Editorial: Hooray for the robotics team! But what about the jobs being killed? – STLtoday.com

Theres a bittersweet aspect to the impressive success of a program at Camdenton High School, near the Lake of the Ozarks, that elevates its robotics team to the same stature as the schools football team. Every school should promote hero status and seek to remove the nerdy stigma from students who make science, technology, engineering and math their primary academic focus.

As the Post-Dispatchs Kristen Taketa reported last week, Camdenton, population 3,600, has gained unusual stature as Missouris capital of robotics. Camdenton High School was one of 17 Missouri teams that traveled to St. Louis last week to participate in the 27th annual FIRST robotics championship. The FIRST competition For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology is demanding. Students are required to construct robots capable of complex tasks such as scaling towers, hurling balls and climbing ropes, often while fending off other robots.

The competition, which this year attracted 15,000 students from 33 countries, included categories for elementary and middle school students as well, which is phenomenal for the jump it gives young innovators in preparing for the future job market. If they stick with this field, theyll probably never have to worry about minimum wages and unemployment lines.

But that is where the bitter mixes with the sweet. The introduction of workplace robotics has had a far greater effect on the loss of manufacturing jobs in this country than free trade and immigration the bogeymen so often invoked by President Donald Trump as the source of American blue-collar workers woes.

These young robotics designers will, in coming years, play a role in the expansion of this technology, prompting more and more workers to scramble for the dwindling number of jobs that cant be done by machines and computers.

An ongoing radio series, Robots Ate My Job, addresses these challenges on American Public Medias Marketplace program. Anchor David Brancaccio recently traveled around the country looking for jobs that were least likely to be replaced by robots. Precious few tasks remain that cannot be farmed out, at least partly, to robots. And that should trouble everyone, including Trump.

For companies that design and build robots, the students emerging from Camdenton and other tech-focused programs are like gold nuggets. Employers are scooping them up so fast, some dont even bother going to college because they already qualify for top-dollar salaries.

Good for those students who are looking beyond the glory of the Friday night football stadium lights and are pursuing a field thats not only fascinating and fun but also promises to keep them employed no matter what workplace challenges arise in the future.

But somewhere along the way, we hope those students and the teachers guiding them will stop to address a more pressing challenge: How to ensure that robots dont wind up rendering human workers obsolete.

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Editorial: Hooray for the robotics team! But what about the jobs being killed? - STLtoday.com