going to replace cheap labor of every kind - and most of the middle class, too.

My Prediction - a universal minimum income is the only way we can maintain peace in the streets.

The Good News - unlike human beings, machines and processes are infinitely perfectible.

If we have thousands of machines that can do the same work as millions of human beings, the standard of living for even the poorest people will continue to rise every decade.

"Over the next four decades, AI and robotics are going to replace cheap labor of every kind - and most of the middle class, too."

Is a CNC machine a "robot?" Or...a conveyor? What's so new about conveyors? CNC burners (duographs or lasers)?

I've done steel work from expediting, to cutting, burning, fabrication, machining (including custom) and assembly. I've done lower level programming and played with robotics, too.

On robotics and AI, we've been seeing a wash of propaganda. I saw the old tape CNC machines (new back then) sitting idle for years, even though they weren't hard to punch out and set up. Why? Because managers didn't want anyone doing anything there that management couldn't understand (vanity, control).

Those machines also developed backlash and other looseness. Looseness from wear needs to be compensated for in setups. Tools needed to be replaced often, as with the manual lathes, mills, etc. There are also custom jobs that require much more frequent setups of many different kinds.

There are cost, regulatory and other limits on natural resources. Conveyors, fixtures and many other many other machines require frequent adjustments and wear quickly.

Artificial scarcity and planned obsolescence will continue. The costs for most such machines are far higher than costs for human labor and begin with big debts.

Open source designs and small shops will cut the mega-corporates' designs on population control down to size. Western culture people will fight, if necessary to retain remaining rights against regulatory crackdowns from globalists and have retained more ingenuity than the globalists had imagined.

Look at the management problems in software and what that industry has been reduced to (bloatacious crapware, mostly offshoring, etc., due to PC personnel practices).

Most likely, the plan from globalists is to continue the propaganda blitz while having foreign, communist slave labor do the real work until those foreign communist nations launch nukes at us. Then, as they have telegraphed in so many ways, they hope to be in their hugely stocked hidey holes surrounded by slave security guards, hoping that the rest of the population will be exterminated. Their fantasies continue with a post-war, environmentalist paradise, where they'll frolic and talk with the animals.