How will automation affect the future of work?

Several years ago, Canary Pete's political cartoon flooded email inboxes and social media pages. The humorous illustration showed a middle-aged executive walking into a typical job interview, with the exception that he had to build his own office chair (since he was applying to work at IKEA). Pete's satire might be short-lived, as last week the robotics industry achieved a new milestone – building an IKEA chair in less than 10 minutes! It is unclear how soon bots will be replacing human assemblers like TaskRabbit, but in the the words of Jackie DeChamps, Chief Operating Officer of IKEA USA,"We are always looking at ways we can innovate and help make our customers' lives at home easier." Addressing the elephant in the room, I debated a colleague earlier this month at The Frontier Conference in New Orleans. I expressed that it is critical for mechatronic companies to engage early with organized labor for successful deployments.