If jobs are “lost” because robots are doing more work, why is it a problem that the population is aging and there are fewer in “working age”? Shouldn’t the two effects sort of cancel each other out?
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When the population of working age people decreases, demand for the stuff that robots make goes down. Robots are not going to consume their own economic output. On the other side, the kind of stuff that retired people may need is not provided by robots. Robots are not doing surgeries; nor are they washing butts or pushing wheelchairs.
Even without considering the retirees, robots represent a problem because we haven’t figured out how to distribute the benefits of the automation among all workers. As it is now, the benefits of automation are going to only a few well connected entities. This despite the fact that taxpayers have subsidized most tech innovations via investments in military, NASA, etc.
To the extent that robots increase profits only for the people who control them, the robots make the inequality problem worse and the issue needs to be addressed.
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