These are time-lagged processes. According to your version of things,
- $UNPLEASANT_JOB is costing too much! Let us start making robots
- Let us continue to bear the cost of paying $UNPLEASANT_JOB a high wage for the decade+ it takes to develop the automation for that task.
Nope, here is what will happen:
- $UNPLEASANT_JOB is costing too much! Let us figure out how to automate this task. In the meanwhile, let us dump the wages for this role. Otherwise, our company closes down.
- 10-15 years later, the same automation needs to be cheaper than the dumped wage for it to be feasible, which is a completely different challenge. First of all, the automation has to be cheaper than your "high enough wage", which is more than you can say for robotics products today.
That is not what happened. Factories did not shut down while they worked out how to build robots. They continued paying decent (union) wages to skilled workers until the robots got good enough to replace them.
We've seen this play out before. We know how this goes.
- $UNPLEASANT_JOB is costing too much! Let us start making robots
- Let us continue to bear the cost of paying $UNPLEASANT_JOB a high wage for the decade+ it takes to develop the automation for that task.
Nope, here is what will happen:
- $UNPLEASANT_JOB is costing too much! Let us figure out how to automate this task. In the meanwhile, let us dump the wages for this role. Otherwise, our company closes down.
- 10-15 years later, the same automation needs to be cheaper than the dumped wage for it to be feasible, which is a completely different challenge. First of all, the automation has to be cheaper than your "high enough wage", which is more than you can say for robotics products today.