How fast will our professions go obsolete and disappear into oblivion, only to be later found in stories, fairy tales, and legends, or maybe some history books? Some fifty years ago there was a profession called rope maker, which is nowhere to be seen here where I live. The estimate is that by 2050 50% of jobs will be lost due to robotization. Those knowledge and skills might be forgotten in one generation. We retain our skills and knowledge by doing. The biggest dairy where I live is fully robotized and the robot performing its work there was named after the last person who worked on that work post. If that person was retired or found another job than that person might have some income, otherwise that person might be rendered without income or simply exist below the poverty line. There is no lack of workers in Europe even though some claim to be so, yet serious researchers from German Institute for Economic Research present entirely different story. Perhaps the employers don't find people with the right education for every post, but one German documentary explained that before, the employers could have chosen 1 employee out of 100 applicants, now they have to choose 1 out of 3, and they clamor that there are not enough workers. This is the robotization era, not the industrialization era when masses of workers were needed behind the assembly lines and elsewhere. The proponents of robotization say there will be new professions created that don’t exist now. Most probably less then there are now. They would do good to fully robotize the processing of waste material back into raw materials as this work is usually so toxic that it is detrimental to worker’s health. However, I don't expect a robot to show up to do plumbing or any other maintenance work anytime soon.
