Mr. Nighswander is president of APT Manufacturing Solutions, which builds and installs robotic equipment to help other manufacturers automate their assembly lines. Lately, business has been booming: With the unemployment rate now below 4 percent, he says he gets calls every day from companies looking for robots to help ease their labor crunch. The problem is that Mr. Nighswander faces a hiring challenge in his own business, especially because, in this town of fewer than 4,000 people near the Indiana border, the pool of skilled workers is shallow. But rather than turn to robots himself, he has adopted a lower-tech solution: training. APT has begun offering apprenticeships, covering the cost of college for its workers, and three years ago it started teaching manufacturing skills to high school students.
So ... replacing human workers by robots (which is what this company does) is actually a employment opportunity bonanza!?
Productivity — how much value the economy generates in an average hour of work — gets less public attention than more intuitive economic concepts such as employment and wages, but it may be even more fundamental. Rising productivity — whether through better technology, more educated workers or smarter business strategies — is why people’s economic fortunes, on average, improve over time. When productivity growth is strong, companies can afford to pay workers more without eating into their own profit margins, letting a rising tide lift all boats.
This seems derived from some weird sociopathic corporatist mindset but is being presented as perfectly normal: Robots/automation leads to 'people’s economic fortunes, on average, improving over time' since 'when productivity growth is strong, companies can afford to pay workers more without eating into their own profit margins' (the last part being what's important). That, in actuality, businesses increasingly no longer need any workers, which will (with the system as it currently is) necessarily be catastrophic for employment prospects ... naaah, let's not consider that, they just need to get some re-training:
“Mr. Steffel works at APT as an apprentice during the two-year certificate program, and is committed to staying a year after it ends. In return, he gets training as a toolmaker, a skill that could ultimately earn him more than $70,000 a year with overtime. And the skills he is gaining are less easily replaced by robots. “This is the career that I have chosen,” Mr. Steffel said. “I’m not going to get rich off it, but hopefully in the end I’ll do well.”
Awww! :/
Anyway, this dribble notwithstanding, to seriously answer the question:
Between 'robots or Job Training' it's unquestionably going to be 'robots' (andAI ) and it's just a matter of time. So, societies and economic theory need to start adapting to the fact that almost all workers will necessarily be replaced by better, faster, cheaper AI and robots. Because the AI/robotic revolution will either lead to a Utopia where societies become populated by people with increasingly more free time (for each other, sports, culture, etc.) ... or ... to some sociopathic dystopia that pointlessly forces increasingly unnecessary 'workers' to compete for necessarily fewer and fewer disappearing jobs.
Trying to stupidly force some obsolete ideology, as this piece seems to, onto the AI/robotic revolution is almost certain to result in much unnecessary suffering and unhappiness.
We may, for ideas, want to start looking at societies that achieved greatness when its citizens had a lot of free time ... such as 5th century Athens for example.