The Upside to Robots Stealing Jobs? They'll Take the Deadliest Ones

We worry about robots stealing jobs and leaving huge swaths of the population with nothing to do but collect universal basic income and watch Simon's Cat videos. But some robots are going to take the jobs no person could or should do. If a Thai soccer team gets trapped in a cave a decade from now, we'll send a team of robots through the dangerous waters to get the boys, not a team of divers who could get hurt or killed. And if Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk ever gets around to building a space colony, they're not going to send humans who actually have to breathe to set up the first protective structures -- they'll send autonomous robots. We can already get a glimpse of how we can benefit when robots do inhuman work.