The future of blue-collar work in an age of automation

AS co-founder of a tech startup, I spend a lot of my time thinking about the future of blue-collared work. At Nimbus, we build technology to make it easy for our clients to run their office. Unlike other on-demand startups, we do not employ people as independent contractors nor do we seek to replace our workers with robots. On the contrary, we invest in proper employment, hiring, training and paying our blue-collar workers well to perform both scheduled and on-demand work - from cleaning to aircon servicing and pantry stocking.

However, our good jobs strategy seems to fly in the face of the prevailing wisdom that robotics and automation will eventually replace all routine and mundane work. There is a passage in Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee's book Race Against the Machines that best encapsulates what I call the "futurist" view of work:

"Rapid and accelerating digitisation is likely to bring economic rather than environmental disruption, stemming from the fact that as computers get more powerful, companies have less need for some kinds of workers. Technological progress is going to leave behind some people, perhaps even a lot of people, as it races ahead.