Humans vs Robots

I found this article and video on the NY Times pretty fascinating.  These advances will continue to be a headwind for job growth, but could also spawn a renaissance in American manufacturing. It is easy to understand why so much emphasis is placed on educating math & science skills.

The falling costs and growing sophistication of robots have touched off a renewed debate among economists and technologists over how quickly jobs will be lost. This year, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made the case for a rapid transformation. “The pace and scale of this encroachment into human skills is relatively recent and has profound economic implications.”.
In their minds, the advent of low-cost automation foretells changes on the scale of the revolution in agricultural technology over the last century, when farming employment in the United States fell from 40 percent of the work force to about 2 percent today. The analogy is not only to the industrialization of agriculture but also to the electrification of manufacturing in the past century, Mr. McAfee argues.

Click here to view the video story from the NY Times.