FRIDA Robot Could Appear in an Assembly Line Near You

This is both admirable and highly desirable; I can see applications in many other spehres besides the factory. Furthermore, it's inevitable; many manual tasks are just not that complex, and technology has gotten good enough that they can be quickly taught to a machine.

There's a problem, though; while it makes enormous economic sense to deploy a device like this once the marginal costs become competitive with those of human workers, what are the human workers to do with themselves? Study and learn new skills, in theory, but that in an educational institution has become unaffordable for a great many people, and doing it at home doesn't yield the certification which many businesses now demand of potential employees. As we move towards a postindustrial technological model, our socio-economic models have failed to keep up.