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In Robotic Nation by Marshall Brain, he argues that in the future, jobs in America will be replaced by robots. These jobs include manufacturing, restaurants and retail stores, police and fire-fighters, doctors and nursing jobs, teachers and counselors, robotic pilots and even robotic actors and actresses. ATM's and self-service checkout lines marked the beginning of what Brain calls the "robotic revolution."

The first robot was the ASIMO which was created by Honda. Brain believes that over the course of two decades of research and development engineers will be able to refine it and create robots that can move with the precision and grace of a ballerina. By 2030 Brain predicts that the first human equivalent robot will come out, by around 2040 engineers will refine the robot and start replacing them with humans in the workforce in fields like fast food industry and housekeeping/janitorial work. And jumping to 2055 Brain believes that over half of the American workforce will be unemployed due to the fact that every regular job that had been filled by a human being in 2001 was now filled by a robot instead.

If one were to look at the evidence in our past it is not that far fetched claims Brain, in 1900 people would never have believed we would be able to fly to the moon. He talks about Moore's Law which says that CPU power doubles every 18 to 24 months and how if Moore's Law is put into connection with robots this means they will keep getting more and more advanced until they will be able do things that humans do possibly even better. Brain explains how over the course of fifteen years starting in 2001, self service checkout lines proliferated and evolved until nearly every retail transaction could be handled in an automated way. This resulted in nearly 5-million jobs in the retail area lost. However, he still thinks that in the future the magnitude of jobs lost will be catastrophic.

I don't believe that half of Americans jobs will be taken by robots as Brain states because we will never fully trust those robots in areas such as police and fire-fighting, teaching, manufacturing and flying airplanes. Humans have done these things for many years without problems so why change that? However, I do believe that a considerable amount of jobs in the service sector will be lost due to the country's fast changing technology. It doesn't take a genius to know that self service check-out lines are a much quicker and hassle free way of buying groceries. If you look at the fact that we are experiencing the lowest employment growth since 1939, its hard to believe that something will not be done to fix this problem. His argument does raise a few questions that all people living in this country should seek to find an answer to. Like why isn't the economy creating new jobs now to counter the loss of jobs thought to happen in the future? And what will those new jobs be?

I think that he does an excellent job in pointing out the fact that jobs will inevitably be lost in the years to come. If you take a look at the 2000 Census he shows you in his writing you see that there were 114 million employees working for 7 million companies that year. If you take out about half of those employees believed to lose a job to a robot that's around 57 million people. That's an extremely large number of unemployed people in America and if these numbers are true, new jobs for humans will definitely have to be made. As far as the belief that by 2055 robots will take over half of Americans jobs only time will tell.